Dionysos

Director: Patrick Deval. The film belongs to the (nowadays) so-called Zanzibar group, a group of young leftist intellectuals and, as stated in the subheading of one of the current books about this group of "dandies," who, influenced by the intellectual climate in Paris at the end of the 1960s and May 1968, created radical films both in terms of content and form. Headless is precisely such a product on the edge of film experimentation and a political-worldview essay. Formally, it relies on a contrasting black and white camera and long static shots, deliberately disrupted and "liberated" by rare and beautiful camera movements. In terms of content, it is an uncompromising hymn to the radical rejection of contemporary society and a call for a new beginning. Thoughts are expressed in the form of long declamations on the edge of a political manifesto and poetry... poetry: the thoughts surprisingly resemble those of F. Nietzsche. Did the main character perhaps represent a new Zarathustra? The film emanates, especially due to the involvement of members of the Zanzibar group, the semi-improvised, unofficial, youthful spirit of filmmakers, for whom the film was both entertainment and a personal, artistic, and political mission. /// Interview with the author: http://sensesofcinema.com/2008/before-the-revolution/patrick-deval/

A brutally precise post-sorella film for Latin America that somewhat misses every box in which the viewer would automatically want to put it, and it is precisely this missing that leads to its greatness. It just needs a few short speeches of self-confusing introspection of the main character and a few scenes whose musical motif and overtly parodied filming undermine the seriousness of the situation, and the blocks of capitalist slave masters, carved by workers, take on a completely different meaning than the precise fulfillment of their function in the historical drama of a class on the path to realization. Paradoxically, the author didn't add anything to the characters' false chimera of psychological depth (which none of us have ever had), but still remains at a higher level, albeit still just a "mere" function, allowing them to perish in the hundreds in the audiovisual dramatization of the choreography of the idea of execution and brutal injustice, reminiscent of works of this type by Miklos Jancso.

Godard as a postmodern Master of Film deconstruction, both the deconstruction of image meanings and words. That is, what shapes human reality if it were not actually a constructed fiction? Or, as stated in the introduction, a person escapes from fantasy into reality (whose basis can only be fantasy), from Nature into Metaphor (the names of the two chapters of this film). This is another Godard film to prove to us that our phantasmic reality consists only of randomly assembled fragments of images, sounds, and sentences, whose meaning becomes perfectly empty and incomprehensible when taken out of their established context - until we put them together into a new unity. Even though that will only be a reflection of our inner consciousness, moving in metaphors, concepts, and abstract meanings that separate us from the real world. However, the dog does not suffer from this, as Rilke already knew, and therefore man can discover the lost Nature/reality through the perspective of an animal, the only perspective from which man can observe the external world and not just his internal, conscious world (the world of fragments of words and sentences, fragments of films and books). All you need to do is follow the basic pairs: love and death, suffering and that world. And especially Godard's dog. /// Jean-Luc Godard again follows the trail of the point at which every totalization shatters, the point where infinity opens up - whether it is the infinity of possible paths of society, the past, and the future, images (...) - and with it, freedom. /// Otherwise, at 84 years old, Jean-Luc Godard has more ideas with form than any Hollywood "god." Examples of this include demonstrating 3D by allowing a dialogue between people sitting behind each other (who would normally overlap in 2D) or by splitting the image and then allowing it to merge again (creating another alienation effect, which he has been exploring since the beginnings of his work). /// I saw the film in both 3D and 2D in the movie theater - definitely seek out the 3D version because, without it, one of the three Godards is simply missing from the screen.

The text of the drama is read for oneself, before any introduction on the stage: it is not the actor who brings the text to life, but the reader - the empty space of the stage is the world. Space itself, text itself. Love itself. And yet, through this formal emptiness, it is given to us - the audience, to its lovers. The content of ourselves comes with a delay, with even greater force, only to then recede like a wave on the Atlantic coast, momentarily giving way to some prefabricated obsessive motifs of the Durassian universe, one of which is precisely the end of love, departure, flowing, and dissolving. Cut, blackness, extreme film emptiness. Silence. And in that moment, the viewer can once again begin their merging with the text and image, like that shot in which the sky, sea, and beach merge into one.

A convenient connection of two worlds, two moments of human life. At the beginning, the main character drives through the USA - an alienated landscape, alone without deeper meaning or fulfillment in life, yet intensified by the surrounding and local (advertising) way of life. This is followed by a journey across The Netherlands and Germany - initially, the forced care for a child gives the main character feelings of satisfaction and a deeper reason for life. It has wonderful poetry, great cinematography and music, and Wim Wenders...

Formally, even with Jost's victorious reiteration of Euro-Atlantic liberalism at the turn of the 80s and 90s, there was a prevailing backward movement towards an even more classical narration than what we knew from films of previous decades: the experimental intellectual guerrilla warfare of American social relations with post-structuralist leftist discursive and socio-political critics gradually disappears and what remains is the best of the long-gone promise of reasonable, moderate, intelligent democratic liberalism that was also dreamed of in Czech fields and woods after the end of state socialist dictatorship, and that, as we later discovered, never existed. While watching the film, not only because of the shots of Vermeer and at one moment also of Rembrandt, I remembered Joseph Heller and his "Picture This" from 1988, in which Rembrandt looks down at humanity and its history from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The film gives off the same feeling as that old good Jewish liberal Heller in all its grandeur: the sensitive irony towards the vanities of everyday life's afflictions and the focus on what is important, even though what is important may not even exist, and even if it did exist, we may never achieve it. And yet, there is no choice but to try. This sentiment is felt much more in this film than in Jost's Rembrandt Laughing from 1988 (Yes! That cannot be a coincidence.). For Jost, just like with Godard, his former inspiration, from whom, however, his work will fundamentally diverge from this moment on, there seems to have been, briefly, a predominance of the desire for something enduring after the disappointment of iconoclasm, something that hides behind the disillusionment of the world and the disillusionment of its effective criticism and transformation, which both authors hoped for but did not come true... Just like in Godard's The Detective (1985), perhaps the only way out of the confusion of life appears to be love, which is eternal.

The second part continues exactly where the previous part ended, after the main character's transformation from a white terrorist into a friend of the people. This transformation seemed very poorly managed to me throughout Hungarian Rhapsody: 1st moment = István is bred with the intolerant attitude of the aristocracy, and he cruelly fights on the side of counterrevolution; 2nd moment = István recommends allocating land to retail farmers, in order to "take the wind out of the sails of the reds," so it is clearly just an opportunistic calculating gesture; 3rd moment = István, dressed in peasant rags, sits at the table with the former aristocracy. Nothing happened between moments 2 and 3 that would coherently explain this transformation. Fortunately, this problem no longer exists in Allegro Barbaro (and it is therefore paradoxical that a story in which characters do not transform is better), and we can enjoy the eternal struggle of arrogance and brutality of wealth and power with the suffering and resistance of poverty in the background of passing history. There is no need to talk about the mastery of mise-en-scène, and the playful placement of individual characters is also very pleasing, which is not only the result of clever movement of actors on the stage but also of miraculous film editing.

Jordan Belson apparently regularly destroyed his previous works, which he retrospectively found inadequate during specific phases of his artistic development. At least until the late sixties, he also refused to screen many of his works. The gradual abstraction of the external world at the expense of the internally derived image penetrates the soul of the author. At the same time, the external world is not destroyed or closed off; in 1978, Belson stated, "The distinction between an external scene perceived in the usual way and the scene perceived with the inner eye is very slight to me." From the beginning, the author has been interested in Eastern religions, Buddhism, in which the unification of the internal and external worlds is to occur. American experimental art of the fifties and sixties is excellently depicted in its apparent contrasts in Belson: abstraction and structurality are not a sign of the displacement of the individual, but rather his higher self-realization in a newly perceived world that is abstracted to its most basic and most mysterious foundations through the camera, which resonates retrospectively with the observer and transforms them through this observation. It is only characteristic that it is necessary to proceed through destruction, which is a symptom of the fact that we can never be satisfied if we are seeking the higher foundations of anything: Belson destroys his older works, destroys the avant-garde with material representation, and remains with pure film enclosed in its mandala without reference to material reality.

Image, editing, and temporal loop as cinematographic means of the return of the repressed, suppressed not by the machinery of Hollywood, which would imply consciousness, but by Hollywood mimesis. In the film, Arnold's classic creative approach fittingly meets with the overwhelmingly psychoanalytic theme of the Oedipus complex. Arnold thus liberates the source material from his hidden and suppressed undercurrent, which would hardly find recognition in mass culture, here in the films produced by MGM. However, this also applies to all other films by Arnold explicitly not referring to this theme - moreover, in this film, we are flooded with subversive work with editing and repetition, which releases from the image what is not visible in the normal flow of film frames, but what is always contained in them as a repressed possibility that cannot be escaped without getting rid of the whole (or until we get rid of Martin Arnold).

A perfect nod and postmodern mockery of the film genre - this horror-giallo is a tribute to Argento and his essential overcoming: the film is above all clever and its formal aspect is refined to the edge of the best formal mastery, even leaning towards experimental pioneering. The entire de facto silent film is based on the creation of mental associations through visual shortcuts, establishing "short connections" between (contrasting images for the majority of people, not so much for giallo fans...) otherwise contrasting images - death, pleasure, young bodies in the throes of sexuality, wrinkled corpses; (genius!!!) the coquetry of naked skin with synthetic rubber and metal. In short: a constant reversibility of life and death, morbidity and pleasure, achieved through the frenzy of the camera and editing, fetishistic details (substituting for the viewer's touch), and the actual absence of words and a "plot," which forces us to rely on our most lascivious senses sight and touch. This is further proof that films can be told primarily through images! Another question is the reversibility of the victim and the killer, and above all the killer and the viewer, giving birth to perverse film pleasure.