Dionysos

"A person has no fate or privileged place in the universe. If they didn't exist, nature wouldn't miss them." Khouri's privileged theme: the disintegration of an individual from the whole world into the monad of a useless human being; Khouri's privileged place: a luxurious abandoned hacienda, in a broader sense territorialization of the privileged theme to the privileged class - the bourgeoisie (and secondarily Brazilian). The universe of this film created by Khouri's successful mise-en-scène: the contradiction between the individual and nature, the anxiety of life and being simultaneously attracted to it as someone who doesn't belong; an island of a functionalist villa amidst a flood of greenery; solitude against the backdrop of the city. But above all, this monadic poetics of alienation leaves its mark in the framing of the human face by the camera which, with frequent details filling the faces of the actors, creates a claustrophobic atmosphere and emphasizes the inner and outer separation much better than the sometimes insensitive and exaggerated use of "oppressive" non-diegetic music, which, in my opinion, has aged the most in the film. If during watching I pondered why there are so many allusions to the 1920s in the film, it is perhaps due to their unsurpassable and beautiful portrayal of the human face, as only silent film could do, and which Khouri also used quite successfully, although in this film it leads the actors to a certain - but characteristic - lifelessness not only in their facial expressions.

What does continuity speak of through a flood of discontinuous fragments from visual diary notes of one's own life, besides the author's own life? It is also one intertitle with a paradoxical message, being even more paradoxical as the film is at first glance, and according to the author's claim, purely personal - "This is a political film." This is a political film? Yes: the film presents the humanism of human life, adoration of the small everyday life not only in contrast to any great history but - and this is the second paradox - also in contrast to the author's own life. Humanism of the moment against any effort, always necessarily violent, to achieve greatness and the desire to leave a mark on the world and history, but above all resistance against the desire - equally violent - to ascribe any meaning to one's own life. Indeed, it is heroic to look back at oneself in old age and say: This means nothing. Everything that you see and that I see, is nothing. Everything is randomly composed, any statement regarding the interpretation of what you see and what is presented before my eyes in a cinematic memory, says nothing more. The more it tries to be objective, and even if it were the most objective (only place, date, time, context), it cannot provide anything at all, because it is about nothing because life has nothing to do with it. So says the author. For the author, there is only a feeling, a moment, the joy of the moment, which merges with the pure joy of filming whatever, because life does not have predetermined important or big events, but a moment of joy can arise from anything. That is why this film is the only film by Jonas Mekas that is worth seeing because it also provides an "interpretation grid" (if it makes "sense" to use this term...) for the author's other films.

A cult perestroika film uniquely combining a testimony of its time period with underground music, a love story with crime, all intertwined with a multitude of postmodern games not only in film form (the intertitles explaining slang expressions, the psychedelic experimental dream sequences of the main character, the contrast between the main storyline and the story of the murdered Tsar Paul I taken from a real book by N. Ejdelman, being read by one of the characters). A true monument of its time, not only because its plot takes place in 1980 and particularly captures the paradoxical era, but in addition to Brezhnevism, it also bears witness to the era of Gorbachev – we must realize that it was written in 1987 and the most positive character is a good-for-nothing musician of an underground band. The ending belongs to the song "Перемен!" (We are waiting for changes). Assa is also a true memento of a destroyed world - perhaps only in the former so-called Eastern bloc there was a belief that the only thing standing in the way of true life, art, etc. is the evil repressive state, and that once we get rid of it, we will be able to live a sweet unrestricted life like in the West, finally devoting ourselves freely to our creativity and through it surely improving the world. The totalitarian state was washed away by a flood, but that free world of creative self-expression in a dehumanizing impersonal world somehow did not materialize.

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).

A human face fascinated by a piece of meat, which will soon transform into it. Will it be transformed by the hands of fascist butchers or by its own hand? We must admire how Fábri was able to capture this transformation with the claustrophobic grip of a dimly lit camera in the first part of the film. The question of how to properly handle meat is not as difficult as whether it is worse to become a piece of meat passively enduring its fate under the butcher's knife or to become an emotionless master of the world. The film shows that neither position is morally superior. The constant reversal of moral superiority shifts guilt and bliss of conscience from one character to another, only for the one who most consciously approaches the position of a slave with a clear conscience, unburdened by the weight of the world, to become the most despicable informant, and for the uninvolved cynic to become an unknowing supporter of the life force for others, which he had to deny at first glance in order to gain it. It is as if moral opposites were not different in anything, not even in the fact that "evil" lies in "consciousness."

In this film, Schlöndorff maintains the tendency from the beginning of his career, which focuses on the phenomenon of rebellion against society and its values, carried by strong individuality. Based on Bertolt Brecht's original work, the film updates the revolt of a poet who refuses to submit to either prevailing conditions or basic laws of human coexistence. Gradually, in its precise but alienating lyrical diagnosis, it distances itself from not only ridiculous bourgeois but also its own friends. /// Schlöndorff's placement of the play from 1918 in the contemporary setting evokes in the viewer (also thanks to the use of folk-rock music - hopefully that's what it's called - to underscore Brecht's original choral) thoughts of the Western counterculture or Eastern underground culture of that time. At its core, it is a strangely romantic idea that in a dive pub, a drunkard could step forward and start reciting verses... /// The casting of R.W. Fassbinder in the leading role of Baal was very fortunate - the enfant terrible of German film and culture of his time perfectly fits his role (which is essentially anti-Brechtian...).

I have long noticed that my comments repeat a few of the same thoughts year after year. My "reviews," as FilmBooster euphemistically calls these creations of mine, describe the orbits of predictably recurring ideas. Their cyclically closed ellipses circle around the radiant Star, never touching it, but as if with the first repetition they might finally succeed, although, like a cockroach in the shadow of a burning building, I have known from the beginning that they never will. And once again, I will escape from failure into the safety of the darkness of another basement, where I will look up at the next revolution. Chazelle built his cinephile monument on the transition from a revolution in the modern sense to the revolution of the classical origin of this word, which means to return, to rotate around in a circle. It is his Stars of the Silver Screen. His Film not only returns backward in terms of costumes but allows the cinematic idea of itself to cycle - the Idea of the material return of the same as the essence of the film, which is constantly changing and, like a modern revolution, seemingly devours its children. But in reality, it only repeats eternal sameness, giving these seemingly dead children the ability to survive forever through the idea of the essence of film itself. Like a cockroach, the moviegoer always gets what he wants because, even unconsciously, he knows what to expect. A perfect ideological self-deception, which Hollywood has an obsessive tendency to project onto everything, everyone, everywhere... - recently, increasingly into the past (anachronistic rewriting of history according to current politically correct measures, and more), but it is not afraid of a utopian future either, as seen recently in the over three-hour "opus" Avatar 2, where a captivating race of beautiful pseudo-people fulfills a story about the Christian duty of a nuclear bourgeois family connected with a new-age climate greenwashing fantasy of merging with unspoiled nature, delivered to us by a complete CGI oversaturated creation worth millions. Fortunately, in the second half, Chazelle showed the other side of the Film planet, which Hollywood often neglects when creating its perfect products. However, his supposed cinephilic epiphany only reproduces with its entire being the conventional linear plot of love story-desire-collision-crisis-catharsis, etc., which is presented to us as the essence of the cinematic Idea.

In the original <--->, but for the (cowardly) world, standing instead on the immediate and unbearable materiality of the world on its ridiculous linguistic substitute, known as Back and Forth - the back and forth of the film camera that scans a single room in horizontal (and also vertical) pendulum motion (similar to Wavelength). The camera as a boundary to the viewer's perception, the camera as a closed interval, limiting the space of events with its movement and its boundary positions - film as the boundary of my world. An event, a character - a moment, a defined place in an ever-widening movement that, with its repetitive linear nature, resembles the movement of a film strip, in which each captured object is like a bead threaded on a string of constantly sliding film frames. Add to that the magic of editing, eternal pleasure for those who have fallen into the enchanting land of cinema, and which proves that above the sovereignty of the camera still hangs the sovereignty of montage.

The opening quarter-hour passage is already full of ideas and dynamics - the flashforward of the end of the robber gang is presented to us as a flashback of the narrator/detective, who also gives general information about the growth of crime in Milan in the form of interviews (e.g., in a cinematically interesting form of thought reconstructions of typological cases, which the detective only comments on with voice-overs, which are eventually supplemented by the actual reconstruction, which he is personally present at). The flashbacks (actually flashforwards) are inserted into this fast-paced introduction, and by following the panic of the Milanese, the viewer at first has no idea what storyline he or she will follow, until eventually the main story axis crystallizes. This story is already told in a conventional way, and it is interesting (whether you consider this a plus or a minus) that we do not return to the documentary style at all in the end. Dino De Laurentiis has always been able to raise money and here he indeed raised enough money, so the crowd and action scenes are certainly not embarrassing, quite the opposite.

The film was a great success at the Venice Film Festival in 1961, where it won, among other things, the award for Best Debut. It is only a pity that the author made another film, six years later, which met with a less enthusiastic reception, and in the 1970s he withdrew completely from filmmaking. Bandits of Orgosolo carries a strong neorealist trace both in terms of the story - the harsh life of the poor Sardinians filled with hard work and the struggle to survive with very little, to pay off debts, etc., as well as in terms of form, wherein lies perhaps the biggest positive of the film. The breathtaking shots of the island mountains, beautifully composed and captured in exteriors and natural light (handled by the director himself), balance out the relatively straightforward and therefore less interesting story. De Seta himself created a series of documentaries about the lives of the poor inhabitants of Italy in the 1950s, and the film is an obvious extension of this interest into the realm of feature film. Local residents also act in the film.