Dionysos

The unstable floating disjunction between words and images, absolute inadequacy of visuals as illustrations of text, endless surpassing of non-totalizable quantities of the potentialities of the camera over any discursive reductionism, the limit of the documentary and limit of all efforts for correspondence between thought and world. The nickel-and-dime psychologizing criminal-sociological description of an absolutely ordinary story "from adolescent delinquent to criminal" always and again shatters against the wall of the image and shows that the attempt to connect these two worlds is colossally pointless. The paradox of the infinity of the seen detail against the absolute generalizability of the textual construct. The uniqueness of the personal story is neither denied nor affirmed by the documentary detachment of the camera, which only captures public space and strangers - in this field of indecisiveness, everyone can find either the sociological search for the roots of the criminal's fate or the transcendent spirit of the criminal, which is absent and surpasses its conditions, which rather than its anchoring in that sociological story, dazzle the viewer with their total indifference towards it. In such a space, everyone is both an innocent witness and a perpetrator. The use of supremely cacophonous "abnormal" music only emphasizes the artistic core of any apparent documentary “with distance,” which makes one wonder whether it was not the aim from the beginning to create a visual poem. This is affirmed by nothing other than the self-contained shots of the camera, which turn the public space into material for the creation of paintings with its details - any attempt to objectify the individual always turns into the subjectivization of the world. In their apparent unity, however, the modern human being finds no reassuring pantheism, but rather a simple indifference of reality towards the individual, which, although dissolved in the image of the world, logically disappears therefrom.

"In the chain of representation, there is white space: in general, we learn about the text, play with it, and represent it. Here we read it. It is uncertainty that concerns the equation of The Truck. I don't know what happened, I did it instinctively, I feel that the representation was eliminated. The Truck is simply a representation of reading as such. And then there is the truck itself, a uniform element, constantly identical to itself, passing through the screen as if it were a musical staff." (Interview with M. Duras in Le Monde, 1977) We must not fall into two boundary traps that could destroy this film for us: we must not imagine that there is something before the text that the text says (this film "has nothing to say") nor must we imagine that the text is here to provide us with material for a superstructure, which is a graspable representation. The white space is always in the middle of the chain – everything graspable in the chain of things in front of the camera, behind the camera, before editing, and on the screen is composed thereof: the musical staff is pure white before and after each note, only it is definitive - only it is truly graspable. Only the thing is graspable, not the person. That is the message of both the film and its politics, a message strongly influenced by its time and the state of the French left since the late 1970s.

Anti-linear film logically offers an insightful lesson about any linearity of human behavior - a vector never leads to a goal, success, or end; it just returns in an infinite loop to its starting point, and we observe: a longing to change, a sense of missing, a search for termination; a new beginning. The villain, who believes they control time, always loses through it; humanity, fearful of its annihilation, will always be reborn after it; the hero, gradually building self-awareness as both substance and subject, is always thrown back to the beginning of the search: the beginning of the film, which is both the end and the beginning. The only lesson is that it's all completely insignificant. Blockbuster nihilism. A person is merely an unconscious mover of their own unconscious decision, about which it cannot be said when it originated because it is always decentralized from its consciousness. The inherent paradox of the film is that its time cannot be reversed: afterward, errors in the script will undoubtedly become apparent. Similarly, the film cannot be stopped because people would then have time to contemplate things, and the magic would be lost. But! Time cannot be stopped either, so these arguments are not valid in this context at all.

The interval between the limit of photogenicity and the purity of absolute film, already explored so many times by experimental film; abstraction from reality, or the precedence of metaphysics over real physics? Or like it is here, both at once - a moonlit night, a spotlight cutting through the darkness like the spotlight of an awakened consciousness, a firefly, a white eye awakening light in the darkness accompanied by a pair of orange taillights racing down a night road, or two crimson eyes emerging from the darkness like a predator lurking in the night of the universe for its prey. The barbed wire binding the moon and with it the viewer's path of consciousness, or just a drunkard's gaze through a fence who has strayed from his path? Can we legitimately attribute our secondary meanings to pure form at all? What if we attribute something to the night in our intoxication and wake up in the morning, filled with shame, slapping ourselves for something that so enchanted us and seemed so brilliant, clear, and fulfilling, but turned out to be so low, so ridiculous?

Truly postmodern and even more post-socialist morality, both in terms of its content and form: the fluid blending of character identities seems to emphasize the emptiness of the new life reality, which, with a wave of the magic wand of the tailor's scissors, suddenly transforms into a lifeless reality of mindless careerism, where life and death hold no greater meaning than the world itself, and thus it is irrelevant whether a character dies or comes back to life. The economic transformation that creates the rich people, killing everyone else on their way up, especially themselves as their past existences, only leads again to a loop of new personal wandering circles of reincarnation, from gravedigger to millionaire and from millionaire to gravedigger, because there is no way out for the world anymore. Jancsó, not only through his metafictional self-insertion into grotesque roles but also with the intentional sociological lifelessness of the characters, reminds us of Godard at the time.

Let's roll up our sleeves when the wheels stop! The absurd logic of the industrial age, thanks to ossification in the form of an authoritarian regime that couldn't separate itself from the era in which it originated and developed, and therefore couldn't preserve the industrial machinery along with itself, only postpones the moment when everyone realizes that the wheels have truly stopped. At that moment, a new generation comes to spin the new star wheels: against the steel rigid trusses, chimney smoke and cigarettes, acids in pipes, and alcohol in the blood, a new generation comes: flexible, agile, both in the spine and in the legs, disco dancers who drink Coca Cola and think about ecology. On one hand, the logic of the past taken to the absurd, on the other hand, an uncertain future that doesn't promise much better tomorrows, and in between is another absurdity as a connector, dividing two shafts that will eventually click into each other and the world will continue in continuity, just on a different level. The future doesn't look so sharp in this way and mainly serves as a brilliant comedy analysis of times lived. Well, none of us are masters of our own work, to which a slightly different meaning is always attributed retroactively, and yet there is something instructive in that too: in the intoxicating victory of rock music over normalization disco, when in the 1990s it seemed that freedom had already won, the heroes of Smoke are actually still partly in the defeated era: cigarettes, alcohol, a fortress... The future belongs to others, because history still prefers the same values, even though it changes facades: so, history, I'm still driving with you and we know where the roads lead - to our flexible, perfectly adjusted, soy milk-drinking and now always sustainably developing (as long as they're still on board), conscious, disk jockeys of our upcoming era.

Separation anxiety as the creator of a spiritual film or the loss of the most precious thing we never actually had, because even this film, with its admitted surreal stylization, unconsciously admits that extraordinary feelings always exist retrospectively - when they die and pass away (and this backward view is ultimately the work of art itself). What is more interesting is that the conception of nostalgia from the spirit of loss takes on a purely unique cinematic form in Sokurov's works, in which the blurred, sometimes even kitschy romanticized perspective is also blurred by the nature of the loss itself - from the spiritually innermost loss of a mother, it can suddenly become the loss of a kingdom (Moloch) or the loss of power over oneself and the surroundings (Bull)... These three films were created in succession using the same visual language, but few followers of the Spirit and spirituality are probably willing to admit that the Mother leads to Lenin and the Son to Hitler, but the logic of nostalgic search for what is lost leads from purely personal monsters to the monsters of great historic events because there is no doubt that after the death of the Mother, the Son will either grow into a respected director or a dictator.

It would be possible to sweep the matter off the table and say to Garrel that since the 1980s, other previously experimental authors have turned back to the script – indeed, Akerman and Schroeter are mentioned, for example. Although personally against excessive subjectivity, one cannot overlook the purely subjective turning point that this author hides with this gradual and increasingly progressive artistic counter-revolution: the breakup with the singer Nico, with his femme fatale... Much has been written about this. Of course, it is illegitimate and erroneous to analyze someone's psyche remotely, but if we can state the validity of the old Freudian distinction between healthy mourning and unhealthy melancholy in relation to a work of art that sublimates the author's libido through film, it is Garrel's films after The Secret Child. While mourning allows a person to eventually detach from the lost object of desire and move on, with melancholy it is the opposite and a person never unknowingly accepts the loss of the object: that is the fate of Garrel's films, constantly returning and revolving around the themes of love, separation, the death of a loved one, drugs, etc. After I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar, fittingly dedicated to Nico, only pure relational form remains in the 1990s: I would not be afraid to say that it is an empty form. Garrel seems unable to let go of what he cannot capture because it is no longer there, so he clings to the emptiness instead of using it fruitfully and moving on through it. We do not learn anything new about love, relationships, or loss; as viewers, we can only project ourselves onto the characters and insert our lives, assumptions, and clichés into theirs. In that, the story or plot returns to the scene: the classic bourgeois narrative stands precisely on the eternal covering up of emptiness, around which the wheels of the story turn - Garrel, however, unconsciously and unintentionally reveals the missing anchor of meaning...

The lie of Romanticism and the truth of cinema - that could be the paraphrase of the famous book: this film is not about nature without humans, but about the human to whom nature becomes a metaphor of itself. The film, with its arsenal of illusions, which it composes for its human observer, creates effects in nature that are impossible, creating for the viewer a machine for self-projection into things, and it is precisely this self-projection into everything the person sees that is mistaken for the evacuation of his own self from the image. Barley does not depict a Cosmos abandoned by man, but as a genius of Romanticism, who escapes from human swarming into the monstrously beautiful and lonely majesty of mountain giants, using this loneliness only to solidify himself and his self. The multiple exposures with which the author manipulates the image serve the same effect as when Antonín Mánes portrays Queen Anna's pavilion on a protruding rock above the lake, or when all the Friedrichs, or John Martin, create dreamy and unreal landscapes. I will be great according to what I contemplate; the storm and stress of my spirit in the digital storm; the anthropomorphization of the forest by an individual who tries to escape from the forest of human figures of society into forests without humans, blissfully forgetting that the horses he pursues with his liberated spirit and incarnated eye are running away from the shadows of screams... as you call into the forest, so it echoes back.

Work once civilized the ape, but capitalism has long since overtightened the screw - the wheel of history is now inevitably turning back, turning people into beasts walking in fenced enclosures and barking their inhuman screams, where the last remnants of articulated speech of a civilization extinct at the peak of its movement hang written on walls and fences and barriers like a memento mori, directing signals to human cattle. A new race is coming up: back towards "down." Whoever first discards the "human" shell of modernity, still thriving without realizing it is already dead, will achieve the first freedom of the new savage. Will it be a return to a primitive communal society or the beginning of a new dialectical epoch at a higher level? Such a question is not worth asking because it falls precisely into the coordinates of the narrative of the civilization that needs to be devoured - devoured without bitterness, without a plan, without a Declaration or a Manifesto, without fear. With the sincere joy of children of a new era, but children who reproduce themselves and devour themselves, and precisely in that gaining indestructibility, immortality: the thing of every order.