Dionysos

Aware viewers immediately see in the human struggle of moral principles and cruel utilitarian conventions a typical example of the "schizophrenia of communist totality" or something similar, as if it only existed in barbaric communist Russia (and the Third Reich, pushed into the same, no less ideological, category of "totalitarianism" as the USSR for current ideological reasons). When we dream the dream that we could only have been truly evil in some sort of past life and somewhere else, we no longer have to fear that we could really be evil today - liberal democracy and the free market inherently exclude that! Fortunately, the Russians knew and know from experience that all social systems are bad, and that is why they can make such good films. The motive of perestroika here lies in the fact that the virtues and principles of good communists and citizens of the USSR (whether we think they are good or not, or real or not, as presented in the film) were betrayed by Stalinism and its carriers, but not defeated. This was largely achieved, although of course not completely, through the deadly war, which, along with late post-war Stalinism, helped suppress the older honorable principles of the revolution. Perestroika thus aligns itself with these ideals, personified in the film by the Komsomol youth, the youth of the party, and the whole USSR, which was torn apart by Stalinism and then Brezhnevism before perestroika came. In politics, this found reflection in Gorbachev's return to Lenin.

Either I.) An interpretation from the outside of the film (retrospective, historical-critical, and speculative): when the film discovers its ability to express anything, any topic, in short, everything through itself since the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, it also brings the dialectical necessity to demonstrate this fact by the opposite pole of extremes, which confirms this fact, creating a film about nothing that expresses nothing. To prove that a film can represent anything, as it is essentially not connected to anything. Or II.) An interpretation from the inside of the film: the anti-representative character of the film sign creates an arc through the viewer's head, through which the sign speaks for itself. However, it shows that emptiness is unbearable, and the viewer seeks anything to hold onto - from random material damage to the film strip, to, for example, the "study" of the edges of a white square and their symmetry, to the fact that they won’t finish watching the film, which is the best proof that it is better to live with the illusion of something than to experience nothing, which is impossible in itself. In any case, it is a beautiful case of a film manifesto of experimental creative destruction.

Perestroika in film: dealing with Stalinism, the motivational burnout of the contemporary generation of the 80s, sequences capturing a concert of the famous rock band Nautilius Pompilius, etc. The film is primarily about the intergenerational clash of values and life attitudes, embodied by the father, who experienced active years of life in late Stalinism, and his son, who grew up in the (relative) comfort of Brezhnevism. Prologue: the father reproaches his son for his indifference toward the surroundings and the deteriorating fate of their homeland. The son counters with the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Stalinist generation, who passively witnessed the devastation of the same country during their youth and adulthood. Plot: the son falls into the year 1949, forced to relive one day of the past reality. He sees two things - the sad but factual impossibility of changing things for the better back then, and the undeniable effort and sacrifice of the generation of that time (building industry on green grass before the war, suffering millions of losses during the war, and being forced to rebuild the destroyed industry after the war). Epilogue: the son reconciles not only with his father but, more importantly, accepts the Stalinist era as it was. That is where the film differs from many of its peers - Stalinism is not condemned a priori (although its shortcomings do become evident), but it is also shown in its positive aspect (not in the sense of justifying purges, trials, etc., but in emphasizing that Stalinism was not only about purges and trials but also about the tremendous effort and sacrifice of ordinary people who lived their lives as best they could). The film flows rather slowly, playing more on details and subtle shifts in meanings, making it more suitable for viewers interested in Russia and its history.

The American avant-garde of structural film, to which this film belongs, is a cinematic offshoot of the contemporary intellectual movement that found much more in language than just a neutral means of communication. Words do not merely reflect reality; they change and even transform it according to their own image. With its claim to totalization, the language system serves as a model for the systematicity of human action and thought (and even the most inner processes within ourselves as Lacan postulated when he said that the unconscious is structured like a language). Words and language thus create their own system, to which both the surrounding social world and we submit, as we view the world according to its system. An illustrative example from this film is that individual letters are gradually removed from a series and replaced by the same images of reality (for example, the letter "f" is replaced by a tree). This automatically prompts the viewer to seek the connection between these images and the letter "f" or words beginning with "f". This is, of course, due to the fact that the film initially constructs the entire sequence solely from words. However, this is only a reminder that language (without which human orientation in the world is not possible) always precedes perceived reality. Another example of how words subject reality to themselves is the constant repetition of individual shots of reality. The continuous repetition of the same alphabetical system prevents short shots of reality from exceeding the predetermined space and forces them, along with letters/words, to repeat an endless loop. Interestingly, after the last word disappears, the fragments of reality also disappear because reality cannot be understood without the system of words, the same system that cruelly defines and limits reality. Of course, the film offers much more (due to a completely different filmmaking approach, the introduction and ending are the subject of quite different reflections). For example, some letters, just before they disappear, are represented by words like "system" in the case of "s" and "cycle" in the case of "c" (which is the very last letter in the entire cycle).

Hollywood in Rome or Romance from the Main Train Station. She is a housewife, but still: in 1953, an American housewife could float in the middle of the station hall like a princess (apparently, all American women in Italy at the time were like Audrey), simply because she was from a country that then constituted 60% of the world's GDP. She can give Italian children chocolate like G.I. Joe did in '45. Strange, just a year earlier, Sica's film about a starving pensioner premiered, and in 1956 a film called The Roof premiered, and wasn't this terrifying contrast worth exploring for De Sica/Zavattini? Perhaps because David O. Selznick and Truman Capote assured them. Yes, that Capote, who did the dialogue for this film. And what dialogues they are - they always have wistful music playing when they are heartbreaking and uplifting music plays when there is hope... basically, the film itself shows that their clichés, dullness, and predictability alone cannot produce an impact. But it may be unfair to criticize this fact because in the 50s that's just how things were mostly done. This is a film that today can only serve as an object of interest for cultural studies, film scholars, and film and non-film historians, particularly as a demonstration of the fact that Hollywood can transport itself anywhere on the planet, yesterday and today, and create a vacuum that negates the entire real world and the specific culture around it.

While in Tarr's previous films, the apartment was a symbol of existential problems, now it is an existential problem. While in the previous two films, one could consider the relationship between external material issues and the characters' internal psyche, here (although not completely because factors such as the teacher's financial distress or the desire to get an apartment and money from the mother play a certain role) the author focuses primarily on the intersubjective structure of the relationships of the residents of one apartment (which is no longer just an apartment, but rather a metaphor, for example, a place of conflict between different generations, etc.). Mutual alienation and latent hostility are evident in all the "dialogues" but the form is important here - especially the play of light. It is precisely thanks to the light that we reveal the true distance in the apparent closeness of the characters, even within the most intimate conversations, when it seems that the characters are closer, each of them is mostly lit differently, which metaphorically indicates their true lack of harmony. It is precisely the dialogues and monologues of the characters where my main criticism of the film lies - the film that wants to delve into the depths of the characters' inner selves must have equally deep and profound ideas contained within them, which Tarr has not completely succeeded at yet.