Dionysos

When the Italians made Once Upon a Time in the West at the same time, they managed to create possibly the best western, thus winning in the exclusively American discipline. In this case too (and once again Morricone was involved), the Italians came close to scoring on the opponent's field, but in the end, it was more like a draw. The story of a lone wolf fighting against the mafia machinery is dangerously reminiscent of the machinery of big fish in the world economy (the mafia family's meetings and decision-making are equivalent to the general meetings of a company, and even the business area is more or less the same, only the means are more straightforward) or heavyweights in world politics. The insignificant McCain will be crushed just like a Central European country in the same year, as we read in the newspaper headlines. Yet this is not a film parable, but a gangster film with suspenseful scenes (also thanks to the brilliant camera work of Erico Menczer) and above all charismatic actors. Moreover, Cassavetes was able to observe the performance of his colleague Falk during filming, whom he then cast in his best films.

Japan, Africa, and various other corners of the world. But also, France, the best of its culture and thinking. The Annales school of history gave the world the concept of "longue durée," which looks beneath the surface of political turbulence to what is important, the "long-lasting" structures of human life. Marker also pays attention to banal moments and traditions, in which there is more hidden than in superficial "grand histories." Even ethnographic passages (including the name Levi-Strauss) in Sunless, and perhaps most importantly, a piece of beautiful avant-garde filmmaking with a multitude of experiments with image and sound. It is no coincidence that there is also a brief mention of Godard in the film. If The Pier was an essay on the impossibility of escaping time, then Sunless is an essay on the impossibility of stopping time from slipping away. Time that has passed can perhaps be captured in memory, but it escapes our control with the same inevitability as what memory should have preserved, and thus there may be only one thing left - to capture time on a film strip. This also does not help, but thanks to attempts like those of Chris Marker, we can add this author to the greats of French culture.

The story of a traditional person in the backdrop of traditional theater seems to exclude real understanding for us, modern people, without us committing distorting anachronism. Like in other cases, can a person of the Age of Enlightenment only imagine a vanished world, separated from him by a wall (romanticizing or disillusioning) of imagination? Not at all, because the modern person is literally present in the center of the action, although as a less noticeable supporting character - the character of the old man, fleeing from his fate. The confrontation between the modern and traditional person thus takes on personal traits. The story of the dying old woman, who willingly gives up her life and the pleasures that remain to her (her teeth), in order to secure the favor of the gods and die with peace in her soul, with the calmness of convention, is confronted with the cowardice of the old man, who falls into the disdain of the community due to the violation of tradition. The undeniable yet ultimately cowardly dignity of the old woman stands against the dishonor of the old man, who, however, appears as an embodiment of modernity, with its appreciation and enjoyment while there is still time, and oblivious to death, which, after leaving the safety of tradition, appears with all its horror. From rain under the eaves, or history.

A black-and-white film without words and without a relevant plot, and yet it is not boring. The static camera, at a slow calming pace, transitions from large shots of bleak Lithuanian reality to the details of human faces. This is one of those films where it is futile and mainly unnecessary to try to reconstruct any point or relationships between the characters. Here, it is about the power of the image itself and what lies behind it. It is about the metaphysical power of the image, with the same urgency that black and white photographs have - their freezing of time throws us directly in front of the weight of the objects they depict. Just like them, this film is also inadequate because, just like silent photographs, a silent film is even less capable of capturing reality with its 4:3 rectangular eye compared to movies where the characters speak because, unlike animals, humans have not only a voice but also speech.

I usually hardly notice it, but here on FilmBooster, there is sometimes a column called "Tags" for movies that somehow managed to characterize the message of the film: police, journalists, intrigue, false accusation, media, and injustice. Reality is always different from how it appears to us, but the police and the media are going in the opposite direction: their perception of things constitutes its reality. Therefore, we as viewers can indeed observe the colorful "reality" of the film narration (which, like any other reality, is open to various interpretations, from the authors' left-wing engagement to other opinions) but the reality created by the unified police/media machinery allows for only one perspective. It is that perspective of black-and-white shots from secret service cameras and (back then) black-and-white newspaper photographs and headlines that remind people in the 21st century that you can become a terrorist overnight not only through your own actions.

It is said that this was Stalin's favorite film, which is quite possible - Stalin always chose his actions in a way that would elevate his image in the eyes of the USSR citizens, as well as serve the interests of the state, at least in his opinion... The case of the play "The Days of the Turbins" by Bulgakov is famous, which Stalin personally watched more than ten times, and yet Bulgakov was persecuted on his personal initiative. Bulgakov was able to work relatively freely in the 1920s, but not in the 1930s, during the birth of Stalin's regime, simply because Bulgakov's work was not in line with it, and therefore not in line with the interests of the state. Volga-Volga is already in the spirit of the regime, and therefore Stalin could only love something that reflected his spirit. In addition, the story of a foolish arrogant bureaucrat, who is more of a burden to the people rather than helping them (let alone serving them), was an ideal object from which Stalin could distance himself, of course, at a time when the bureaucratic-authoritarian regime he co-created reached one of its "peaks"...

What can a little boy who is locked in a room for misbehaving dream about? Giulio dreamed of a world without authority. When he, as an adult, symbolically walked out of the room, he immediately aimed his gun at the highest authority - the state. However, his fight kept something childish within it, an idea of a romantic rebellion that everyone will want to join sooner or later, and that a free world will be built tomorrow. And this world will applaud its liberator. With this belief, one can be free even in an empty cell, because imagination does not know any authority. The problem arises when returning to the real world (when Giulio walks out of the room for the second time, where he dream about himself and the future). That is because a person who has determined recognition from others as a condition for his own freedom cannot bear the fact that they will not live to see true recognition of their merits. His freedom slowly slips away... The major positive aspects of the film are the beautiful calm camera of Mario Masini and the performance of Giulio Brogi.

An ironic and self-ironic leftist film that can also cut into life in a lighter spirit (I do not just mean the very dense abortion scene, which must have been censored at the time). The first half of the film is fully "feminist" matter: the main protagonist herself effectively supports men and children, as a result of which she has no time for her own life and self-development, the female "double shift" par excellence, unquestioned by the social norms of the time. After Roswitha is forced to leave her profession (notice that she does not choose to do so herself, but it is imposed on her by external necessity), her personal transformation begins, almost negating her previous mode of existence - Roswitha is actually the only person throughout the film who tries to take authentic action in the context of the factory, once again surpassing men (in the plural), including her own husband (in the singular), when her personal energy is directed outward into the world, towards socially pressing issues, instead of into the family. Her beginner's idealism is the source of a number of tragicomic situations, and the point with the preservation of production in her husband's factory is a typical example of how our society works: the factory is not closed in the end, and the employees can be satisfied, but as it turns out, the arbitrariness of corporate management turns people into passive objects, who can only wait and see if they will be able to support their families tomorrow or not. In the words of a factory security guard: "There are many places where the public can freely move. Streets, squares, department stores, public toilets, parks..." But factories are not on the list... Kluge's unique style - combining social-critical documentary with the formal finesse of Godard's New Wave, with all its intertextuality and irony through film techniques (such as contrasting references to the Soviet revolutionary "Chapaev") or (now only Kluge) juxtaposition of the past and present, whether artistic or historical.

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.

As the author himself said, Hail Mary is the culmination of a series of his films (Every Man for Himself, Passion, First Name: Carmen) from the early 80s, with which he returned to making films that address personally or intimately human questions (after the political 70s). His "Marie" is truly the culmination, as her individual hesitation and decision-making about the chosen path is the core and climax of the whole film. As a typical copy from the aforementioned series, the film also appears with its rediscovered (self-sufficient) beauty of the cinematic image, which was weakened (especially in the 70s, but of course also in other phases of the author's work) by attempts to find new functional relationships with sound and goals beyond the aesthetic experience in the image. Therefore, there are deliberately kitschy shots of nature, etc. What works less in the film is the side plot of the Czechoslovak emigrant-thinker, which might be intended to contrast with Marie's actions (her humility, hesitation, and sacrificing her sexuality in contrast to the arrogant intellectual with multiple women) or the storyline about creation (of life) in contrast to biblical conception. It is interesting that Godard does not attempt any (atheistic, etc.) updating with the story of the Virgin Mary, let alone one set in the present, but rather respects the spiritual content of the biblical source.