Dionysos

The essence of a book is to encompass all other books ("intertextuality"), the nature of reality is to contain within itself an infinity of realities ("representations"), and finally, the essence of an image is (not) to encompass all other images, all stories, and all interpretations, but also something more - a peaceful fascination with itself, free from interpretation, open to the flicker of an always new world, a new sequence. After all, sequences unfold in time, and when an entire life is needed for an hour of film, the ultimate refuge of films becomes a fragment of images, which have the power to compress entire centuries in their flashes. Or at least their own - the twentieth century of cinema. Jean-Luc Godard, even in his old age, does not change his likely definitive word of an abandoned revolutionary, who does not intend to abandon the hopes of his past and his images and becomes the Angel of Walter Benjamin, who redeems the victims of oppression and exploitation with his gaze (after all, Benjamin's textual metaphor has a prototype in... Paul Klee's painting).

Since I experienced Vyškov almost at the same time, albeit in a shortened form of a one-and-a-half-month basic training course for Active Reserves, instead of three months for future Voluntary Military Training, although 85% of the course content was the same, I can confirm that the documentary is, within its limits, very faithful. A time machine transported me a few years back and also to the 70s when the main part of the Vyškov complex was built. Of course, the film could have been more artistic, more critical, more contemplative, and it would have suited it better to be a sincere raw cinema vérité.

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.

Entanglement of sound, image, and sex in a single threesome - those are the strongest moments of the film: like in the orgy scene (where there weren't just three...), where the rhythmic movements of copulating bodies pulse in flickering light and creep into the gaps between the roaring music tones. Or like in the dual disco-sex scene, where the music and laser lights vibrate and envelop young bodies even before they intertwine during sex. If Enter the Void was about the limbo of personal life mistakes haunting the main character in the form of recurring memories, it applies even more to Love. Memory and personal torment, the inability to suppress unpleasant memories that return according to their own laws - linear storytelling is therefore correctly suppressed. Mistakes and frustrating moments coexist with happy ones - they bother them, push them away. As a result, the ending (in contrast on the linear axis) belongs to despair. /// I can't decide whether one of the film's effects, namely the identification (both by the director and the viewer) with the main character, is an advantage or a disadvantage. It is undeniable that Noé partly projects himself into the character of Murphy, but at the same time, Noé ridicules himself - with a ridiculous persona he plays himself; by admitting that Murphy is really close to being just a talking phallus. On the other hand, the attempt to evoke identification between the viewer and Murphy is a bit pandering in my opinion - Murphy's character is like a product of a marketing copycat of an advertising agency for a target age group: his main entertainment is sex, he likes movies, from B-movies to the good ones (so it doesn't seem like he's a complete idiot), there are no books in his apartment, and he takes light drugs but he’s definitely not a major addict. He studies at university but does not work too hard - parties, nightclubs, etc. Does the use of the first-person singular form imply that we should identify with the protagonist? And does Noé want to guide us through the same limbo and to the same awakening as the main character? Thanks, but it's not necessary and won't be for most viewers. Or is it just the director's personal confession? /// The main negative aspect of the film is the occasional ejaculation of certain obvious aspects directly into the viewer's face, presented in an unnecessarily simplistic form (again, that innocent child as in Enter the Void!) or through simple speeches by the characters (again, see Enter the Void).

The sleep of reason gives rise to monsters, fortunately, because Grandrieux's night full of emotions can be inhabited by monsters, but also by fallen women and fallen angels of self-destructive emotions. The night of reason gives rise to owls and bats in Goya and also in Grandrieux we descend with bats into the cave of a relatively isolated social milieu, in which every inclination is confirmed by physicality at the moment of its conception, just as the painter's imagination has given tangible form to falling ideas in the shape of animals – and we will truly observe the whole film as every speech, every deepest word passes on its way to the other person into a fully tangible sexual expression. Without compromising in any way, since chiaroscuro is a valuable technique that reveals that contrast can be more impressive than the formlessness of day, and the director proves that synthesis can unite image and word in opposition. To connect so perfectly fantastically that the viewer, who succumbs, feels an inexpressible understanding, even though the film cannot explain too much... How, after all, can one coherently express that connecting line that begins in one realm of human experience and ends in another?

Darkness and a road in which the phrase "C'est Chantal" is heard. We cannot see her face, but not because of the darkness. We cannot see it for the whole film because the camera is covering her. The camera, like the eye of a Jew, who on an eternal journey seeks his Canaan, never loses sight of the most precious object in her life, to which she always returned and wanted to return. Mother. The mother who traveled through a concentration camp to Belgium, to this apartment, where the city will forever stand, the city to which the Messiah (will not) return. As a daughter, she was never without her mother, and as a pilgrim without a pilgrimage, similarly, this film is nothing by itself because it is a supplement to the author's entire work. Akerman, moreover, proved once again that she is able to use her film techniques even with the most sensitive material, creating distance with her uncompromising and avant-garde style. Perhaps the distance that was always present between mother and daughter in that part, where for the daughter it turned into a lifelong trauma, transferred to the language of film in her youth. Yet perhaps I am not someone who is able to judge this.

The curtain rises, the frame anchors, the screen expands, the perspective focuses, the viewer looks - from an unchanging angle on matter that knows only transformation, as if the viewer of this present-day mental “Minecraft” saw digital Muratti 30s cigarettes marching by and pondered the dilemma of whether this thematic and constantly bending and newly rutting monism of audiovisual matter refers to the original code of the film god, whose every step has been written into all future since the beginning of experimental film, and every color, material, and sound transformation only follows a brilliant divine plan, or if we are watching the aleatorics of self-producing matter lost in the randomness of the universe, whose random generation of meaningless patterns duplicates the history of film and humanity as the interplay of absurdity and pure childish joy from moving senseless audiovisual pleasures - and nothing more. Nothing less.

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.

How do you capture the endless expanse of the steppe and how do you fit its width into a film shot? A different filmmaker would probably choose a wide-angle format and a moving camera, but not Alonso. It's as if the awareness of the unattainability of the desert led the author to exactly the opposite approach because the boundlessness of space and time cannot be tamed, but it can be highlighted. This is done precisely by following a procedure where we are forced to observe only a single fragment of the universe with the knowledge that the whole and an even greater beauty than what we see still lies outside. The unattainability of the infinite whole has always forced humanity to choose a single static perspective that was supposed to substitute for the universe - and the filmmaker is similarly forced to put the tripod somewhere. The same applies to time as to space - it, together with the young protagonist, in a figurative sense, overflows through its temporary fragments in history and forces us to see each specific incarnation as a transient form within a broader whole. /// Praise to Alonso and Salminen above all for the fact that their film images are truly beautiful and not kitschy, as they could have easily turned out.

SS - Schutzstaffel and the Second World War. SS - "Signore, sì!" and the First World War in the army of the state agreement, allegedly the democratic party of the conflict. Injustice and helplessness do not belong only to explicitly criminal armies like the SS, but to every other as well. The Italian "Yes, sir!" is beautiful proof of that. From a film perspective, it is most interesting to see how Olmi, in order to emphasize the message that the soldier's greatest enemy is not the enemy on the other side of the trench, but his own army, (or the army as such), does not let the Austrians appear on the screen at all. In addition, the inhumanity of the military machinery is manifested despite the fact that each of the characters, including the officers, are normal human beings (the problem of military hierarchy is personalized and depicted as the transgressions of specific individuals for ideological reasons, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries). Thanks to this, the viewer sees that it is precisely the army and war as such that can be blamed for the suffering of the people on the screen.