Dionysos

Jordan Belson apparently regularly destroyed his previous works, which he retrospectively found inadequate during specific phases of his artistic development. At least until the late sixties, he also refused to screen many of his works. The gradual abstraction of the external world at the expense of the internally derived image penetrates the soul of the author. At the same time, the external world is not destroyed or closed off; in 1978, Belson stated, "The distinction between an external scene perceived in the usual way and the scene perceived with the inner eye is very slight to me." From the beginning, the author has been interested in Eastern religions, Buddhism, in which the unification of the internal and external worlds is to occur. American experimental art of the fifties and sixties is excellently depicted in its apparent contrasts in Belson: abstraction and structurality are not a sign of the displacement of the individual, but rather his higher self-realization in a newly perceived world that is abstracted to its most basic and most mysterious foundations through the camera, which resonates retrospectively with the observer and transforms them through this observation. It is only characteristic that it is necessary to proceed through destruction, which is a symptom of the fact that we can never be satisfied if we are seeking the higher foundations of anything: Belson destroys his older works, destroys the avant-garde with material representation, and remains with pure film enclosed in its mandala without reference to material reality.

The strain and trembling of the inner being, the destiny of a nation, events and turning points - these can be captured with minimal reliance on external support, action, and material representation: words and music, supremely immaterial entities that have the most powerful divine power to bring things into existence, to realize them. Straub and Huillet, with the purifying power of artistic prophets, announce the arrival of the cinematic idea, in which cinematic language is maximally subordinate so as not to taint the transparency of proclamation. The classic canon of Straub and Huillet, in which nothing distracts attention from the smallest tremors, which, like water in the desert, thus receive a life-giving force multiplied a thousandfold, creates one of their most perfect works, where classical biblical tradition is combined with Schoenberg's classic to create a classic and typical work of these filmmakers.

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.

Accelerated sequences of an urban landscape: How else can Kluge open another one of his socio-historical dramatized essays than with this shot (which he has been using since the beginning of his "feature-length" career)? This shot, which dissolves the individual hustle and bustle of pedestrians and cars into one accelerated mass of light, erases their individuality and turns them into indistinguishable particles of a single mass, which is the only one that is observable and significant. This acceleration takes place against the background of an inert and solid, unchanging, and brutal mass of reinforced concrete administrative buildings of modern capitalism. In this introduction, the latent organizational order of the film and Kluge's films of this time is captured – an analysis of permanent structures, unchanging invariants, moving through different costumes of opera drama and the drama of German and European history, all against the backdrop of specific, "dramatized" passages (this time not as drama in relation to literature, but drama in relation to a documentary), which are in harmony or tension with these structures. The assignment of the film was to show emotion as a product and commodity of modern capitalist structures, and it is up to the viewer to judge whether this can also summarize the result of the author's analysis.

Images without characters and houses long abandoned. A camera floating over words about human fates in a deserted landscape of past lives. A double death, the triple death of characters: only their voices occasionally echo in the backdrop of their demise; only the voice of the narrator, who often takes over for them, lets their passions and suffering be heard, about them and without them. Without them, and yet their presence constantly screams - no character ever appears in the image, but no image ever says anything else than that they lived here and were the same characters. Duras is a master of nostalgia for people who are still, which now reveals that these people were condemned to the demise of their love, their efforts, their life, their colonial bourgeois and environment longing for aristocratic shine, condemned by themselves and others, condemned while alive and thus already dead – that is why they can speak even after their end - because the beginning already belongs to their death. It is joyful to watch only the camera and not perceive the sound, and it is joyful to just listen and not perceive the image; it is joyful to do both at once. And yet, or precisely because of that, they will never fully merge.

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."

A sad comedy that robs the viewer of hope and in which no one is happy. When the principle of theft is privatized and stealing becomes a universal imperative, a den of thieves is created in broad daylight, enlightened by self-interest and the natural right to inalienable private ownership of public institutions - the police, law, and banks. When a thief pursues you in such a situation, you are pursuing yourself. After his political thriller and social drama, Petri attempts to awaken the viewer's conscience with a political comedy, and many moments or stylistic elements will remind them of his previous attempts, interconnected with this film's deeper left-wing critique of bourgeois society: reminiscences of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) in the cool editing and precise camera work, with the sounds of Morricone's music in numerous night scenes, and with the main protagonist's father figure being almost functionally identical to the same character (played by the same actor, Petri’s favorite Salvo Randone) from The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971).

The greatest strength of the film is its greatest weakness: the counterpoint of matter and spirit, body and soul. The materiality of the body brilliantly intrudes into Sokurov’s otherwise typical slow flow and into lyrical classical/preromantic images. The repulsive bloated body of Mephisto amidst female purity in the beginning; Margarete’s beauty gradually ending in a shot of the vulva: the symbol of the gradual disturbance of the balance between soul and body, and the reduction of what is noble in a man (his disgust for God) to an animal (non)essence. Who introduced imbalance and Sin into the world of balance between soul and body? Who abandoned patient asceticism of knowledge, and who exchanged the promise of a constantly advancing future of science for one night with Margarete? The answer is also the answer to the question of why this typically religious interpretive framework is the film's greatest drawback: unlike Goethe's masterpiece, it completely flattens Faust's story into a Manichaean struggle between soul and matter - only Mephisto can come from the body, matter, and sex. Faust is no longer a self-destructive hero who has already achieved everything in knowledge and who joins forces with the devil to know even more, and thus he must also know what escapes science. Now he is just an impatient and defeated renegade of spiritual work, who succumbed to desire and ended up in a barren desert on his journey for bodily pleasures, which means the death of the body and the spirit. Sokurov's Days of Eclipse also took place in a desert, but the direction was the opposite: detachment from a filthy reality led upwards... here, falling away from God is inevitable. Therefore, the review must also be less.

If anyone is interested in what (not only Italian) bourgeoisie could be like, that bourgeoisie, as depicted in the cinema of the 1960s by Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Bellocchio after ten or fifteen years, that is, after reaching middle age, should watch A Leap in the Dark. When Antonioni and co. revealed the breakdown of communication and isolation among modern individuals, they showed them still in their youth. In 1980, Bellocchio shows a portrait of the modern bourgeoisie that is even more unbearable because the middle-aged bourgeoisie not only failed to overcome mutual alienation but also, as a result, failed to mature. Hence the complete infantility of the characters: at the beginning of the commentary, I wanted to use a journalistic shortcut to say that this film is like if the characters of Monica Vitti and Alain Delon from The Eclipse got married, "with the footnote that this is a relationship between brother and sister." However, this film proves precisely that the "footnote" is not just an addition and something in parentheses but that it is a necessary condition and necessary consequence of Antonioni and co.'s films. Therefore, the bourgeois characters must remain closed in the infantile isolation of childish games; neurosis and absolute inner weakness, compensated only by external imitation of social behavior or education, must be shattered by the mere presence of a real child, which brother and sister will never conceive, and therefore neither will all bourgeoisie. Impressive performances by M. Piccoli and A. Aimée.

The film Law of Solitude. There’s always only one face in one shot. A person is alone in the film window, and the shot is alone in relation to all the other shots. Trying to find continuity between the shots would mean simultaneously tearing the characters from their solitude because the story already creates a connection between multiple shots, resulting in the interconnection of characters within a common time and space. This does not happen. Seberg has her frame, and Aumont has hers. Only Terzieff duplicates himself in the mirror. The only case when there are two faces on the screen at the same time is the perfection of illusion. Every viewer who would want to find a story in the film and thus defeat loneliness will find no clue in the film and no legitimate justification for their heroic act: they will be on their own.