Dionysos

The unstable floating disjunction between words and images, absolute inadequacy of visuals as illustrations of text, endless surpassing of non-totalizable quantities of the potentialities of the camera over any discursive reductionism, the limit of the documentary and limit of all efforts for correspondence between thought and world. The nickel-and-dime psychologizing criminal-sociological description of an absolutely ordinary story "from adolescent delinquent to criminal" always and again shatters against the wall of the image and shows that the attempt to connect these two worlds is colossally pointless. The paradox of the infinity of the seen detail against the absolute generalizability of the textual construct. The uniqueness of the personal story is neither denied nor affirmed by the documentary detachment of the camera, which only captures public space and strangers - in this field of indecisiveness, everyone can find either the sociological search for the roots of the criminal's fate or the transcendent spirit of the criminal, which is absent and surpasses its conditions, which rather than its anchoring in that sociological story, dazzle the viewer with their total indifference towards it. In such a space, everyone is both an innocent witness and a perpetrator. The use of supremely cacophonous "abnormal" music only emphasizes the artistic core of any apparent documentary “with distance,” which makes one wonder whether it was not the aim from the beginning to create a visual poem. This is affirmed by nothing other than the self-contained shots of the camera, which turn the public space into material for the creation of paintings with its details - any attempt to objectify the individual always turns into the subjectivization of the world. In their apparent unity, however, the modern human being finds no reassuring pantheism, but rather a simple indifference of reality towards the individual, which, although dissolved in the image of the world, logically disappears therefrom.

A convenient connection of two worlds, two moments of human life. At the beginning, the main character drives through the USA - an alienated landscape, alone without deeper meaning or fulfillment in life, yet intensified by the surrounding and local (advertising) way of life. This is followed by a journey across The Netherlands and Germany - initially, the forced care for a child gives the main character feelings of satisfaction and a deeper reason for life. It has wonderful poetry, great cinematography and music, and Wim Wenders...

The second part continues exactly where the previous part ended, after the main character's transformation from a white terrorist into a friend of the people. This transformation seemed very poorly managed to me throughout Hungarian Rhapsody: 1st moment = István is bred with the intolerant attitude of the aristocracy, and he cruelly fights on the side of counterrevolution; 2nd moment = István recommends allocating land to retail farmers, in order to "take the wind out of the sails of the reds," so it is clearly just an opportunistic calculating gesture; 3rd moment = István, dressed in peasant rags, sits at the table with the former aristocracy. Nothing happened between moments 2 and 3 that would coherently explain this transformation. Fortunately, this problem no longer exists in Allegro Barbaro (and it is therefore paradoxical that a story in which characters do not transform is better), and we can enjoy the eternal struggle of arrogance and brutality of wealth and power with the suffering and resistance of poverty in the background of passing history. There is no need to talk about the mastery of mise-en-scène, and the playful placement of individual characters is also very pleasing, which is not only the result of clever movement of actors on the stage but also of miraculous film editing.

Formally, even with Jost's victorious reiteration of Euro-Atlantic liberalism at the turn of the 80s and 90s, there was a prevailing backward movement towards an even more classical narration than what we knew from films of previous decades: the experimental intellectual guerrilla warfare of American social relations with post-structuralist leftist discursive and socio-political critics gradually disappears and what remains is the best of the long-gone promise of reasonable, moderate, intelligent democratic liberalism that was also dreamed of in Czech fields and woods after the end of state socialist dictatorship, and that, as we later discovered, never existed. While watching the film, not only because of the shots of Vermeer and at one moment also of Rembrandt, I remembered Joseph Heller and his "Picture This" from 1988, in which Rembrandt looks down at humanity and its history from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The film gives off the same feeling as that old good Jewish liberal Heller in all its grandeur: the sensitive irony towards the vanities of everyday life's afflictions and the focus on what is important, even though what is important may not even exist, and even if it did exist, we may never achieve it. And yet, there is no choice but to try. This sentiment is felt much more in this film than in Jost's Rembrandt Laughing from 1988 (Yes! That cannot be a coincidence.). For Jost, just like with Godard, his former inspiration, from whom, however, his work will fundamentally diverge from this moment on, there seems to have been, briefly, a predominance of the desire for something enduring after the disappointment of iconoclasm, something that hides behind the disillusionment of the world and the disillusionment of its effective criticism and transformation, which both authors hoped for but did not come true... Just like in Godard's The Detective (1985), perhaps the only way out of the confusion of life appears to be love, which is eternal.

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.

While in Tarr's previous films, the apartment was a symbol of existential problems, now it is an existential problem. While in the previous two films, one could consider the relationship between external material issues and the characters' internal psyche, here (although not completely because factors such as the teacher's financial distress or the desire to get an apartment and money from the mother play a certain role) the author focuses primarily on the intersubjective structure of the relationships of the residents of one apartment (which is no longer just an apartment, but rather a metaphor, for example, a place of conflict between different generations, etc.). Mutual alienation and latent hostility are evident in all the "dialogues" but the form is important here - especially the play of light. It is precisely thanks to the light that we reveal the true distance in the apparent closeness of the characters, even within the most intimate conversations, when it seems that the characters are closer, each of them is mostly lit differently, which metaphorically indicates their true lack of harmony. It is precisely the dialogues and monologues of the characters where my main criticism of the film lies - the film that wants to delve into the depths of the characters' inner selves must have equally deep and profound ideas contained within them, which Tarr has not completely succeeded at yet.

The subdued light of the long Akerman-style shots mixes the shadows of the characters' dull figures with the night of reason into which the main character falls. What is the director's last fictional film about? It is about the eternal European chimera of its own superiority, the impulse for Citius, Altius, or Fortius (faster, higher, stronger), which reduces people and nature to mere symbols and materials of its own success and dream of victory. It is about the rebellion of one of the objects of this madness, which is intertwined with a family rebellion - the effort not to appear in a stranger's dream, even if it was the father. Is all this not just intertwined with the rebellion of youth, escaping from the authority of the father/culture toward love, regardless of profit and prestige - wanting to live in a world that is true to itself? Isn't this supposed to be the fate of the entire third world, which was not even named in the film? How should we interpret the opening scene, which uncovers hopes of defiant gestures: a young mixed-race woman loses hope despite Frank Sinatra's voice - was it the lover's killer who took it away from her, or was it Sinatra himself, revealing the end of a different illusion, not European but the illusion of the youth of the third world about their own world? The minimalism of already dead characters imitates the death of Almayer's world and the world of his daughter. Not to forget means to die, and to forget means to lose the meaning of life - in this space between two deaths, the main heroine is captured in the opening scene, in which her gesture sadly beautifully misses the situation to which she no longer belongs.

Image, editing, and temporal loop as cinematographic means of the return of the repressed, suppressed not by the machinery of Hollywood, which would imply consciousness, but by Hollywood mimesis. In the film, Arnold's classic creative approach fittingly meets with the overwhelmingly psychoanalytic theme of the Oedipus complex. Arnold thus liberates the source material from his hidden and suppressed undercurrent, which would hardly find recognition in mass culture, here in the films produced by MGM. However, this also applies to all other films by Arnold explicitly not referring to this theme - moreover, in this film, we are flooded with subversive work with editing and repetition, which releases from the image what is not visible in the normal flow of film frames, but what is always contained in them as a repressed possibility that cannot be escaped without getting rid of the whole (or until we get rid of Martin Arnold).

The film already deviates slightly from amongst other Soviet films with its civilian plot about the relationship between a mother and her son, which initially creates the impression of a primary focus on the adolescence and rebellion of the young boy, but gradually involves the capricious (to put it nicely) mother, whose sadness fills the entire film by the end (the director and screenwriter are women, so the focus on the female character is only beneficial). However, the main advantage lies in the lightness and playfulness of the expressive means, which corresponds to avoiding the common Russian melancholy, fatalism, and deep thoughtfulness in terms of content (yes, despite the fact that the film is dominated by the sadness of its protagonist, that is where the art lies). Along with the attractive camera work and editing techniques, which serve better to create impressions than words alone and the plot, the film resembles (the 10-years-delayed and Soviet) French New Wave.

"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?