Dionysos

The overall tone of the film is hinted at by the expressive opening captions and the first introduction to the main character through his distorted subconscious dreams. Impulsive, fervent, and unpredictable painter Franco Nero decides to retreat to an abandoned country estate in an attempt to immerse himself back into his work, where he fully descends into the depths of delusions, dreams, obsession, and inner conflict. The horror element of the film is manifested during the painter's obsessive exploration of the past life of a beautiful aristocrat who lived in the house before him during World War II and served as his inspiration. The film is particularly pleasing with its surreal visions, the materialized dreams of the artist, and the blurring of the boundary between reality and imagination, culminating in a tragicomic ending.

When postmodernism suddenly awakens from amnesia and realizes that surrealism has been forgotten. The film is situated on many interpretive edges - from farce to imaginative questioning about the nature of human memory, and from a game with genres to multi-layered references to the history of cinema. It should not be forgotten that it is a quite interesting criticism of war: the film deliberately adopts the expressions of the wartime propaganda of that time for its overall framework of space and events, which occasionally creates delightful contrasts - anti-German slogans fighting against Teutonic barbarians framing the time and space of the film and standing against the personal search for emotion, the death of loved ones, etc. However, it is primarily a surrealist anabasis to the end of the world, wrapped in the retro black and white garb of silent films of the time, more so those German films rather than war or Soviet films (where the most famous product of Soviet cinema of the 1920s in the form of the montage school automatically comes to mind). However, Maddin adds some more historical inspiration to the postmodern urn - the noir genre. After all, the lonely hero with amnesia, in a hostile environment of a mysterious city, tracking his femme fatale at night and commenting on this self-destructive pursuit of solving the mystery through voice-over, is a classic fulfillment of this genre.

The zero level of film: its decomposition into prime factors - crushing its DNA down to basic bases. In other words: a return to the original foundations of every film experience, which is the interplay of light and shadow, sound and silence. This means that the prejudices and comfort cultivated by decades (and now more than centuries) of conventional bourgeois cinema are painfully disintegrating in the viewer, with unpleasant struggles that mean only one thing: a return to the degenerated sensibility of the viewer to the true roots of their perception. As they say - to bounce off the bottom, we must first finish the bottle - Kubelka has truly brought us down to the very foundation of film.

"A person has no fate or privileged place in the universe. If they didn't exist, nature wouldn't miss them." Khouri's privileged theme: the disintegration of an individual from the whole world into the monad of a useless human being; Khouri's privileged place: a luxurious abandoned hacienda, in a broader sense territorialization of the privileged theme to the privileged class - the bourgeoisie (and secondarily Brazilian). The universe of this film created by Khouri's successful mise-en-scène: the contradiction between the individual and nature, the anxiety of life and being simultaneously attracted to it as someone who doesn't belong; an island of a functionalist villa amidst a flood of greenery; solitude against the backdrop of the city. But above all, this monadic poetics of alienation leaves its mark in the framing of the human face by the camera which, with frequent details filling the faces of the actors, creates a claustrophobic atmosphere and emphasizes the inner and outer separation much better than the sometimes insensitive and exaggerated use of "oppressive" non-diegetic music, which, in my opinion, has aged the most in the film. If during watching I pondered why there are so many allusions to the 1920s in the film, it is perhaps due to their unsurpassable and beautiful portrayal of the human face, as only silent film could do, and which Khouri also used quite successfully, although in this film it leads the actors to a certain - but characteristic - lifelessness not only in their facial expressions.

Film, revolution, sex: art, equations of not just one Japanese art film of the late 60s and early 70s, especially from the legendary production workshop "Art Theater Guild", which is also behind this film, although here the equation is too balanced between the existential aesthetic pole on one side (à la Yoshida or the previous masterpiece Death by Hanging) and the sexually screaming repetitive storyline on the other side, which recalled the good and bad of Koji Wakamatsu. It's as if the split mind of the main character reflected a certain split in the author's ability to balance the urgency and valence of individual motifs: if Oshima wanted to double the incomprehensible exaggeration of the intra-diegetic film within the film in relation to its fictional audience by portraying this incomprehensibility by exaggerating the repetitive love scenes with deliriously repeating patterns of the same speeches, then he succeeded. On the other hand, I enjoyed precisely those existential flashes that seemed to shine through the film hidden beneath what was seen, the one that is contained in every film in the world, from capturing the foam of days to the conventional Hollywood art of forgetting and even the most real-political agitation: the "hidden" obvious film of the city, objects, lines, noises, silence, characters before they become social, diegetic, or political characters. The poetry of reality in its deeper surrealist-existential dimension before it becomes an identifiable self from me and its empty doppelgänger in which we live every day, and which always allows us to discover that incomprehensible "deeper" reality in retrospect: when it is always too late because the loop of the true film has already finished when we put it into the projector. There is nothing left but to repeat its circular movement - and to find out that we have wrapped that loop around our necks ourselves.

What does continuity speak of through a flood of discontinuous fragments from visual diary notes of one's own life, besides the author's own life? It is also one intertitle with a paradoxical message, being even more paradoxical as the film is at first glance, and according to the author's claim, purely personal - "This is a political film." This is a political film? Yes: the film presents the humanism of human life, adoration of the small everyday life not only in contrast to any great history but - and this is the second paradox - also in contrast to the author's own life. Humanism of the moment against any effort, always necessarily violent, to achieve greatness and the desire to leave a mark on the world and history, but above all resistance against the desire - equally violent - to ascribe any meaning to one's own life. Indeed, it is heroic to look back at oneself in old age and say: This means nothing. Everything that you see and that I see, is nothing. Everything is randomly composed, any statement regarding the interpretation of what you see and what is presented before my eyes in a cinematic memory, says nothing more. The more it tries to be objective, and even if it were the most objective (only place, date, time, context), it cannot provide anything at all, because it is about nothing because life has nothing to do with it. So says the author. For the author, there is only a feeling, a moment, the joy of the moment, which merges with the pure joy of filming whatever, because life does not have predetermined important or big events, but a moment of joy can arise from anything. That is why this film is the only film by Jonas Mekas that is worth seeing because it also provides an "interpretation grid" (if it makes "sense" to use this term...) for the author's other films.

A cult perestroika film uniquely combining a testimony of its time period with underground music, a love story with crime, all intertwined with a multitude of postmodern games not only in film form (the intertitles explaining slang expressions, the psychedelic experimental dream sequences of the main character, the contrast between the main storyline and the story of the murdered Tsar Paul I taken from a real book by N. Ejdelman, being read by one of the characters). A true monument of its time, not only because its plot takes place in 1980 and particularly captures the paradoxical era, but in addition to Brezhnevism, it also bears witness to the era of Gorbachev – we must realize that it was written in 1987 and the most positive character is a good-for-nothing musician of an underground band. The ending belongs to the song "Перемен!" (We are waiting for changes). Assa is also a true memento of a destroyed world - perhaps only in the former so-called Eastern bloc there was a belief that the only thing standing in the way of true life, art, etc. is the evil repressive state, and that once we get rid of it, we will be able to live a sweet unrestricted life like in the West, finally devoting ourselves freely to our creativity and through it surely improving the world. The totalitarian state was washed away by a flood, but that free world of creative self-expression in a dehumanizing impersonal world somehow did not materialize.

Perhaps in the distant or near future, it will be possible to rationalize love and human reproduction and fit them into an equation á la Heisenberg or Bohr, but until then, we are all condemned to be guided by our unconsciousness, especially sexual instinct - this time á la Sigmund Freud. Indeed, libido is truly the main driving force behind the motives of both main characters, although it manifests itself differently in each, and it is skillfully accompanied by another well-known psychiatric maxim in the style of "Tell me about your mother." From the subsequent ferment, two personalities emerged, from whose comparison it may seem that the rational and objective approach to the sexuality of the scientist-brother prevails rather than the sexual passion bordering on the obsession of the teacher-brother. Can this statement be made even after watching the final minutes of the film?

Black and white, fantasy versus reality mixed in pop-art shades of advertising print colors for sexual satisfaction, which blurs their ontological and narratively film-like distinction into an infinitely unraveling loop of motion of the offset printing cylinder, which takes on shapes, situations, and images from the collective matrix of dreams and reprints them into the unconsciousness of the main protagonist, who instead of delving into the depths of her own unique satisfaction, wanders in the whirlpool of consumer crowds; the individual's imagination is captivated by the idea of others, who are either an obstacle to the protagonist’s gratification (the paranoid function of the camera by Tinto Brass, the multiplication of gazes, the menacing presence of uninvolved individuals) or an exaggerated key to the Desire station; however, since T. Williams' time, we know that the final destination of this tram is the cemetery. Therefore, after getting too close to the object of her desire, the protagonist alternates between the danger of a black man's skeleton and the bourgeois safety of her white symmetrical husband.

In this film, everything is permeated with the essence of death - the death of the homeland means the death of its people, and the disappearance of national substance in the form of traditions, history, or monuments kills the children of the nation, even those furthest away from the places where their native land gave them life and filled that life with meaning (the film is, as they say today, very essentialist, fortunately only in an introspective intimate manner, so we only encounter nationalist remarks towards other nations in the most necessary cases). However, the brilliance of the film lies in capturing death, decay, and slow decline in the entire mise-en-scène - every square centimeter of Askarian's shots of materialized dreams and memories screams "extinction!" at the viewer. Every object filling the space in front of the camera is a silent witness to the end of one history and one nation, and it reflects the agonizing nostalgia of an exile whose world is falling apart and whose every idea and memory of homeland can only be consumed by the decay of his homeland and thus his inner self. Inanimate objects of the mise-en-scène are personified and brought to life only for that necessary moment, so they can die - their movement is a symbolic contrast to the characters, who, at first glance, appear to be alive but are already dead (and their acting is lifeless, but not Bressonian).