Dionysos

This is something for the current "young professional" film critics who analyze (often only presumedly) intellectually and therefore adore tons of conventional, trashy, Hollywood waste, and in the flood of nerd nostalgia, they continue to reproduce conformist forms of thinking and art and by their "authority" sanctify the survival of the commercial automaton for money, which can be called "B movies renamed blockbusters." On the contrary, Rogério Sganzerla, as always, uses B-material, to which, however, he feels no less affection and fondness, as he is not influenced by the Brazilian military dictatorship paid for with American money or by Hollywood itself - and he does not create only a pseudo-intellectual copy of his inspiration, but from the beginning he stays outside its boundaries in terms of narrative structure and completely denies its commercial character by canceling the temptations of the plot and other clichés and letting the trash speak for itself. The film is actually a series of Shakespearean scenes when a character takes the stage for themselves and lets their inner self speak, which is a caricature of a mad scientist, a perverse hitman, a devilish femme fatale, etc., and thus truly allows the trash to shine in the spotlight without needing to intellectualize it with any other platitudes. It can be expected that such a film immediately becomes indigestible for the average viewer or critic. It's like the well-known difference in destinies between Truffaut and Godard - both loved old Hollywood films, but one did not surpass his original inspiration, the other did... Or the sad case of Tarantino reminds us that film criticism cannot free itself from vulgarity just by using foreign words and concepts in reviews when, as a former video rental store clerk, he remains a slave to the commercial genre. Sganzerla here chains together paradoxical Renaissance noble portraits focused on individual characters, but depicting deviant characters from the fringes of society and art, thus creating a liberating playful contrast to any attempt to perceive film only as art and art only as life... (He has in mind late Malevich, who, for example, in his self-portrait from 1933, draws himself in Venetian clothing, in a clear allusion to Renaissance art: Malevich, who once believed in the abolition of art and the new human, returns to a traditional, understandable concept in the time of Sorel and neoclassicism, without ceasing to create non-commercial art - and without attracting the interest of a wider audience...)

Films may be prostitutes, but fortunately, there are directors whose images and sounds cannot be exchanged for money - the French company Darty selling electronics wanted to hire Godard and his partner Anne-Marie Miéville to shoot a promo product for them. Fortunately, not only in France is there awareness of the existentialist tradition, which opposes the capitalist exchange of goods and the enchantment of 'being-in-itself' of things with the 'being-for-itself' of human freedom, 'not being what it is,' freeing oneself from objectification and creating constantly new relationships between them, liberating oneself from the existence of consumerism to the existence of the individual, etc... On the other hand, "the Darty company is content and happy to simply resell almost all successful fundamental images: cold, heat, noise, cleanliness. And now they are material." Adversely, the task of the filmmaker is to find a way to defend against this tendency of solidification: "Voilà, the image, and its brother sound; and their mother and father - desire and unconsciousness are the only things in the world that cannot be negotiated. Except when we transform them into matter." How do we prevent this? Simply by never allowing the image and sound to merge with themselves, not acquiring a given meaning, not allowing themselves to be authoritatively explained, for "it is essential for the image to come from elsewhere. And this elsewhere is here, and nowhere else." / By the way - during the filming, the Darty company of course withdrew its support from the film, and to this day tries to obstruct its distribution through its share of the film rights.

The pearl necklace explosively unravels disparate scenes of Brazilian carnival dancers from the Third World, connected by a thread of ecstatic resistance against everything that turns misery into misery and turns the poor into the poor - thereby resisting itself. This is formally manifested in irony toward its critical discourses and the discourse of film as such. Perhaps it won't be more stereotypical symbolic violence if I say that this film, in the style of more animalistic late Cinema Novo, activates the strongest of South American temperament. Under the parade of unrestrained images and proclamations, as a viewer in the Sambadrome stands, you can sense their common latent Dionysian energy, a carnal carnival of the will for freedom, redemption, and the struggle in the blood of dignity that will not be tamed by any capitalist, white man from the North, or any critical theory. The will for the growth of life, sprouting from the muck of the global South.

The view challenges, the heart tempts, the circumstances urge - the coward runs away: Yankee has recently awakened and turned his favorite genre, the road movie, into a tool for self-criticism of his own life project. The neurotic man (that is, the majority white so-called "normal" subject) has reached the end of his historical journey and, as he has so often realized, lacks the courage for the ultimate fulfillment of his desire. It is therefore finally deservedly left by the roadside of history. Tomorrow belongs not necessarily directly to women, but at least not to men (and if the future were at least half as beautiful as Talia Ryder, Jordan Peterson, the prototype of a fighter for male historical supremacy, who must take antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills...) would certainly dare to enter it, for example, as the archetype of today's North American defenders of old conservative orders. The Sweet East, just like this year's Beau Is Afraid, brilliantly shows male weakness and inability to fulfill their role, while Tom Cruise still probably managed to produce the appropriate reaction to Nicole Kidman's "Fu*k" in Eyes Wide Shut. Contemporary American heroes can no longer do that - whether it is shown to us through the surreal introspection of the male soul in Beau or, on the contrary, negatively through the fate of a girl whose vicissitudes are fundamentally shaped by male incapacity to achieve what they want for their cultural-political self-delusions... Fortunately, American cinema is partly getting rid of its Hollywood self and offers at least in these two cases films that are not afraid to step at least a little off the beaten track of cinematic storytelling.

The Theater of Essence or How to Achieve Purification not through Reduction but through Overload: a cleansing excess through which Carmelo Bene achieves his eidetic artistic style. Another person would hide behind an empty mask of minimalism and cowardice, which must protect what little it has to say in the incubator of a lack of further experiences. In contrast, Bene overwhelms the audience, explosions of sensations and paranoid cuts bombard the spectator's mind without pause, forcing it finally to free itself from the effort to grasp all the tangle of meanings, reconstruct a one-sided plot, capture every breath of meaningfulness; in short, it compels it to freedom, which can finally find the gesture behind all gestures, the speech behind all speeches, the acting behind all actors, and the film behind all theater. It is no coincidence that his collection of interviews and thoughts about film is called "Against Cinema," because it truly contemptuously tears conventional film to pieces in the name of essential expressionism, as his style should be called. The beauty of the true film image shines through the stylistic allusion, which is the filming of expressive facial expressions of the actors in ostentatiously colorful costumes of basic geometric shapes against a purifying-white backdrop of not theatrical but metaphysical scenery.

When it comes to the breaking of the bread of the history of German cinema, we come across the source of its modern source with The Bread of Those Early Years, and while watching it, I somewhat feel like "I am at the source, and I perish of thirst." This is not only because the plot of the film tells the story of a young man dissatisfied with the predetermined bourgeois future (in line with the resistance intentions of the Oberhausen Manifesto against "Papas Kino," of which this film was a pioneer), but also because the plot and partly the story somehow - at least to me - did not completely fulfill expectations of greater iconoclasm. The story indeed uses many avant-garde approaches, such as local freezing of the image and above all the non-linear storytelling, but especially in the case of the latter, certain limits of this film are revealed: the local non-chronology does not create the same temporal aporias as in Robbe-Grillet/Resnais of the same period, which lead to a new perspective on art and life, but still allow for reconstructing separate 'before' and 'after,' and thus the form remains more of an ornament than a transcendental hammer of the new... However, it is still an above-average ornament compared to the myriad of conventional films created in the history of cinema before and after... This temporal progression of "two steps forward, one step back" thereby noticeably reminds me of the fate of H. Vesely himself, because this film also feels like a step back compared to his previous masterpiece Nicht mehr fliehen (1955), which with its stylized and surrealistic style may have attacked the old world and film more than this more civil piece that is closer to reality.

A scientific autopsy of a human being, at the end of which is a living person; the appearance of ironically detached structuralist methods of dissecting a human and a country only into their objective system of relationships leads to a glimpse of the flourishing of humanism - a flower extracted from a child's head crushed by a bulldozer. A glimpse and fulfillment of experimental structural film of the 1960s to the 1970s: If, in May 1968, at the student barricades in Paris, there was a chant to overthrow capitalism, saying that "structures do not march in the streets" (les structures ne marchent pas dans les rues), then in this Brazilian short film masterpiece, it actually happened – a film based on a cold structure created a human teeming with life and freedom. So that he could be killed. So that we could all kill him.

Probably murder, definitely escape. However, it wasn't a person who was killed, but a "parallel cut" that disrupts the idea of the connection of events and confuses the ability of the average viewer to connect unrelated things, like in a children's fairy tale: the director, like a child, replaces the conventional bourgeois continuity of meaningful cuts with the montage of two lines, each dancing its own solo; only the dancers' glances, from the whirl of their closed pirouettes, rhythmically flash onto the other soloist - and at that moment a new, freer meaning is born, one that does not rustle with paper inserted in advance by the screenwriter, but one that is born spontaneously during the dance-film from the viewer's perspective. Symbolically, Hanoun most often uses classical and baroque music in his tetralogy of four annual films - the beats of times when instead of two clearly defined pairs dancing in a close embrace, contradance took place, when, for example, individual dancers intertwined in various combinations in two randomly grouped opposite lines... In this film, no music is playing - a symbolic possibility of even greater detachment from the dictate of expressing logical meaning through editing... Otherwise, it may also be a nice film about fatherhood and a mother-in-law.

“Renaissance collections aimed to show the connection between natural and artistic forms, the transitions between the wonders of nature and human creations. The Kunstkomora thus presented a vivid image of the world in its multiplicity and breadth, according to natural philosophy and magic principles, that "everything is contained in everything" (omnia ubique). (Description in Umprum) Greenaway's films are this kunstkomora, in which the microcosm of the author's artistic vision burdened by so many internal images through a dark room is projected into the macrocosm of baroque overflowing mise-en-scène, a kunstkomora that wants to say everything and indeed says everything: one film image is not enough, the superposition of images duplicates the leafing through of a book, which is the definitive inventory of all knowledge - in Greenaway's work, films need to be seen as a natural transition from book to film and vice versa, as writing and knowledge can be aestheticized at any moment and visuality can always be absorbed by the alchemy of words which "was at the beginning" of everything and from which the author's mannerism also arose, in which the sole essence of the divine demiurge - the director - manifests not only through the seven liberal arts but through all artistic forms within the reach of classical spirit.

"Do you remember the problem of harmony? From the forbidden union of Area and Aphrodite, a child was born and was named Harmony. Born from the god of conflict and the goddess of love, she inherited contrasting traits from her parents. Harmony is harmonious disharmony." Here, a film is also born based on the disjunctive synthesis of the great with the small, the verbiage of the intellectual bohemian with the vulgarity of bodily shock; a film image captivated by discourse alternating with elegant pomp of refined imagery drowned in silence - or music. In short, the modus operandi of Bressane. The viewer can choose whether the moment when it lights up will collide with the moment when the world is colored, or - when the image becomes black and white, and thus more pleasing to Harmony with its contrast: or must the pendulum of the viewer's attention, on the contrary, constantly swing between the two poles in order to enjoy the smooth transition between static framing of passing words and flowing camera movement of paused words?