Dionysos

An explosion of primordial energy - animality, blood, a world without convention because it is without culture: the sinking of culture into a total mixture, in which things lose their shape and a bicycle lies on the table - explosion of the frenetic force of film, feverish unrestrained editing, sinking into the film. The return of the artist from the mid-20th century to this state through imitation of the creative process of a caveman, covering the walls and ceiling of his cave with drawings composed of simple lines? Ana as a Paleolithic Venus, unappealing and even terrifying to our modern conventions, but in the world of Freudian patria potestas before Oedipus, an embodiment of animal beauty? A bit like a sped-up Zwartjes.

The regularity of the outline of five lines giving the condition of the possibility of freedom for music, which must always be embodied in itself standardized notation marks in order to be able to be heard in its always similar and yet new arrangement. Straub and Huillet created an extremely faithful chronicle: Bach's life is composed of musical notes, which are constant repetitions of all those own names, names of institutions and cities he went through during his career, of all the titles he fought for, and of all the names of people who shaped his family and life. The directorial duo perfectly doubled the genre of period chronicle and created, as it can only be done, a faithful (because not anachronistic, thus not violated from today's perspective) reconstruction. It is faithful because the people of that time considered these exact themes worth recording for future generations: the era of romantic individualism - bourgeois novels full of emotions and psychologies came later. If we compare this film with the Hollywood "crap in silk stockings" (as Napoleon dubbed the classicist genius Talleyrand) "Amadeus," we once again have proof of the Hollywood ideological violation of anything that is not Hollywood into its own form. Straub and Huillet therefore created a fragmented and flat portrait, but nevertheless a portrait composed of authentic historical sources without retroactive domestication for the 20th-century viewer.

PCI receives about a quarter to a third of all votes in elections, while the native Parma securely lay in the red fortress of Emilie-Romagna. It is the 1960s - three out of four intellectuals are leftists and May 1968 is approaching. The youths of the Italian and European bourgeoisie, raised by universities, await the revolution. However, as Bertolucci showed us, the middle class became, for a certain period of time, at best a mere compagnon de route (a companion on the journey) of the proletariat, from whom it soon distanced itself: the main character stands in the middle of a quarry, surrounded by naked bathing working-class boys, wearing a suit. During the time of this film, Bertolucci believed that he correctly captured the weakness of his generation and especially his class in a position of engagement in a matter that negates it through revolution. The isolation of the bourgeois individual (sex within the family only strengthens the idea of the inviolability of their class) incapable of establishing a real connection with the working class, on whose behalf he acts (for example, his connection with the proletariat passes through the mediation of an ambivalent character of a teacher, who is introduced to us in the narrative as an enlightened active individual, but on the screen later appears as a dull passive figure, equally isolated and living in the past). However, Bertolucci did capture, which only we can know retrospectively, the greatest tragedy of left-wing intellectuals or artistic filmmakers: the Godardian motto of style as a moral (political) choice, which Bertolucci explicitly puts into the mouth of one of the characters, concealed the belief of the impatient European bourgeoisie that revolution is a conscious negation of the world - a new form, a new way of thinking, and new editing. That is certainly true, but it forgets about the long, tedious, and surface material struggle. History has taught us that the spring breeze of May quickly subsided, new waves came and dissolved, the bourgeoisie found cozy spots, and Bertolucci started making Hollywood films. /// However, the muse of Revolution will give birth to beautiful unrest again and a fresh new perspective, as Bertolucci's early films demonstrated.

A Japanese action-packed Trans-Europ-Express: all the time planes and possibilities of character development and events coexist in a single moment. I fundamentally disagree with the notion that every stylistic element was motivated purely by impulsive decision, because on the contrary, the individual elements, by which the usual linearity is undermined ("he greeted me like a Yakuza," it was at three o'clock, "it's strange that he left only one bullet in the eardrum", etc.), are and must be carefully incorporated into the final editing of such a film. This is precisely because it is not easy to create a film in which no event, no decision, or no mistake exists only once, but the characters constantly return from the future or are attacked by their own past. It is not easy for it not to leave the possibility of simple reconstruction (in this case, I would only criticize the author for being too obvious in some of the above-mentioned crucial points of the film's construction).

Imagination and topos are truly the guides of a story that is more than lightly fantastical (my only objection is that it could have pushed the envelope even further). The film certainly has value as a story told on the brink of surrealism, appealing more to the viewer's emotions and imagination than their ability to rationalize a chain of facts, as the Cartesian neatness of the line of aligned planets does not evoke a fit of rationalism, but rather triggers a chain of fantastical events (but still clothed in the realistic guise of more or less standard film means of expression). /// A few comments: social critique - the scene by the fire, in which the characters themselves come to realize that the socialist society did not create one people, but once again split into social classes that have nothing in common, where thieves and greedy butchers who engage in corruption in a scarcity economy are still around. The topos of the village - in the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet cinema triumphantly brought a tractor to a backward village, which thus contributed to the destruction of the old and the construction of the new; from the post-Stalinist thaw through the 1960s, the village no longer fulfills utopian tasks, but slowly modernizes and finds its fate in gradually catching up with the city. Some people nostalgically reflect on this, similarly to elsewhere in Europe; since the 1980s, the Russian village has become a bizarre and dark place, from where anyone that can still run away does. Our urban heroes thus pass through death and thereby through the fantastical realm of the Russian village.

"Behind the curtain, where it is still forbidden to go (nothing speaks anymore). In the interruption of connection, in the final contrast. Against all expectations, an unstoppable outflow, a distant new beginning. Movement, detached from itself, now arranges distances, roles... from the other side... it does not cease to unravel its tireless function." The text by the renowned writer Philippe Sollers, accompanying the entire film, reveals the hidden foundation of the film's approach: to discover behind the shell of visual sensations that the Mediterranean offers their common basis, unifying spatial and temporal distances into a point of contraction, in which everything must first be equivalent in order to subsequently create all the differences endowed with meaning - a mythological point where each shot reveals a connection to every other because the language with which they will subsequently speak is only now forming here. Thus, to unveil the drawn curtain, behind which a constant arrangement of differences takes place, always a new arrangement of shots and memories of them. The time of the Mediterranean contributes to this mythology, in which unchanging eternal destinies coincide with the slow growth and decline of empires, and where even modern man finds an equivalent in an abandoned castle, a bleeding bull, or a mummy, and is eventually transformed like steel into the face of a young Arab girl. Linguistic and film structuralism in the form of cinematographic and literary poetry.

An experimental essay, a supremely self-reflective film combining an intimate personal portrait with social and political climate. Jost, as an intellectual familiar with modern humanities and as a young man sentenced to more than two years in prison for refusing military service during the Vietnam War, creates a film that is absolutely at the level of the best experimental politically engaged film on the edge between documentary and fiction, best represented by the Dziga Vertov group. However, he never loses sight of the individual, i.e., himself as the creator of the work, as an individual determined by his surroundings and, in retrospect, reflecting this cultural environment and - where a strong moment of engagement is manifested - transforming through the form of this reflection. Indeed, the linguistic and cultural turn in this film finds its perfect artistic expression. The difference between the interior and the exterior is erased - the "otherness" of the world permeates the individual, which cannot be escaped, even if one is most opposed to Nixon, Vietnam, imperialism, and advertising. A world that exists only through each individual - Jost deconstructs the "objective" structures of contemporary society, examines their reflection in the structures of an individual's life modeled after them, thinking, love relationships, and ultimately shows the necessity of change, which must simultaneously change the individual's consciousness in order to begin to change the world.

Resnais was not an auteur - his films relied on the quality of his collaborator, the scriptwriter. For this reason, Muriel, or The Time of Return showcases the director's progressive paralysis: Hiroshima mon amour by Duras, Last Year at Marienbad by Robbe-Grillet, with the third feature film Muriel relying on the script and dialogues by Jean Cayrol, who, although a talented writer, simply did not reach the same level as the previous names. The theme of the intertwining of time and its relationship to the subjectivity of the characters (similar to all the mentioned authors as well as Resnais himself) is present here... actually, just like everything that was already included in the previous two films. This is where Resnais' paralysis manifests itself - he reached his peak in his first two works, and everything afterward is merely a hesitant imitation of himself (but only partly himself, as it is apparent that Resnais tried to mimic the spirit of Duras/Grillet in his early films, although he simply did not possess it), or empty copies of the corresponding formal procedures (flashbacks/flash-forwards, etc.) as in Stavisky. /// However, it would be unfair to assess Muriel solely based on the internal criteria of the director's career - it is still and will always be a work of narration and formal techniques safely surpassing the vast majority of other films. In the brilliant editing sequences, the time sequence is not followed, but rather time-space crystals are created, whose surfaces reflect different temporal sediments in various directions, bringing the past closer to the present, space, and characters according to their internal relationships, and, last but not least, anticipating events caused previously in another plane, which will only be revealed later.

Tabula rasa - an empty paper rests before the writer, ready to be filled with characters; like black on white, a black and white shot unfolds before the viewer in the first few seconds, still without characters and therefore inhabited only by inanimate objects - chairs, a garden, tables - and only when the characters appear shortly thereafter do they carry something of that deathly taste with them. After all, all the characters are dead, and it is either because they are experiencing inner emotional burnout or because they are just fictional characters existing only on paper/canvas. (This is Duras' second film, with the first one being created entirely independently in which she demonstrated her sense of meta-fiction and unconventional cinematography). Are the film's plots just a participation but a false and deliberate creation of two "emerging" writers? /// However, Duras creates an engulfing atmosphere of purgatory, in which people only manage to avoid dying by alienating themselves from others, and their desire only revives in another, who becomes a lifeline from indifference. Or did the trio of cynical and hopeless characters, like a vampire, pounce on the last emotionally suffering and thus living character, who is eventually initiated into their game? (Only those who do not understand that the game is an artificial creation in everything can truly experience it.) /// Once again, Duras' words and dialogues create another complete world alongside or in the midst of the one seen on the screen.

Classic cinema novo or starring sertão, poverty, defiance, and again, as in the thematically similar film Black God, White Devil by Rocha, hypertrophied religious faith, millenarian waiting for salvation indistinguishable from death, through which one must go. A clash of two cultures, a poor village, living only on utopia, against military culture coming from the city and in the service of the latifundists, feeding only on the work of villagers and cynicism. When the rebellion against cynicism is combined with the rebellion against power, this gesture of defiance leads to folk prophecy, predicting suffering on earth as a condition for paradise and thus symbolically embracing death, the only thing left for him. I agree that the socially critical and documentary/engaged theme and partly its approach is complemented by the "Jancsó-like" camera, which combines two levels – the realistic depiction of the social conditions of local village life and cultural conditions of the birth of religious faith with artistic portrayal of the process in which this religious imaginary produces itself and creates its own heroes, who yesterday still breathed and hoped, but today are already just legends, easing the difficult life with one foot in death and thus in salvation (or at least believed so).