Dionysos

The main heroine between two men, Kira Muratova between two film worlds, and the Soviet Union between a muddy yesterday and a neat tomorrow. It is true that we can understand the script as Brezhnev idealization, but from the film itself, there is also a sense of resistance against any materialism in human relationships. Not only with typically Russian lyricism that I ever believed (and not condemned as kitsch) perhaps only in old Russian films. But it is mainly because of the central motto, the declaration of Ljuba, in which, among other things, says: "The most important thing in the world is true happiness. They don't produce it in factories, not even in the best ones." It is an antithesis of materialism and proof that the causality of the film does not meet the official communist ideology: in that transition - from the mud/bad relationship with Nikolay to the brand-new housing estate/great relationship with Mikhail - the soft piano literally screams to the viewer that Muratova sees this transition as caused by love itself, and not as something embedded in the concrete of material conditions. Mikhail is thus not a hero of socialist realism and historical materialism, but a lyrical hero who fell from somewhere from a different history (from a time when we did not fly into space but instead burned handmade ceramics). Love and happiness change us and our relationship to the world, not the other way around; there is no dialectic of both moments in the film, only a temporal synchrony of two internally unrelated motifs: the birth of love and the construction of a housing estate. That's why I give it one star less. /// Muratova, on the other hand, stands between two worlds - the film lyricism is balanced by her favorite formalistic games, here repetition, playing with the axis, and the camera.

For those who have longed to see various structural and other experimental films, focusing through long silent shots on the glow of spotlights, on hitherto unseen fragments of the world and consciousness, and in long multilingual reflections (from soundtracks of found footage to the author's own voice-overs or recitations, etc.), studying imperceptible discourses, connected into one film, a structural film permeated with subjectivity but not with plot - then go and watch Him and Me. It is the author's autobiographical reflection on his own life and American past, functioning simultaneously as a window into the present and generally into human life, and as a window into the pure material presence of objects captured by the camera. A certain pathos of memories and their images, merging with current images, will then permeate even non-American viewers who did not experience the past brought into the present (i.e., the 1980s).

An experimental, mad, pop-art comedy, a typical product of scathing left-wing non-conforming film circles of its time, i.e., counter-cultural motifs of rebellion against the bourgeois world (represented here by the husband of the main character, from whom she runs away at the beginning of the film to experience a liberating romance with an unruly adventurer; romance as a road-movie across cultural and social symbols) mix with mockery aimed at their own ranks and an ironic ending, in which the suffocating marriage eventually takes place only because the bride died in a previous scene. "Stupid policemen. Your order is an order of logic, and it is always false, like morality, like coherence." Indeed, do not expect coherence, because Brass dissolves it in itself in a postmodern way and reveals the nonsense of every coherence through continuous, chaotic swarming of editing and fragments of action, analogies, and gags. That montage is simply brilliant and noble, even though it mediates "just" a satirical comedy - how Brass connects characters and events across time and space with just a wave of the editing scissors!

When the development of technology allows us to eliminate the delay between the time of an event and the time of its representation, when the event itself immediately merges with the surface of the media that presents it, we come to a simulacrum of pure synchronicity between the displayed and the displaying - a television screen transmitting a live broadcast. A dialectical twist is then imminent: does the event have to have, as it did before, primacy over the media, or - thanks to the fact that reality and its representation have merged and are therefore one - does the medium itself have to become the mover of reality? Jancsó then shows in the next, this time capitalist continuation of the chronicle of his career, how the medium assuming this demiurgic role plays at the same time the role of manipulator and power-hungry oppressor. The continuity between Jancsó's films from the end of real socialism and the beginning of real capitalism is evident, sad, formal and substantial, bitter, and ultimately fruitless. It cannot be fruitless when simulation and empty desire for power and primitive luxury have killed the last remnants (perhaps nothing was left after Kádár) of the efforts to create something great: yes, it was often (actually fundamentally) the pathos of tragic events - nationalisms, fascism, revolutions, processes, building, etc. (in short, the 19th and 20th centuries in Jancsó's greatest films), but it was a pathos in which struggle and death still had some value. That is no longer the case here - death, like a strange spectacular kaleidoscope, shifts from one character to another, and even though the weakest link ultimately loses, it somehow disappears on the edge of the screen, without glory and the possibility of later historical redemption. Even the waltz becomes a caricature of itself, a simulacrum of a long-lost past.

The aesthetic purism and ecstatic simplicity of The Inner Scar brilliantly demonstrates Garrel's sensitivity to the inhospitable beauty not only of the locations in which the film takes place (although in the film itself, nothing literally happens - the movements, gestures, and “actions” of the film and characters are beyond time and they are eternal symbols of conduct, not plots), but also of human relationships: the sad cruelty of emotions, including affection, love, or mythical human search as if from the first epics or epic poems (Clémenti on horseback), in which the rise of man to the world or to another forever misses the target. This is one of Garrel's masterpieces, when he still claimed experimental music and his films approached, even surpassed, the uncompromising nature of films by Straub and Huillet, Godard, or W. Schroeter at that time (who, however, like Straub, supplemented his puristic static shots with classical music or opera). It's a pity that Garrel's later films, although still of great quality, adopted much of the style of J. Eustache or Rohmer.

In the beginning was the word, and at the end the advertisement, which has the last word. The modernist anxiety of all existentialisms and absurd dramas, namely the anxiety of the breakdown of mutual communication and thereby the loss of human meaning, finds resolution (it becomes the content of the media that comes after it as the viewer learns) in advertisements: in a total senseless cluster of sounds and screams, which once perhaps were language and music, the viewer can dissolve peacefully and can let themselves be consumed because they no longer need to know anything other than that Word, which gives everything, and thus also them, meaning. Pepsi Cola, Nescafé Gold Blend - the last and only words left to humans, which they understand. The authors of the film succeeded in combining undeniable irony and self-serving entertainment, which the Japanese advertisements of that time undoubtedly had and still have for the white viewer, with the meaning-making level because it is only thanks to the impenetrable Japanese language that the message of the film can be heard so clearly. Another matter is the counterpoint of the intellectual interpretation of the advertising phenomenon, which falls into the visual whirlwind of rectangular media and becomes its helpless sustenance.

Monism versus dualism: Morrison breaks the (metaphysical) dichotomy of content and form, soul and body - the destruction of film material perfectly merges with the decay of what is being portrayed. People captured on film already died before the only thing that remains of them is dissolved by time. It is not because this is old, discovered footage of people who have necessarily already passed away due to chronology, but because Morrison (in the best moments of his film) chooses completely ordinary, universally human, and typically human moments. Moments in which death is present. Hence the feeling of melancholic distress: the viewer senses that they are not watching a film, but looking into a mirror that distorts the same way as sequences of blissful lover's embraces. Human life consists only of clichés, which repeat themselves endlessly and continually rot on countless reels of randomly dug-up found footage, and therefore it doesn't matter whether it is the signifier or the signified, the film, or the person that is decaying.

«Tout ce dont vous avez besoin pour faire un film, c'est d'une fille et d'un flingue» (Godard). I keep writing this here over and over again, apparently just for myself, but: Brazil, cinema marginal, underground - mockery of absurdity and absurd mockery of everything and everyone's meaning, and finally even of oneself (literally). This is a film stripped down to its nonsensical skeleton, in which Tristan with a monkey mask runs away with apathetic Isolde from the adversity of hostile fate in the form of obscure forces of evil. Everything is undermined by self-destroying sarcasm, aesthetic ugliness, ugliness that (maybe?!?!) should not evoke any feelings of disgust, resistance, or rebellion because that would be too noble, but simply an ironic mockery of the viewer, a true rejection of all the seriousness that the pseudo-romantic plot could contain. Thus, there is room for an orgy of senselessly long shots (similar especially with companion Julio Bressan), which can be either savored for their unnecessary excessiveness, their inappropriately effective ride and smoothness in the context of the film, or in this film one may search in vain for meaning where there is none and never was - especially in 1971 in Brazil, under the rule of the brutal military junta...

The introductory spectacle: the police on stage beating people in order to protect them in reality, but whom?; a simulated revolt and virtual emancipation accepted as a gift from the outstretched hands of the consumer idol. The same gesture serves the same function, whether as a (marketing) symbol of rebellion calling for participation, or as a sign of mourning and return to humility/conformity = Watkins shows that the essence and meaning lie not so much in the content as in the form that people allow themselves to be led by (existentialism and the Moscow theater as a form for advertising walking apples; a rock & roll band playing for teenagers and the Lord himself; the relationship between the stage and the audience, the idol and the spectator, serves both fascism and late capitalism, etc.) /// Although the film was made based on someone else's work, Watkins, of course, couldn’t deny his alienating documentary style: even though the film is at its core a "normal" fiction, Watkins' genius is demonstrated in the perfectly alienating voice-over in the cathartic scene - at the moment when ordinary (consumer) films would celebrate the regained subjectivity and nature of the main character, Watkins ironically and coldly overlays it with external impersonal statements, thus relativizing her effort to break free from the clutches of the public from which she has become estranged. /// A critique of the film: Was it necessary to be so explicit and didactic at times?

A thoroughly original copy, which not only pays tribute to/steals from/lets itself be inspired by the visually striking references and forgets itself in the film Last Year at Marienbad. It is difficult to determine what is Japanese about the film, apart from the two main actors and the (invisible) crew, when everything else we see is European material viewed in the style of Resnais and Antonioni. Yoshida and his team have created a strangely fascinating simulacrum of European progressive cinema, which, together with the story of a painful melancholic search and missed love, fascinates with its relevance to the time and icons. This is especially true of the form, which, in its somewhat empty (often slavish) imitation of its models, reminds us of the artificiality of the choice of kitschy stage sets of the "most beautiful" and "most iconic" European destinations, from the Eiffel Tower through the Roman Forum to London and Lisbon, where the entire film takes place. However, these scenes are also among the most interesting in their own way. Nevertheless, Yoshida absorbed the experimental narrative structure through (not only) this film (not entirely successful in itself, but reaching above the average of that time as well as today), which he soon after ingeniously and completely originally used in his subsequent films, following in the footsteps of his European teachers, playing with the temporality of the plot and the nature of the characters, dealing with alienation and love/life/politics, etc.