Dionysos

A young priest arrives in a remote and dilapidated town to replace his deceased predecessor - he doesn't know for how long, and he is unfamiliar with the locals. Apart from the poor villagers, mixed-race Indians, and diamond seekers, who live in a place of faded prosperity, living here are only a local dignitary, his beautiful young protégé, and another young, peculiar white man. The title of the film suggests where the plot will lead. However! The film relies more on the overall atmosphere (the play of silence and music is worth contemplating), the characters, excellent camera work, and interesting editing of certain scenes. However, one user on IMDb wrote, "The characters are sketched to remain mysterious (it's all suggestions, nothing is defined), but you could also call them underdeveloped." Nevertheless, they are still interesting characters within the context of the film - a woman transforming from a victim into a danger; feminine love and the body as a threat to male purity of spirit and character, or conversely, as a challenge for cleansing action towards others and one's neighbor. The film thus builds tension through the (absence) of music, the editing, and occasionally impressive black-and-white visual compositions.

The average viewer looking for a horror film will indeed find it, but in a reversed form, because this film is not the domain of conventional cinema, but quite the opposite - the average viewer will run away from the film in horror (by which Necropolis paradoxically fulfills one of the ideal goals of the horror genre). It is, in fact, a total European art film - the end of the 1960s, counterculture, long intellectual declamations in even longer shots, and traditional B-movie and historical characters turned upside down into pop-art material used to create completely different meanings (Frankenstein as a thinker/propagator of revolutionary ideas in the style of consciousness-raising, Bathory as a modern neurotic woman dissatisfied with her husband, etc.). The entire film is shot in a studio using minimalist but aesthetically exquisitely crafted sets, which provide a great background for detailed studies of characters and actors with the slow and static camera. The actors are chosen in an interesting way because they mirror the multi-layered nature of the film - from more avant-garde and art actors like Clémenti or Viva to the supremely avant-garde playwright and director Carmelo Bene, and even Bruno Corazzari, who acted in spaghetti westerns. The film also has a decent humorous component and, moreover, even at first glance, the sequence of scenes, which is only loosely connected, has a certain internal logic and relationships.

In this film, everything is permeated with the essence of death - the death of the homeland means the death of its people, and the disappearance of national substance in the form of traditions, history, or monuments kills the children of the nation, even those furthest away from the places where their native land gave them life and filled that life with meaning (the film is, as they say today, very essentialist, fortunately only in an introspective intimate manner, so we only encounter nationalist remarks towards other nations in the most necessary cases). However, the brilliance of the film lies in capturing death, decay, and slow decline in the entire mise-en-scène - every square centimeter of Askarian's shots of materialized dreams and memories screams "extinction!" at the viewer. Every object filling the space in front of the camera is a silent witness to the end of one history and one nation, and it reflects the agonizing nostalgia of an exile whose world is falling apart and whose every idea and memory of homeland can only be consumed by the decay of his homeland and thus his inner self. Inanimate objects of the mise-en-scène are personified and brought to life only for that necessary moment, so they can die - their movement is a symbolic contrast to the characters, who, at first glance, appear to be alive but are already dead (and their acting is lifeless, but not Bressonian).

Already in Garrel's debut film Marie for Memory, there was a quite non-conformist portrayal of Jesus, and here too I am unsure to what extent this undoubtedly contemporary situation of the non-revolutionary year of 1968 is meant as an authentic update of the Bible. But in this indecisiveness - at least for me - lies one of the film’s advantages, thanks to which even a leftist atheist can appreciate the New Testament story of Jesus and Mary and vice versa. The structure of the story is also ambiguous: Jesus' apparent Oedipal relationship with his mother (played by the same actress as Mary Magdalene) continues throughout the entire runtime, but individual scenes/metaphors prevail overall, in which the audiovisual element dominates. Michel Fournier's camera work - also a member of the Zanzibar group (another member, Frédéric Pardo, made the medium-length film Home Movie, autour du 'Lit de la vierge about this) - together with the sound, which alternates long silent passages with psychedelic rock, create a burdensome and lyrical atmosphere on the edge between harsh reality and the hope and defiance of stimulating myth. It's a film about the sad and lonely messiahship of young left-wing artists/revolutionary messengers of the Zanzibar group X Jesus Christ.

Latin American film (almost) magical realism, which allows madness and abnormality to emerge amusingly and mysteriously underneath beautiful black and white textures. It is a drama with elements of comedy and sometimes even horror (the characters float in a strange realm between reality and dream) that benefits from excellent work with a stylish black-and-white camera and editing. This, in combination with the story of a diffident hero and a disturbed family, creates a tense atmosphere where meaningless details take on disturbing meanings, facial details, and a mise-en-scène repelling the strangeness of the unknown, and where a nighttime dream may eventually turn into a daytime nightmare. A film about desire and submission to it. A film about the desire to get rid of the master preventing our happiness, only to find ourselves in his place and not finding any other way out but to end the futile waiting game. The film may remind some people of the works of David Lynch.

Just as it was seeking new forms and new relationships within society, the Dziga Vertov group was seeking new forms and new relationships within film. The discontinuity of the political essay, alternating between general reflections and specific demonstrations of specific aspects of the anti-capitalist struggle (from the Black Panthers to the proletariat to women's rights activists), intertwines with scenes of almost didactic narrative value, aimed at deconstructing the staged process of American justice, whose parallels with Grigory Dimitrov's Nazi trial after the Reichstag fire are purely coincidental. Revolution through film, or a film about revolution for revolution; a film that constantly reflects on itself; a film that knows what it wants but doesn't know how - and if what it's doing is really new, it can't even beforehand. It is precisely this search for the new "how" that is the true goal of the film. /// However, in order not to praise it too much, the film occasionally reveals the Spartan production conditions of the aforementioned group, whose financial conditions were clearly not the most dazzling (and it was this film that was supposed to fill the gaps after the expensive filming of scenes for the Palestinian film, which eventually became Here and Elsewhere) - some scenes look more like "skits" filmed in someone's basement. There was also a bit more of didacticism and travesty at the expense of philosophical and political reflection this time.

This film from the Yakuza environment combines "plot," intellectual mystery, and formal free-spiritedness in a way unique to the turn of the 60s and 70s. Essentially, the conventionally constructed story about the interchange of a police officer and a criminal, with all the metaphors about the convergence of "law" and "crime" clearly evident in the foreground, is permeated with ambiguous questions about the identity of both men. Their convergence is not unlike the first mentioned, but mainly due to it, the film acquires a personal and historical dimension that serves as social criticism, as well as the aforementioned metaphor (a different past relationship with the student leftist guerrillas becomes a paradoxical starting point for "both" men, whose life destinies diverged only to intersect again and reveal the true essence of their character). All of this is permeated with audiovisual gems in the form of excellent camera work, playing with sound, and metafictional passages (at the end of the 60s, it may have been an obligation to introduce sarcastic remarks about contemporary society into fiction). Another excellent, albeit not flawless, product of ATG.

Paradoxically, one of the main characters of the so-called poetic film, Jurij Iljenko, made a film about rust, decaying water, death, and false hope, where the hints of poetry end up sarcastically trampled as a false illusion. It was the late 80s and early 90s when the USSR was experiencing not only glasnost, which led to the creation of this totally disillusioning film (one of many...), but also perestroika, which turned into no less than a total economic and political disaster. Like countless other perestroika films, this one offers only a dystopia, a land on the verge of human and natural catastrophe, where all human ties break apart and only the laws of violence and blunt power survive in the ruling anarchy. This anarchy leads nowhere and wants nothing - it just is and there is no way to escape it (the main character hides on a symbolic bridge between the zone and the outside world). The metaphor of the "escaped" prisoner who climbs into the very core of the long-empty Soviet reality in the form of a tin sickle and hammer and observes the manifestations of this reality from there, is perfect in terms of the script. When the inscription on the prison gate changes from "You cannot live in society and be free from society" to “cannot,” "live," "free," we should not read it literally but consider the original inscription as a whole. The film's authors are actually attacking the entire society of that time and the entire system of mutual relations, where only anonymity, egoism, and corruption reign, and where the only hope lies in the personal and unique actions of a few characters. Hence, another paradox - a collectivist society, from which alienation was to be eradicated, created a film about total alienation, where true life is represented only by the individual gestures of isolated individuals (such as a woman living on the outskirts in an abandoned railway building, etc.). For me, it's just a pity (but this is also a common feature of these films) that there were hints of Christian mythology in connection with the main character, although an interpretation in this spirit is certainly not the only possible one.

Rivette is once again in full force, skillfully bridging the enigmatic plot and the pleasure of film, fantasy, and characters. The metaphorical sequences described above are indeed the truth of the entire film. Not only do they serve as a mirror to the plot itself, full of twists and intense battles between characters, taking the form of deceitful tricks and surreal passages of open violence. But mainly, they allow the filmmakers and the audience to savor the complicated plot in its simple essence, condensed into silent scenes composed of elementary and at times almost existential ingredients, from anxiety to fear to... reconciliation? Personally, it seemed to me that Rivette is more theatrical here than in his other more explicit films, especially thanks to the deliberate complexity, paradoxical nature, and ironically contrived mystery of the plot, creating a distance that turns the characters into actors playing their roles (one character directly asks another: "What role are you playing?"). However, this only strengthens the enjoyable feeling (which I personally missed in Duelle), that it's not just about what actually happens on the screen, but how it happens (by the way, Lubtchansky showcases the best of his artistry) and how the film is composed of elementary ingredients: acting, tension, surprises, camerawork, and emotions.

Here, the Marxist-oriented Debord anticipates many aspects of his most famous work "The Society of the Spectacle": separation = alienation of the ruling modern society from economy to politics to art, fragmentation of the whole person/society into a powerless passive spectator of their own history or films and an almighty fetishistic image of their own power, opposing it as a foreign demobilizing force, offering the illusion of joy and life in exchange for the inactive hypnotization of the individual by the product of their own forces. Films and images simultaneously take on the role of Feuerbach's God, in which the best of man and his revolution have become alienated, as well as the palliative function of modern opium for the people, enabling a peaceful life instead of a tumultuous life of freedom, revolution, and history, which are also distorted and misrepresented at the same time by the evening news and action films. /// Before becoming one of the main exponents of Situationist International, Debord was a member of Letterist International. Lettrism, already through Isidore Isou and his Venom and Eternity (1951), had a great influence on the new generation of (not only) French filmmakers, and his discontinuous montage and critique of traditional art and film image had an obvious influence on Debord as well (who made his first film as a Lettrist in 1952). Conversely, Debord's work is a link to modern film essays by Chris Marker or Jean-Luc Godard.