Dionysos

According to Lyotard, the collapse of the "grand narratives" of modernity was accompanied by mourning - the mourning of the "postmodern" people at the end of the century over the certainties that those grand unifying stories of emancipation, freedom, and progress offered them. Here we can see the collapse of one of these grand narratives twice over - not only the collapse of the story of freedom and equality, the socialist ideal and a better society, but also the collapse of the linearly narrated film story, of a film unified by a certain principle (whether it is the bourgeois Hollywood dream of the main characters' crucial role, whose motivations unify the plot, or another weakened form of unification, such as a certain message, the chronology of events, logical causality of the story, etc.). If we return to the aforementioned mourning, it is clearly evident that it returns to us twice over. Not only within Godard's message, the lamentation over Europe's betrayal of its ideals, its effort to change and become better, but again purely within the framework of the film and its form - after all, what else but this mourning can "connect" (since I cannot use the word unify...) the individual fragments, caesuras, and singular fragments that the film is composed of other than this sad yet liberating human and film mourning?

A professionally filmed documentary that focuses primarily on Godard's early creative years and the beginnings of his "political" period. The main advantage is the interviews with prominent American directors who reflect on both Godard's own work and the influence it had on their work and their views on cinema as a whole.

A perfect nod and postmodern mockery of the film genre - this horror-giallo is a tribute to Argento and his essential overcoming: the film is above all clever and its formal aspect is refined to the edge of the best formal mastery, even leaning towards experimental pioneering. The entire de facto silent film is based on the creation of mental associations through visual shortcuts, establishing "short connections" between (contrasting images for the majority of people, not so much for giallo fans...) otherwise contrasting images - death, pleasure, young bodies in the throes of sexuality, wrinkled corpses; (genius!!!) the coquetry of naked skin with synthetic rubber and metal. In short: a constant reversibility of life and death, morbidity and pleasure, achieved through the frenzy of the camera and editing, fetishistic details (substituting for the viewer's touch), and the actual absence of words and a "plot," which forces us to rely on our most lascivious senses sight and touch. This is further proof that films can be told primarily through images! Another question is the reversibility of the victim and the killer, and above all the killer and the viewer, giving birth to perverse film pleasure.

The entire film fluctuates between opening and closing title sequences, between two Tokyo bars, between life and death - and between Enter and the Void. In the average middle position between these almost three-hour amplitudes lies (although not in the middle of the runtime) the central sentence of the film, which states that drug XY (I don't remember the name) has the same effect as death. Noé therefore embarks on a deep drug trip, but here a problem arises - three hours need to be filled with some type of material and content on the basis of which the trip can take place. We must not be fooled: although the trip is in its visual effects a pure form and abstraction, in a drug-induced frenzy the "content," the "meaning," and what "was so beautiful" is always somewhat present and inevitably attached itself to the hallucinogenic audiovisual experience without being “just” it. In other words, a (film) trip also requires a screenplay that enables the trip, and here Noé falls short - banal thoughts about reincarnation (legitimizing camera techniques and the plot of the film), pathetic parallels between children and death, etc. Oh, how the film would benefit if it could rid itself of these literalities and story crutches as much as possible, if it let itself be carried away by its own greatest advantage, i.e., the smooth pulsating atmosphere of a psychedelically mad city, captured in an experimental film form, precisely fulfilling the thesis of the unity of content and form. In short, if the whole film were like its opening title sequences, in which the original content is injected into the viewer's veins in such a way that in the newly created psychotropic form, all forms of readability are distorted to such an extent that they become unreadable in exchange for pure enjoyment of colors, movement, and sound.

In my opinion, the film is not primarily an attempt to depict the obscure love of a woman and a dictator. For that, the psychology of the characters would be too simple and unchanging from one moment on. Therefore, we should rather understand the film as a more general critique of fascism/Mussolini, in which the film form plays a crucial role with the use of alienating effects in the form of period materials. Furthermore, while up until the turning point Mussolini (F. Timi) appears on screen as himself and can be perceived as a human character (with all his flaws), from the moment of the turning point, he presents himself as a perfect duce through period footage. From that moment on, the internal imperfection = inherent self-destruction of fascism also manifests itself, as it tries to destroy the people who are: 1) the duce's biggest supporters - Ida, who will never stop loving Mussolini and thus will never leave the psychiatric clinic, 2) the duce himself - accomplished by destroying his own namesake son, who in the end transforms into his own father (and is therefore also locked up in a psychiatric clinic), symbolized on the film plane by assigning the role of the son to the actor who played Mussolini's father in the first half. In other words, the more perfect the image of the duce in front of the public, the greater the decline of the real duce (or his "alter ego" in the form of his son and devoted love). The criticism of the role of the Catholic Church is also very subtle: there were many compassionate individuals within it, but it is the church as a whole that actually keeps Ida captive to fascist tyranny throughout the film.

The frontier of dawn, like the boundary of a fleeting moment and eternity - photography. The pressing of the camera shutter precisely at that boundary, where the photographer's gaze meets the frozen eternity, locked in the future photograph - in that same moment, love can be born, and the film poses the question: can love ever cross that moment? Can a moment be transformed into eternity? What to choose - "le petit bonheur bourgeois" (Garrel + Poidatz), or the true depth of the moment (Garrel + Smet)? In response, the film offers us a second boundary: the boundary of the mirror, in which eternity is present on one side (Garrel contemplating choosing bourgeois happiness with the childish Poidatz), and on the other side, a spontaneous moment of gaze, in which love is born "at first sight" (Smet). The resolution of the film and the main character is only an answer to the dilemma of how to reconcile the moment with eternity. /// The final literal metaphor (Satan) fills me with concern that Philippe Garrel has turned to genuine devotion and abandoned the legacy of the radicalism of the 60s, but perhaps it was just irony. Otherwise, the film is a dignified culmination of W. Lubtchansky's career, although somewhat precarious, as the film reproduces a photographic vision of the world, and the framing of scenes is often almost static and enclosed in a tight composition.

Another in a series of bleak films that in a raw way and without sentimental embellishments capture the harsh life of survival in a depressing economic situation, set in gloomy tones and where the frosty weather serves as a backdrop to the pre-Christmas rush to emphasize the cold reality. As in any society, especially in the Western consumerist society, money is, unfortunately, a necessary means for even basic simple happiness, but when it is lacking, even an otherwise orderly person can succumb to an easy but illegal way to get rich. It is sad that (especially in the USA), money is perceived not only as important but as the main source of happiness (a new television, a nicer house, more expensive toys). Thus, the true "happy ending" is that this perception changes for the film's protagonists in the end.

If Khrushchev had read Chekhov, the main character would have been caught between them. A frequently used theme in Russian art, the many times used theme of useless people gnawing at the soul of Russian intelligence, is once again unfolding within a character who is simultaneously caught between Moscow and Kazakhstan in 1961. The film is also a great exploration of the life of a fictional character and the time period - the short period between the fall of the Stalinist regime and the complete emptying of the socialist values of late Brezhnevism was a time when the Union and its citizens truly aimed for the stars. Communism could still be a reachable dream - after all, the Russian man, the son of a semi-literate peasant, was preparing to be the first to conquer space. Those who wanted to could still believe. Wouldn't this belief - perhaps naive at the time - be more pure, sincere, and real than the classic intellectual skepticism, egocentrism, and careerism? The main character is torn in his private life (with the values of bourgeois intellect represented by his wife), in relation to his ancestors (the correlate of his bourgeois wife is his parents from the intellectual class, killed in Stalin's labor camp), and towards his friends (emigration). Aleksey German Jr. managed to embody this dilemma even in the mise-en-scène - is it possible to believe that an epochal event can emerge from this typically Russian disintegrating mess, where something is constantly being ruined, something is not working, evocatively captured in the murky space of the cosmodrome? German Jr. completely benefits from his father's work in terms of form - the use of framing, depth of field, and mise-en-scène - it's visually stunning. Furthermore, it's commendable that, like his father, he strives to humanize events that could easily fall into grandiose fresco-like representations (WWII, Stalinism, here Gagarin).

Anyone who wants to watch this film as an "ordinary" crime thriller about a person's disappearance in a deserted town somewhere in the depths of Russia will surely be disappointed. However, surprisingly, there is no mention of a thriller or crime in the film's description, as it is in fact described as a drama and as mysterious. It is actually better to look for something else in the film rather than just the tension of the investigation, which should definitely not be the main focus. Successful singer Ljuba, after climbing up the social ladder, wants to leave Russia, but she has no idea that the country she grew up in won't let her go that easily. She wanted to sing solo, but she forgot that in places like Yuryev and in a place like Russia, there is no place for soloists, at least if they still want to be true Russians (and not just quote Chekhov and others from memory). When she sang alone, she lost her voice. When she finds her way into the choir, she may still have hope of getting her son back someday.

This documentary captures sometimes truly incomprehensible mistakes and errors made by the previous regime, especially its governing nomenclature. However, the form they chose cannot be given more than one star. Impartiality means nothing to the creators, half of all information is based on the subjective evaluation of people directly affected by the decisions of that time (and thus their objectivity can be questioned). The nature of this series implies that the authors selectively choose only those projects that were squandered, but almost completely fail to mention other similar ones that made it into production/distribution, etc., and were successful. Simply put, it is a work created ad hoc, with minimal factual and technical added value. The only positive aspect is that at least the work of our ancestors, who surely deserve some recognition, has returned to the light of day.