Dionysos

A story that demonstrates that sometimes fiction can be the truth of reality and that the night-time alcoholic retreat into the world of fiction can be a form of therapy for the soul and a way (or at least an attempt) to come to terms with one's own past mistakes. Reality offers the old man nothing but a false game of pretense, which we, as viewers, only fully see through thanks to our previous immersion into the old man's imagination. Within it, he can seek revenge on his (cold is a weak word) son (the great Bogarde) and attempt to reconcile with past traumas. Yet what surprises the viewer is often the rather humorous approach. Nevertheless, it is a depressing story about a man losing control over his body, his loved ones, and ultimately, his memory and imagination. The characters on the screen are largely presented as determined by an external power (the will of the story's old writer-narrator), reminiscent of Resnais' subsequent film My American Uncle, where the characters are determined physiologically or psychosocially.

Together with the subsequent film Mamma Roma and his very first prose book "Ragazzi di vita" (1955), it is about Pasolini's contradictory view of the life of the Roman lumpenproletariat. By contradictory, I don't mean formally, but as life itself is contradictory (and as his life and work were too). The characters are both sincere and treacherous, their laziness is undeniable, and they rob others and each other, but they can also be generous like few "decent" people, and so on and so forth. It is as if they have preserved something childish within themselves (friendship, the desire for eternal holidays), which, while maintaining it into adulthood, proves incompatible with our society (at least with the "honorable" part). The characters suffer for it, it can be said partly rightfully so, but that does not mean that their lives are not too dearly redeemed. Pasolini lingers in these works over the fact that the victims of these people are greater than their sins.

Esthetic philosopher Boris Groys knew that the utopianism of communism lay in the attempt to replace the power of capital with the power of politics, which is nothing more than words - all power of discourse. This film is precisely the best dream of the performative power of speech: slogans are not templates, but a medium that brings events to life on the screen - it truly requires the viewer's attention to the moments when the characters' speeches generate a new, disjointed narrative sequence, symbolically connecting the jumpy editing with the inevitably unnatural/violent leap from immaterial word to material action. The true meaning of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" lies precisely here, and the Yugoslav hippie communists of the fourth way - the path between capitalism, Soviet state socialism, and Chinese Maoism of cultural revolution - try to find the mythical origin of phrases here, their real embodiment in existing political regimes has (?) profaned them forever. How else than to once again transform phrases into actions - but differently, newly, disjointedly: both in relation to previous attempts and to previous film art. Why couldn't Godard's Week-End become the basis for a new kind of film, just as Lenin's turn of the helm became the basis for a new concept of societies: that capitalism ultimately triumphed and suffocated the bad alongside the good that emerged in the field of real socialism and cinema Marxism, is nothing but a sad legacy of the present, which will make this film incomprehensible to many contemporary viewers. And this is characteristically true for a film that is so ironically critical of the former real socialism (albeit constructively!) that many anti-communists would envy: another example of how the baby is thrown out with the bathwater...

A Film excerpt from the life of nine-year-old Michael, who spends his childhood between school and home, where only his mother - a local prostitute - waits for him. The formal aspects of the film correspond to the monotonous life of the boy - long shots, minimization of time ellipses, slow pace, and repetitive shooting and arrangement of shots in the same recurring situations. We are confronted with the gloomy adolescence of a child, who nevertheless lives or tries to live a normal life of children's games and dreams. Personally, this film reminded me of a one-year older film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Akerman, in which there is an identical distribution of characters and their roles (although the director's focus on one of them differs) and, above all, a similar (although much more pronounced in Akerman’s film) formal process. Saless' film is very subtle and unspectacular, with meanings being casually presented - for example, the role of money in the lives of West German children, prostitutes, traders, and pensioners.

The ability of some Japanese art masterpieces of that time to transition from subjective to societal, from intimate examination of oneself and personal relationships to universal and thus political, i.e., simply from existential to critical, is truly fascinating (Teshigahara - The Pitfall, Oshima - Death by Hanging). The first quarter: Antonioni in Japan, undoubtedly and flawlessly - a man lost to himself, his family, and characters wandering in a dehumanized world of geometric shapes of modern architecture in its perfectly smooth, rectangular structure, negating any natural place for humans. But Yoshida goes further - memory, the past, and the future transform the concrete stage of modern individual purification into the purification of the political individual, fighting for their ideals. A purgatory of convictions, dreams, and illusions in which heroes are trapped by the past, present, and future, and in which they can experience their own failure, weakness, unhappiness, and guilt - and lose their illusions, currently, almost seamlessly (flashbacks and flashforwards do it for them). A dead end of political choice, which is inevitably linked to the choice of life. /// Perfectly sharp and regular framing of shots often locks the characters in a central composition from which there is no escape, just like from an allegorical purgatory. All-consuming surfaces of black and white, steel and concrete, futile efforts.

The curtain rises, the frame anchors, the screen expands, the perspective focuses, the viewer looks - from an unchanging angle on matter that knows only transformation, as if the viewer of this present-day mental “Minecraft” saw digital Muratti 30s cigarettes marching by and pondered the dilemma of whether this thematic and constantly bending and newly rutting monism of audiovisual matter refers to the original code of the film god, whose every step has been written into all future since the beginning of experimental film, and every color, material, and sound transformation only follows a brilliant divine plan, or if we are watching the aleatorics of self-producing matter lost in the randomness of the universe, whose random generation of meaningless patterns duplicates the history of film and humanity as the interplay of absurdity and pure childish joy from moving senseless audiovisual pleasures - and nothing more. Nothing less.

A film about the decline of chivalry, symbolized by the downfall of some of its greatest legends: Arthur, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table. In the opening passage, the true nature of the heroic deeds of these medieval heroes is revealed to us without hesitation – their battles are only futile bloodshed, and their noble goals (the Holy Grail) are merely false (because they do not exist) alibis for these atrocities. The film is about the demise of the chivalrous sense of nobility and duty, as the life of a true knight should be a generous service to his lord and duties. Lancelot fulfills his duty towards his lord at every moment, but the problem lies in the fact that he has multiple lords – his king, his virtuous lady, and his god. Lancelot, as a true knight, tries to fulfill his duty towards his lord at every moment, but he leaves it up to his decision, that is, his feelings, to determine which lord it will actually be. Instead of noble service to duty, there arises a tragic inner conflict between his passions and the sense of honor and commitment. Everything leads to the self-destruction of the knightly order, as best demonstrated by the death of Lancelot's best friend, Gawain. Symbolically, the final battle scene is a place of triumph for the infantry and archers...

The pitfalls of the big city are unpredictable. For one brother, money, booze, and prostitutes can destroy a promising career, life, and character, while for the other, his gigantic altruism can paradoxically lead to self-destruction and more harm than good (it's no coincidence that all ancient and medieval saints end up crucified/dismembered/decapitated, etc.). However, the film's ending belongs to neither of them (despite the tragic culmination of their love triangle), but rather to the unobtrusive brother in the background, who until then was probably the most unremarkable character in the whole drama. It is he who carries the message that was very useful for Italy in its difficult post-war "neo-realist" times - to stick to honest work, not to come up with risky attempts to get rich, not to lose will and hope, not to forget about family, and grit your teeth and wait for a better world to come.

Lost in the room, lost in the film. A study of the viewer's relationship to the fictional world of film, diegesis. Gidal himself: "This film is a consequent continuation and contraction of my film work, research which began with Room (1967). The film is not a translation of anything, it is not a representation of anything, not even of consciousness." The film represents nothing (except itself, it must be added - a topic very close to experimental cinema of that time) and only maps the room and, through its procedures, maps the ways in which the viewer allows him or herself to be drawn into its game. Slow camera voyeurism, always following partial shots of a darkened space, constantly teases the viewer's expectations, who is used to, from classic productions, crutches, instructions, and clear maps on how to navigate in the pre-camera area. Here, orientation is always difficult, made impossible, and postponed, while the inability to recognize scales and objects is used as a springboard for aesthetic values - from objects that we do not recognize, Gidal keeps only their basic contours or colors, which he further abstracts, examines, absolutizes). Ironically, sometimes Gidal lets the picture light up to the max - even then the mysterious room will not and cannot be visible and open to light. Gidal thus mostly allows almost complete darkness to rule.

A work of art is always born from its historical and social conditions. While the pre-war avant-garde, especially European, discovered abstract forms of moving geometry and the dance of objects captured in the possibilities of film montage, Cornell mostly adhered to figurative creation in his entire body of work and his most famous piece, Rose Hobart, is one of the classic works of its author and is an embodiment of the found footage method. Therefore, from what conditions does this film emerge? It emerges from modern mass culture, which, unlike Europe, began in the USA in the 1930s. With his film, Cornell created a dream, but he could only do so because Hollywood had first created the consumerist dream East of Borneo. Cornell, with his found footage style, only utilizes the "artistic" prefabricated items of mass culture and tries to create higher-level art from them, or rather to make something valuable out of the ubiquitous junk, which is the fate of today's world.