Dionysos

Duras - intricacy of ideas and dialogues + Vierny - precise black and white camera that turns an otherwise "literary" film into an aesthetically smooth affair. In fact, even Vierny's camera for Hiroshima Mon Amour, based on Duras' motifs + excellent performances by Delphine Seyrig and the character of Count de Peyrac, was a classic (great) piece from the 60s. However, words and gazes do the main work in this film - a film about fading and reawakening desire lightly plays with hints and inscrutability, which best evokes desire: a riddle always entices more than the obviousness of the revealed, ambiguous words of a mysterious stranger lure more than his appearance, the melancholically purposeless gaze of a mature femme fatale more than the barrenness of beautiful youth, and above all - the dark and still unresolved past fuels desire much more than a certain future. Duras traps both the main characters and the viewer in a trap of time and the desire to experience something new, the desire to find something unknown in the another (a dialectic that can dangerously oscillate between both poles, between falling in love and horror at the otherness of the other). Mirrors and words split the pair into a quartet, splitting the present into the past and the future...

A typical and unremarkable film from the genre of "boulevard anabasis," which was the sandbox for future giants in the early days of the French New Wave, where they experimented with creative techniques and learned the craft. Eustache - although in 1963 it was already quite outdated, it must be noted – also created a simple story about two friends wandering around Paris and chasing girls. Shortly before that, he assisted Rohmer on his The Bakery Girl of Monceau and borrowed from him that slightly moralizing and reproachful tone that characterizes this first completed film by Eustache, despite its overall light-hearted irony. It is all the more surprising that the director's subsequent film Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1967), for which Godard supposedly lent him the film material, is even simpler in this regard, and the main character, played by J. P. Léaud, is a typical adolescent character whose only purpose is to spend time in cafés and nostalgically humorously chase young Parisian girls for the viewer. It is really not much for 1967, although Eustache was able to occasionally demonstrate a greater sense for the camera in both of his first films compared to the aforementioned Rohmer.

(The entire original title of the film is Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or, Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn). It could be argued that the film is uncinematic in its conception - indeed, the main impression from watching it is the author's "pleasure from the text." Straub and Huillet adhered faithfully to the original baroque text twice: the originality in the language used (French) is supported by the originality of the space, which is being referred to and which is the setting - Rome. In this, the talent (or rather originality...) of the directing duo is shown, namely that they break this historically faithful originality with the intruder of the modern world, which simultaneously forms the background for the depicted story and a possible symbolic center to which the viewer may or may not relate this inquiry into the mechanisms of politics and emotions. But the film is not all that uncinematic: mostly the static camera, focused on tracing the minimalist expression of the actors and facilitating the perception of the dramatic language, occasionally conjures up a magical composition, or the directors rarely resort to a camera movement; however, the viewer thus takes that much more pleasure in them.

Garrel, a much-admitted disciple of Godard and the most radical of the French New Wave directors directed a film on the edge of mysticism, several times inverted Christian dogma permeated with social radicalism at the end of the 1960s, in which ideology critique and the Lacanian psychoanalysis blend. The theme of a love relationship from the beginning of the film gradually relates to the obstacles that love faces, unsubdued thinking, and rebellious youth facing reality, which can eventually take the form of a normalizing institution - an institution for the mentally ill. The film as a whole is consequential - it is equally "crazy": the possibility of metaphorically connecting various constructed parallel thoughts is seemingly unlimited. Blasphemy is combined with nonsense, "revealed" hope with socially critical hopelessness.

A relatively disparate film, interestingly combining the reflection of the film medium, the personal motives of the creator, and generalizing "objective" studies of the form of the external world and cinema. Jackie Raynal combined the position of the starring role and director: in most scenes, she stages herself, and what is most interesting - in diverse situations ranging from intellectual reflections to various demonstrations of film speech effects, in which Raynal plays the role of an object, to intimate scenes in which we (perhaps) are meant to trace the fabric of human emotions. Raynal skillfully composes games with editing, sound with idea metaphors, the subjective with the objective, and last but not least, irony with seriousness, and the power of imagination with the power of the image.

What or who did Antonioni actually alienate? The characters from each other - and thereby only doubled their actual alienation in the world? Is it, therefore, "artistic criticism of morals performed from within the bourgeois world: there is nothing in it that could interest us Marxists," as Galvano Della Volpe said? Certainly yes. But not only that. As he unveiled the mask of modern individualism, Antonioni suddenly brought into the world of film the power of image and aesthetics that existed only in the 1920s. Antonioni removes words and the intrusiveness of conventional film music and puts us in front of images that are as captivating and binding as an overly beautiful woman. Antonioni, therefore, alienated both the images and the sound from the viewer - the barren emptiness of Rome thus signifies not only the emptiness of interpersonal relationships but also evokes in the viewer a tremor with the otherness of something too perfect to identify with: empty streets captured in perfect black-and-white compositions; the silence of the deserted city and the silence in the middle of the crowd... At an exhibition or in a magazine reproduction, one often comes across photographs from films - and whenever I came across Monica Vitti, it was, of course, within the framework of the tetralogy of feelings. A coincidence? Hardly: even such a beautiful actress was elevated by Antonioni's camera to such an extent that merging with her image is impossible, and this impossibility is unsettling (it is not by chance that she appears in one of “Exposures” by B. Probst). Antonioni, therefore, managed to and had to alienate the viewer and the object of their gaze and their hearing as he liberated modern film narration (from the "classic" merging of narration and meaning, subordination of expressive means to the articulation of the plot, etc.), thereby placing the viewer in front of an otherness that calls for a new understanding. By doing so, he opened the doors to a new visual language.

Jon Jost is the most independent American independent filmmaker who shoots full-length (do not take normatively) fictional films. This film was supposed to be shot in 5 days with a budget of $8,000. Excellent, and not only in this context. Jost opens his film (about the relationship between a lonely working woman and a problematic retired marine) almost melodramatically, almost sentimentally "Lelouch-esque," gradually interspersing the film with sequences of pure and simple cinematography of long emotional shots and a poetic camera game, and then adds a few explicitly improvised scenes in the style of "everyday chatter," while the film, still held within a dramatic arc, continues to flow, leading to a very unpleasant awakening from the previous dream. All of this is imbued with Jost's own complex country music, which always adapts to the current state of the plot. The film also includes a few formal pirouettes with editing and camera work, and it is therefore both an independent and surprising work and constructed by a more or less conventional narrative. Thus, it should, I dare say, have the potential like Jost's other films (of which I've only seen two), the potential to appeal to a wider audience. Unfortunately, this is not the case, because Jost's films are hard to come by and there are no subtitles for them.

Between Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Popular Press, there is a shift (note - the term “shift” does not have to be taken normatively) towards a more classical narrative, and indeed we encounter a dramatic arc here. In the context of the author's previous films, it is almost a perfectly solid arch! I believe that the film has a more or less clear purpose and is therefore about something, i.e., it is an update of a classic literary work. However, unlike the original, Dorian does not see himself in painting, but rather in the tabloid press. But while in the original the painting becomes more hideous as Dorian changes, here Dorian transforms depending on how his media image changes. Herein lies the main theme of the film, based on contemporary social science studies (including gender studies, post-structuralism, media studies, cultural studies, etc.) - the theme of individual identity construction through media discourses, the secondary nature of the individual in relation to mass societal and cultural practices, etc. However, the film is not primarily an objectifying pseudo-documentary, as that would not be Ottinger - her penchant for costumes, dada or twistedly garish aesthetics (the 1980s!) is also present here. So is surrealism, but it is less prominent and the viewer can more easily relate the surreal scenes to the overall structure. Compared to Freak Orlando, the individual surreal scenes do not have complete autonomy - whether it is the opera scene or others – and they are always more or less connected to the film's underlying theme, which is the step forward that the character of the all-powerful media magnate D. Seyrig takes in relation to the poor Dorian (the opera as a distorted mirror of the actress and Dorian's publicized relationship; Seyrig, who also appears in seemingly purely personal delirious visions of the main character, who no longer has a private life, etc.).

The shortcomings of previous surrealist films have been overcome by Bokanowski: while before, in fragments of subconscious symbols, no meaning could be found (which is always foreign until the dream that Bokanowski films becomes your own - otherwise, you have to make your own film) and at best, there was only a mere external impression of the beauty of imaginary images. Here, thanks to the extended runtime, the original mixture of fragmented symbols is stretched, and as a result, each fragment is given enough space to develop its own point. The whole may still not have a single point, but now at least the individual paragraphs have their own points. Furthermore, Bokanowski already detaches himself from figurative representation in some places and interweaves his work with refreshing abstractions of light and shadow, which complement other more visual rather than film techniques: many sequences deliberately transform into a painterly product, linocut, or even a work at the intersection of book illustration and puppet film. However, he does not resign from cinematography - not only are the graphics set in motion, but also dreams, which, after all, are not static...

The trouble with the continent of the dreamland washed by the waters of surrealism and imaginative symbolism is that its meaning (signified, if you will) is located on a completely different plane than the materialized symbol itself (significator, if you will): the viewer is therefore forced to try to guess the intention of the author of the work, whom they do not know (and thus rely only on sheer impossibility) or try to insert their own meaning. Yet this is fundamentally hindered precisely by the fact that the meaning of a dream or the unconscious is so personal that the viewer cannot help but feel, despite all the external beauty of the symbols, like a persona non grata in a foreign land, in a land full of visionary symbols. /// Nevertheless, Bokanowski once again triumphs artistically and technically, there is no doubt about that. It then depends on each viewer whether the strings of their imagination or buried emotions will (randomly) be played out or not. However, The Angel manages to resist these shortcomings without losing any of the qualities of the author's previous films.