Dionysos

Doors that lead nowhere end up in a place that cannot be reached... The more dialectic of mise-en-scène, camera, and editing the film is, the more crystallized is its higher developmental level in their synthesis: the nudging of the doors in the pre-camera space accompanies the permanent denial of the axis rule duplicating the permanence of the movement of hinges and the cyclicality of editing, which is comparable to the cycle of botanized human life, from which escape is possible only into a wilderness without doors and without flowers. The dew of meaning on the surface of things and people; slow absorption and fast transplantation, without either strategy being able to definitively close the doors or leave them open, as they are, following the example of Magritte's paintings, just an illusory means of movement that only seemingly divides the space. And if there are no boundaries in life, there is no place to reach, because we already got there long ago, and therefore it is not possible to hide from anything - especially not from oneself.

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.

A viewer shaped by bourgeois perception could try to find an expansion of their own limited ideological horizons in this film. The directorial approach of Leninist self-criticism and activist transcendence of oneself can dialectically be grasped as a classical psychological individualism of Balzacian cut, with its inner character development. The activist of the world-historical class struggle, the subject-less process, grasps this process from within their own subjectivity within the framework of a specific bildungsroman. What is not bourgeois at all is the constant self-criticism of the field of perception narrated by the character, along with the connected transformation of the coordinates from which this perception is carried out. This is something incomprehensible for conventional cinema, as otherwise, we wouldn't be able to witness the shocking puppet show of bourgeois art, where the puppets seemingly change and frolic here and there against the backdrop of unchanging, recycled scenery. And therein lies one of the lessons of Marxism, where the character changes along with the material conditions in which it is formed.

Two eyes of the glassy gaze of old age, to which illness has flattened life into a thin surface without the depth of the field of the past and future, completely adhering to the technique of dual projection onto a screen, whose flatness at the level of the media is coextensive with the targeted content of the work, which is increasingly dulled and emptied staring into the eyes of death, and where the extension of cinematic time only timidly reminds us of the actual length of the real final countdown, of which both cinematic eyes can tell us nothing new, precisely because the eyes of the film are the eyes of its protagonists. Where there is no past and future, there can fortunately never be a conventional entertaining plot, and so the viewer can truly only wait for liberation along with the characters. That is also the contribution of Noé's film, that through the split screen, which is not just an end in itself, he allowed, at the core of a conventional dramatic film, one eye to peek at the techniques of direct cinema, and thus get closer to the documentary reality through fiction.

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.

Neo-Baroque lost its neo and only baroque remained, whose weight of gilded encumbrance may have been another bead in the rosary of genre-ironic creations of cinéma du look, but the repetition of the prayer mantra reveals itself here as a doubly double-edged sword, which Carax cut himself with this time: by repeating the form, its true power was diluted, the power of negation through a convention-incompatible form, to such an extent that the negation of negation (= form) evoked simple mathematics - multiplying two minuses gives us a plus, which is nothing but the valorization of the content itself. And in the content, I saw nothing but convention, to which only a different narrative vector and occasionally a comedic tone could not suffice to break free from it. Symptomatically, here, the undermining and playing with genre forms (musical, melodrama, fairy tale, etc.) is nothing more than something we have already seen in other more commercial works because such "postmodernity" has long been privatized by Hollywood. Hollywood has finally caught up with and absorbed Carax like a depth that is truly dangerous to look into because, from this perspective, cinéma du look can turn into cinéma du don't look. Neo-baroque always started in apparent kitschy sweetness only to turn bitter, but this transition was (in the best works) caused precisely by the inversion of conventions of given forms, while when we want to repeat this Neo-baroque dramatic arc only on the level of content, we always end up with nothing but convention sneaking in through the back door. Perhaps the transformation of the puppet into a living being was supposed to be an interpretive indication of the author's mise en abyme, with which Carax wanted to convince the viewer at the last moment that his film is not just a bloodless marionette swallowing the budget, but a work containing life, yet even in this final attempt (which is nothing other than a replication of Hollywood desires), he failed.

Long live the commune! They wanted to shoot it against the wall, but they did not know that its ideas had long surpassed all the walls that bullets endlessly shatter and the horizons of all bourgeois lackeys. The commune did not die, it has been alive for 150 years and will live until true freedom redeems it for everyone. A film that thinks for itself throughout its creation, with the aim of transferring the meaning of the narrative into the very process of giving testimony, can only be a worthy successor to the revolution that included everyone, from the working class to women and people of all races, long before the (supposedly liberal) capitalist elites began preaching about it today in a necessarily and significantly neutered form. It was a process that was too short: 72 days/6 hours, and yet it is too long: the entire history thereafter. Film can rewrite the past through the prism of the present, but can it transform itself in the present through the prism of the future it invents as it goes along if it truly becomes inspired by the commune, i.e., by connecting people and not just connecting the script with filming, budget money with production, and the producer's desires with monetizable traceability? A similar method of radical self-reflection during filming was applied, for example, by the Dziga Vertov group around Godard in the late 1960s and early 1970s, i.e., at a time when barricades last rose in Paris.

Dual separation in terms of loss that we should mourn? (We have lost meaningful conventional film. Who will build it for us?). Or dual emancipation, which is equally hopelessly painful as it is redemptive? Jane Arden's dual approach in the intentions of feminism and "antipsychiatry" symbolically intensifies in the counter-movement of separation, which is the collision of the object of female and psychotic emancipation in the form of a single character - the psychiatrist-husband, whose dual paternalism disappears in the movement of the woman's detachment from his and reason's rules, and in the movement of the film being liberated from the rules of the Hollywood forefather. The collapse of these two poles in one film character thus foreshadows the collapse of bourgeois ideas about the one correct film, ideas that only see otherness as nonsense anyway, just as they see "common sense" as a deviation from normality in a madman.

So where does the film lead us? "Into darkness, where we begin and end"; where the projection starts and ends; where the circle begins and ends, its circular movement of devouring, transforming, and expelling protecting nothing and no one. "Things change. That's the only thing you can rely on." Things and people. Desires and dreams and memories of them and ourselves; the only thing that doesn't change is the medium through which everything passes in its transformation: the purity of the indestructible Sublime, whether as the personification of pure corporeality or the hunger of the perfect sexual body that devours, or its sublimated version - the necessary other side of the same coin - the sacred purity that was not changed even by being eaten by a libido dragon. A film about forgetting that I myself am a devoured and expelled product of my constantly changing past, and a film about a film, whose climax is the movement back when rewinding the reel backward, at the beginning of which a completely different film is played out again, in which the original protagonists are devoured and expelled by their own fantasies. Last but not least, European art is devoured and expelled by the emerging dawn of pornographic or exploitative cinema in the form of the wisdom of books, reducible to a dictionary of copulation as mere scenery for sex itself, and in the necessary circular inversion, the seemingly soft-pornographic film is transformed into a form that pushes the boundaries of narrative conventions rather than the boundaries of sexual intercourse.

Lost in the metaphysical painting of de Chirico's cities emptied of people, encountering only their indestructible remains instead of man: their phantoms (in the polyglot universe of the film, both in the sense of Greek and Spanish, which are also heard in the film), which emerge from the desert as Dalí's impossible objects, those melting clocks that dissolve in the annihilation of time in the post-atomic wasteland in a microsecond zero and place this film alongside the surrealist films of the 1930s and 1950s. However, this flattening of time also leads to less categorizable formal play with editing, bending elliptical time, or quick cuts, as well as analeptic/proleptic montage, which creates a new reality without having to construct impossible surrealism. An essential element of the film is its literary anchoring, where the intertextual source in Camus' work is almost a complete generator not only of the film's overall statement but also of its specific fictional plots (the harsh sun, the revolver shots, etc.).