Dionysos

The film is a post-modern mix of various narrative and formal techniques, broken down into a myriad of individual building blocks that can stand and function on their own. However (and this is the main advantage of the entire film), they can work together as part of a truly singular film, with the story of Leni Peickert as its backbone. The best thing about the film is precisely its seemingly fragmented form of "building blocks" - the individual blocks: a) are made up of various artistic and non-artistic media (fragments from literary works, reproductions of paintings, metafictional techniques, and archival and documentary shots); b) have variable length and role in the overall structure (from short meditations, for example, on freedom and the end of Nazism expressed by elephants (!), to longer micro-stories of characters seemingly unrelated to the plot, but indirectly playing an important role, such as the profile of moral inspector Korti, who is a symbol of the final subjugation of Leni Peickert's "utopianism," but we are told many irrelevant things about him). There are endless examples, but it is important that these blocks trigger a free chain of associations and possibilities in the viewer to create different and new meanings and forms, always connected by the main narrative thread, which makes the film very audience-friendly. There is also more technical and formal playfulness, overall perspective, references to other films, the strong influence of Godard's work (such as the intertitles), and a story that, in a positive sense, reflects the time period of its creation - the rejection of the West and the East, the 19th century, Nazism, and the present as places that not only deprive us of illusions but also of utopia in its positive sense of a desire to change an unjust present.

The regularity of the outline of five lines giving the condition of the possibility of freedom for music, which must always be embodied in itself standardized notation marks in order to be able to be heard in its always similar and yet new arrangement. Straub and Huillet created an extremely faithful chronicle: Bach's life is composed of musical notes, which are constant repetitions of all those own names, names of institutions and cities he went through during his career, of all the titles he fought for, and of all the names of people who shaped his family and life. The directorial duo perfectly doubled the genre of period chronicle and created, as it can only be done, a faithful (because not anachronistic, thus not violated from today's perspective) reconstruction. It is faithful because the people of that time considered these exact themes worth recording for future generations: the era of romantic individualism - bourgeois novels full of emotions and psychologies came later. If we compare this film with the Hollywood "crap in silk stockings" (as Napoleon dubbed the classicist genius Talleyrand) "Amadeus," we once again have proof of the Hollywood ideological violation of anything that is not Hollywood into its own form. Straub and Huillet therefore created a fragmented and flat portrait, but nevertheless a portrait composed of authentic historical sources without retroactive domestication for the 20th-century viewer.

The head, which transforms into a skull, is already empty beforehand. Madness says: death is already here.* War says: madness comes with me. Madness anticipates while the soldier's head remembers - from this aporia arises the second deadly effect of war: it never ends. For the survivor, for the "witness," it forever returns with their memory - film as retrospection, telling the story of one soldier's past and as a medium of collective repressed memory (repressed because The Human Bullet unmasks, back then the times had not yet ended when film could have a social function other than economic-operational); but also film as an image of anticipation - war as a bridge between the past and the future because the absurdity of the world connected by the bridge of memory has not disappeared. The hero's war began at the moment when the war had already ended: how can one not judge from this that war never ends? Just like in "Catch-22," it brilliantly touches one's emotions to see how the hero is caught in the trap of the absurdity of time, from which there is no escape either forward or backward because his fate was always sealed in the logic of war. *) "History of Madness," 1961.

The power of a novelist lies precisely in the fact that they invent in absolute freedom, without any model. Modern prose has one remarkable feature: it deliberately emphasizes this characteristic to such an extent that invention and imagination ultimately become the plot of the book (A. Robbe-Grillet, “For a New Novel,” p. 23, essay from 1957). By replacing the words prose and book with the word film, we have a description of this film. Just like any artistic fiction is a lie, this film is also a lie, with the difference being that it is too powerful, too much for the ordinary viewer who wants to be mesmerized by a merciful lie - a comprehensible story - for 90 minutes (nowadays 120 minutes). Robbe-Grillet dissolves the process of creating a lie = plot into the film itself. Another thing is the endless coquetry of present and past, lies and (always only provisional and current) truths within a single sequence, creating a unique and peculiar synchrony of Grillet's films.

A unique synthesis of high and low, nihilistic, satirical, and ironic towards everything and everyone. It is one of the founding films of the so-called marginal cinema, a purely Brazilian category of films on the border between (deliberate) ignoble and underground. Similarly, this film, which is primarily an anarchic burlesque, playing in a free-thinking and unrestrained way with form and content, to which nothing is sacred, situates itself on the edge of pop art and avant-garde. It mocks (just like the entire marginal cinema "movement") the left-wing intellectualism and snobbery of the legendary Cinema Novo, as well as the police, criminals, and terror to guerrilla and army or officers, which only shows that, unlike its purely commercial Western counterparts, this film is not a genre film for its own sake, but with its undisciplined nihilism, it is an authentic statement by a 21-year-old director about the state of his country - after all, the country was ruled by a military junta since 1964, and by the end of the 60s, the country slowly but surely found itself in the midst of political violence of state and guerrilla terror. But what primarily attracts attention is the form, which, with its deliberately (but thoughtfully) chaotic combination of two main storylines, a barrage of editing combining various visual and sound sources (fictional story, fragments from period films, music from classics to contemporary pop, fake TV shows, etc.), and comedic coloring, creates a film that is, especially for foreigners, a unique, although of course highly subjective, source for understanding the reality of Brazil at that time. It is precisely the unusual combination of image and sound of the film that gives it a new dimension and, above all, new meanings, mostly of a cynical and humorous nature. /// Despite its irony and self-irony, the film is truly a smart testimony of the social situation at that time - the feared bandit who asks "Who am I?" throughout the film is ultimately shown as a powerless, uncertain, and insignificant person-symptom of a society that projects its own fears onto him like a projection screen (communists see in him "a man from the highest stage of capitalism," while right-wingers see him as a criminal and terrorist who takes from the rich and gives to the poor), and the ending shows how the all-powerful bandit is just a temporary affair in a time of the country's descent into unnecessary violence on a much larger scale.

A revolutionary phantasm, a spontaneous outbreak of political and cinematic energy, an unattainable dream; it is unbelievable that it could ever come, and retrospectively unbelievable that it came at all. A film about May 68 filmed in May and June 1968 between France and Italy about everything impossible that May featured in the history of Western Europe. This film is a perfect depiction of everything impossible and chimerical, but again in this case, also beautiful. Just like in Visa de censure n°X that began in the same year, here too it is primarily about a wave of unbridled imagination, predetermined images, a whirl of colors, and constantly fading scenes, images, and dreams. Yet here we have something more under the influence of the turbulent events of those months - political slogans, and revolutionary challenges and demands. It is characteristic that they merge in the form of colored subtitles with the entire background on which they appear - in reality, these slogans were unfortunately mere fantasies, not in the background of the film, but rather in the minds of the May student revolutionaries. But what inspiring chimeras, what a beautiful film!

The Zen proverb states: "When it seems that the five faces of the Pentagon are impenetrable, attack through the sixth." On October 21, 1967, over 100,000 predominantly young people set out on a march targeting the symbol of the American military-political establishment, from students to black activists to hippies. Red, rainbow, and Vietcong flags were flying in the heart of the USA, which was previously unimaginable. And during the radicalized pro-communist time, the master of the documentary, Marker, left us evidence of a moment when it seemed that not only people in the USA were beginning to awaken, but also that the emerging generation was starting to change in the midst of the struggle against police batons and the main army. Change with a capital C. It seemed that the otherwise chimerical slogan from the beginning would possibly come true in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, we now know that it was truly just a chimera...

A lyrically conceived story of the painful farewell of the poor farmer Ivan to his native, though cruel homeland. The main part of the film captures the last farewell of the old farmer to his community and the countryside, which he knows he will never see again after realizing his lifelong dream of emigrating to Canada. But before all the villagers can solemnly bid farewell to their comrade and symbolically serve the requiem mass for someone with whom they are forever saying goodbye, they must first deal with another unexpected complication - a thief who wants to destroy the dream of the farmer. Needless to say, the people of the Ukrainian Carpathians are able to take care of such matters in their own way. This is not a second coming of Sergei Parajanov, but even so, the captivatingly cold black and white camera, as well as the raw poetic shots of the infertile landscape and the rejoicing men, have much to offer.

The opening quarter-hour passage is already full of ideas and dynamics - the flashforward of the end of the robber gang is presented to us as a flashback of the narrator/detective, who also gives general information about the growth of crime in Milan in the form of interviews (e.g., in a cinematically interesting form of thought reconstructions of typological cases, which the detective only comments on with voice-overs, which are eventually supplemented by the actual reconstruction, which he is personally present at). The flashbacks (actually flashforwards) are inserted into this fast-paced introduction, and by following the panic of the Milanese, the viewer at first has no idea what storyline he or she will follow, until eventually the main story axis crystallizes. This story is already told in a conventional way, and it is interesting (whether you consider this a plus or a minus) that we do not return to the documentary style at all in the end. Dino De Laurentiis has always been able to raise money and here he indeed raised enough money, so the crowd and action scenes are certainly not embarrassing, quite the opposite.

The circular structure of the film, which in its second half mirrors the first one in the form of developing variations, inherent to the original arrangement, not only reminds one of Robbe-Grillet's games with Deleuzian incompossible worlds but also ideally fits the actual theme: what if a Japanese Aryan from the Far East could repeat his own life in a different form, as a member of a subordinate Korean ethnicity? The tragicomic nature of this film stems from this circularity, which only refers to the cycle of human history: the compulsive repetition of the superiority of some over others. Nagisa Ōshima's experimental sandbox, which incidentally in the film diegetically emerges from the beach, draws its strength precisely from the subversive self-contradiction, in which nothing can happen to anyone, because they are just a puppet/character in the cycle of the film reel, that can be revived at will, and the fact that from this sandbox a person quickly steps into the real world just as the monkey (a racist figure par excellence) ends after drunkenness: the end of the film merges with the bullet to the head, after which nothing follows.