Dionysos

Formally, even with Jost's victorious reiteration of Euro-Atlantic liberalism at the turn of the 80s and 90s, there was a prevailing backward movement towards an even more classical narration than what we knew from films of previous decades: the experimental intellectual guerrilla warfare of American social relations with post-structuralist leftist discursive and socio-political critics gradually disappears and what remains is the best of the long-gone promise of reasonable, moderate, intelligent democratic liberalism that was also dreamed of in Czech fields and woods after the end of state socialist dictatorship, and that, as we later discovered, never existed. While watching the film, not only because of the shots of Vermeer and at one moment also of Rembrandt, I remembered Joseph Heller and his "Picture This" from 1988, in which Rembrandt looks down at humanity and its history from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The film gives off the same feeling as that old good Jewish liberal Heller in all its grandeur: the sensitive irony towards the vanities of everyday life's afflictions and the focus on what is important, even though what is important may not even exist, and even if it did exist, we may never achieve it. And yet, there is no choice but to try. This sentiment is felt much more in this film than in Jost's Rembrandt Laughing from 1988 (Yes! That cannot be a coincidence.). For Jost, just like with Godard, his former inspiration, from whom, however, his work will fundamentally diverge from this moment on, there seems to have been, briefly, a predominance of the desire for something enduring after the disappointment of iconoclasm, something that hides behind the disillusionment of the world and the disillusionment of its effective criticism and transformation, which both authors hoped for but did not come true... Just like in Godard's The Detective (1985), perhaps the only way out of the confusion of life appears to be love, which is eternal.

The cut between shots disappears, taking with it the barriers between classes - from now on, the world is once again what it has always been: the only social field, the only stage without internal boundaries, the only stage of history and film, in which the constant rearrangement of elements through the medium of power and the camera moves the movement of the plot forward regardless of individual consciousness, but only according to the logic of purely relational pushing by historical actors for hegemony within the political space. The actors are collective subjects of classes, the driving force behind the struggle for power and emancipation, the method of exposition: mise-en-scène. When the proletariat and the bourgeoisie confront each other face to face, there will be no more artificial power-ideological boundaries to separate them - the violence arising from the desire of oppressors to guard their place and determine the place of the oppressed will be revealed in all its undisguised repugnance. It is at this very moment that a new medium arrives: the camera, to elevate the movement stemming from this violence into a movement usable for dance and capture this revolutionary Csárdás, given by the utopia of the non-place. The dance of the masses must be accompanied by music, and it is in this collective ancient ritual that the historical actors find strength for action.

Young Luzia sets off from the poor northeast of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro to find her fiancé Jasão and thereby a better life with him. Lost in the unfamiliar metropolis, she accepts help from the carefree Calunga, unbroken by life, who becomes a witness to the dramatic story of the two lovers. Unlike his friends, who come from the same disadvantaged circumstances, Jasão is determined to seek revenge with a gun in hand against the injustices and inequalities of contemporary Brazil. /// The opening short sequence, combining elements of cinéma-vérité and the typical Brazilian exuberance of the indirect narrator Calunga, prepares the audience for the expectation of a socially critical and intellectually deeper cinema-novo, partially reflected in the postmodern ironic long subtitle ("As Aventuras e Desventuras de Luzia e Seus 3 Amigos Chegados de Longe") literally meaning "The Tales and Sorrows of Luzia and Her 3 Friends from afar." However, there is no Glauber Rocha. Nevertheless, the film firmly stands in line with the progressive current of Brazilian cinema at the time. Gradually, it transforms into a more melodramatic, Italian-style edited socially poetic novel that does not alienate or document but rather tries (not always successfully) to captivate the viewer. The possibility of an ambiguous interpretation of the final message of the protagonists' destiny saves the overall tone of the film from becoming a guide for the viewer on how to draw lessons regarding their own active stance towards the reality outside the film after the screening.

One moment conceals both madness and triumph of reason and destroys the cliché that separates a genius from a lunatic by an infinitely small distance. On the other hand, the only moment compressing clarity and confusion, colorful image, and the attack of black and white insanity leads us to resolution, victory, and gain - at the cost of loss. The protagonist passes through the gate toward victory, but this victorious arch stands on two pillars... the moment of victory is the moment of the protagonist's defeat. We always achieve our goals, and there is only one path that leads to it. Bogart experienced something similar in Ray's In a Lonely Place, but here the protagonist's actions justified him and destroyed him at the same time, although the merger was only temporary and contingent. Fuller is on a higher level; he shows that the victorious gesture itself leads to defeat, and vice versa. It is a shame that Shock Corridor and its cinéma-direct realistic counterpart Titicut Follies stand in the shadow of something similar in many ways, but much less subversive, even though it may not seem so at first glance, i.e., One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (it’s no coincidence that it was, of course, filmed entirely in "color"...).

A hundred heads are looking at me, I have a hundred heads instead of my own – and still, they see nothing: in the mirror, they only see my body without a head. I borrowed a hundred pairs of eyes from others, and yet I am blind to myself. Who, then, is that neighbor, those neighbors from whom I borrowed the gaze that remains blind? "What then is our neighbor? Something within us, some modifications of ourselves that have become conscious: an image, this is what our neighbor is. What are we ourselves? Are we not also nothing but an image? A something within us, modifications of ourselves that have become conscious? Our Self of which we are conscious: is it not an image as well, something outside of us, something external, on the outside? We never touch anything but an image, and not ourselves, not our Self. Are we not strangers to ourselves and also as close to ourselves as our neighbor?" (Nietzsche, The Complete Works, In: Klossowski, Vicious Circle) The eternal path of oneiric surrealism toward oneself through a detour that tempts to keep going further and further away from the path towards the goal, which is the subject of dream thoughts ... that is with every image of film consciousness further and further away ... And that is why new Duviviers, Jordans, and VanDerBeeks can always arise: the film image is never exhausted, but it also never gets closer, even if it uses the most surprising and seemingly most individualized visual language. Borrowed images from our neighbors or their apparent subjectivity (engraving our signature into an old etching is not enough for it to become ours) will not bring us closer to ourselves, and the surrealist Ernst is no less persistent in emptiness than the apparent films without a narrator, for example, the aforementioned Jordan.

The saying that all roads lead to Rome is just a self-deception of humanity believing in fate, through which it removes responsibility for its own tragicomical wretchedness - in fact, Cassavetes showed that there is only one way, leading to countless different goals. Similarly, Cassavetes can use the same cinematic language, the same artistic approach, and the same general relationship to life and the world, no matter what subject he films: he just needs to change the accent, emphasize a certain detail at the expense of another, add a touch of slapstick, and suddenly we have a comedy out of a drama. The viewer can momentarily forget that, on the contrary, his dramas have in the description of human dignified wretchedness their colossally ironic and funny dimension. No human journey ever leaves the dual tragicomedy of its one life path: staggering between the two poles of Kantian unfriendly sociability; denying the fact that a person can find happiness only in the bosom of others, which they continue to destroy and then can't help but wonder why they are alone among people and people are in the middle of them in their isolation... the path of words, the only path of words, which are constantly launched harpoons, with which we try to defeat the other person like a whale in a single gesture, while at the same time attaching them to ourselves. Words, always the same words, which are tragic once when Cassavetes lets a lonely character utter them in a filthy dump, and comical another time when, like here, he lets them scream at each other as characters of fateful lovers.

Can the space of a movie theater for watching cinema be replaced with something else? Not at all - otherwise the viewer would be deprived of the trailer for another film before the start of the actual film: in this case, an advertisement for the film La belle époque, in which pensioners create an experiential agency in a film studio set in the 1970s, so they can relive their first love there... It has also been proven that Alzheimer's disease is best stopped in older people by placing them in period settings, with original furniture from their youth, exposing them to their memories, etc... Although Bellocchio, in his age as an author, logically lost many of his artistic iconoclasm and formal inventions, he is not only still above the level of ordinary conventional cinema, to which this film belongs in terms of its category but also functions as Bellocchio's historical tribute to the Italian film belle époque: a blend of poliziotteschi and Italian politically-engaged police thrillers, within which Bellocchio created one of his famous films, Slap the Monster on Page One from 1972. Italians to this day prove that they are the best in Europe at making American films.

Diving into a world that we lost, without ever existing - the fantasy of the past revived in its distorted form thanks to the artist's imagination in the present; actually, now also in the past, but not because of the date of creation in 1969, but because Larry Jordan's work was never truly "modern," and it is just an eternally outdated song. It is commendable that it presents to the common human and viewer's expectation a perversely distorted mirror of surreal visions of this seemingly normal world, but the main problem is that, like most Anglo-Saxon authors, it cannot truly reject such a world and thus create a truly new world - it always returns to the need to create a form of the world as we know it, even though it is an imaginary world that reveals a deeper, invisible, or transcendental plane in every moment of projection of the world we are familiar with. Hence the fondness of many American experimental filmmakers of that time for Zen-Buddhist mysticism, and this film was also supposed to be inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Martin Čihák unconsciously captured it precisely when he wrote that Jordan's films "do not work centrifugally, but uniformly. (...) ...Jordan creates a new space." Exactly. Like the seamlessness of Hollywood, here too we tend to create a new example of a world, space, and film without seams, absence, and fractures: film allows us to immerse ourselves in a dream reality that only enriches our everyday world with a new level, but it does not offer a means to truly build a new world: for that, Jordan would have to start from precisely opposite premises, namely to first reveal the nonexistence in the heart of the current world rather than a deeper level of existence.

The car is an industry act and the film is an industry act. Both the car and the film grow from the soil of capitalism: after all, cars and films were already born in the advanced stage of industrial society, they are its children. In order for a product to grow, we need to water it: on the level of the base, with market mechanisms, and on the level of the superstructure, with ideologies. There is too much money in both cars and films for capital to give up its offspring. Why use the vocabulary of nature to describe human activity? The good old Barthes will answer: capitalist mythology delights in the naturalization of human relationships, making them something eternal. The film - the Hollywood one, the (so far?) only real one in its influence on humanity, yes, we have to admit it - as long as it remains the fruit of the capitalist film industry, it will forever repeat the same myth-making clichés (not to mention the myriad of already exhausted and repeatedly used narrative and visual clichés!). The wheels of industry, the racing car, and the film reel must never stop because it makes production more expensive. Everything must rotate smoothly and predictably so that profits can be predictable and reproducible. Films must be made to be watched and cars must be produced to be sold. The entire film is just the fulfillment of one myth, which Barthes just described directly in connection with the film: it shows us that greedy unscrupulous Management is bad, but it immediately negates this criticism by showing us that even under this cover of bourgeois power, one can live in accordance with their inner authenticity, preserving a healthy core. The result is that the individual remains a subject of the Company - they submit to its mechanism, but they live under the illusion that they have retained their freedom and achieved their own goals. No one stands up against the Company, capitalism continues to live on. We are in the perfect sphere of ideology: "I know well that a film or a car is just a product of industry, that its raison d'être is always primarily profit, but still...” And now, honestly, dear petrolheads like me, dear cinephiles like me: when you drive your Alfa Romeo like I do and when you watch a film that you enjoy like I do... How difficult is it to realize that your idea, that even though you drive an industry act, but in those moments, exceptional moments, when you forget about it and when you let yourself be convinced that your car was also created to fulfill the desire for speed, driving characteristics, etc... that... you are just giving in to self-delusion? It's difficult, I know, impossible - maybe. Perhaps not? Perhaps something needs to change so that it isn't like that...

The Wild West or perhaps Wild West Indies? The double nonsense of ahistorical comparison: this is not the USA, and this is not India. Nevertheless, the film is full of Eurocentrism and the centrism of the white race: the colonial state of the 17th century is like the Wild West - with the absence of law and the sanctification of one law only: personal profit at the expense of everything and everyone who is or was here. Cuba is truly like the India of the West, which Columbus never discovered and at the same time discovered - Cuba only appears here as a new "India" for Europe, a new field for its expansion. However, the double material enslavement is duplicated in the realm of ideas through cultural extrapolation from Europe - religion. It is fascinating to see, as in The Last Supper and other Latin American films, the ambivalent role that religion plays - from the more obvious role of enslavement to chiliasm visions of salvation. In this regard, the film surpasses the initial European idea of savages and the new land as a land of purity and uncorrupted people and completely confirms the historical shift (which naturally happened very soon) after which the new land and those who live in it become more of a danger and a subject of spiritual struggle rather than an innocent blank slate race prone to accepting the white truth of Jesus. The Church and Europe thereby confirm their own powerlessness indirectly proportional to their actual power. This powerlessness leads to disillusionment. The Europeans are left with only one thing: to choose. To choose between their total ideological emptiness and to become only what they have always been: power-hungry, pleasure-seeking demons, against whom religion has always wanted to fight on an ideological level. Or to be blind to their own emptiness and to throw themselves into religious frenzy even more strongly. The Europeans' own struggle with themselves as the foundation for the liberation of others from the Europeans could thus be the motto of the film. This is because people long for salvation, and the colonialist Europeans will never be able to offer it to them, having lost it themselves. /// Fortunately, even Alea freed himself to a certain extent from the Euro-North American heritage, and his film full of noisy and violent frenzy, flooded with raw images full of urgency and resistance, clearly recalls Cinema novo.