Dionysos

Just like in The Job (1961), we follow the relationship (but on a higher level) of two people and their conflict between the fulfillment of a person's emotional realization and the world of industry. The social theme does not serve only as a backdrop for love problems under any circumstances; the migration of factories and qualified personnel from the north to wild Sicily forms the other side of the same coin as the better-known migration of unskilled villagers to the wealthy north (depicted, for example, in Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). The film is captivating primarily in its formal aspects, through which we become acquainted not only with the painful decisions of the main protagonist through numerous flashbacks, but also with his current emotions through beautiful shots of the factory and Sicilian countryside. Because of this, the film was warmly received, particularly among the directors of the French New Wave at the time.

This film would not work as a psychological sociological study (which Herzog certainly did not try to do) because who would believe that a person who was supposed to be tied up in a basement until the age of 16 would not learn to walk, speak, and think within a few years... (for example, Truffaut's The Wild Child (1970) or Mockingbird Don't Sing (2001) in relation to this topic). However, similarities between human life in general can be traced in the film, although it is quite paradoxical considering the very individual fate of Kaspar Hauser. Indeed, we are all thrown into our lives by someone without our contribution, without our choice, and without knowledge. Society then tells everyone how to perceive and explain the world around them, and it tries to adapt each person to its own image so that they correspond to its "protocol" (Kaspar is born for society only when he appears in the middle of Nuremberg square, or when he is brought to the house of the officer, and from that moment until the end, the protocol of his life is created). And just as he was thrown defenselessly into the world, he is just as insidiously, gratuitously, and arbitrarily thrown out of it by the same person.

Did anyone notice that the film is about the eternal struggle of Good against Evil? But seriously, this film won't dazzle the demanding viewer with the complexity of expressed thoughts, but rather with how it can convey them to the viewer - through an exceptional merging of content and form. This is something that is one of the greatest strengths of a work of art. The photogenic and unreal landscape, especially for a Central European, provides ideal material for this purpose: towering mountains and proud rocky peaks as counterparts to equally proud heroes, around whom both stories revolve; the purity and mountain sun as a mirror of an immaculate Virgin, the harsh yet real and honorable life of mountaineers compared to the pettiness and vanity of people from the plains below them. Add to that the excellent play of contrasts of the black and white camera - the devil balancing on the edge of darkness and daylight, a funeral scene where the characters emerge plastically from the encompassing darkness, reminding us of the rarity and brevity of life.

It is only characteristic that one of the members of the large family of documentary films was created for a purpose that does not align with the task that prevailing common sense imposed on it yesterday and today - to neutrally reflect reality and objectively retell history. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, the father of the montage documentary, inherited a clear socio-political motivation from its dual mother, Esfir Shub,and the October Revolution. The description of facts overlaps with a particular interpretation that denies universal objectivity and - let us add to it with folk wisdom - "criminally distorts reality." If this naïve opinion, which stubbornly denies that every interpretation is a crime committed against "reality," but with the caveat that interpretation can never be avoided and is a necessary addition to every event, every text, and in this case, archival material can be easily refuted, it is possible by pointing to this film. Since the montage documentary, which, with its structure, was most suitable for a documentary film about more recent history in general and has therefore become its most common prototype to this day (with minor modifications: intertitles replaced by voice-overs and supplemented with talking heads), it found its first portrait in a film with a clear ideological function. It is up to each modern viewer to understand that the ideological content of the documentary (ideological in the sense of worldview, ideas, etc.) can change, but that the ideological-interpretive function is and will remain irreducible. After all, in the indifferent face of Nicholas II Romanov, there will always only be what we or the time period want to see in it and what the montage composition, connecting it once with "bloodiness" and another time with "holiness," will embed into it.

At least in the first hour, an almost brilliant mockery of all seemingly unquestionably valid claims of language on the objective construction of social life. Greenaway sets up a truly linguistic game in which the randomness of every linguistic system is perfectly demonstrated, in the sense that the meaning of things and therefore their naming is not given positively but is derived negatively by differentiation from all other names (from the word "table" itself, nothing is derived, but we gain the idea of a table by contrasting it with "chair," "wall," "child," "spaceship," etc...). The randomness of specific expressions is therefore obvious. The language we speak every day can be playfully disrupted, allowing the author to build a completely new system, which can form, for example, around a worldwide bird conspiracy, thanks to the aforementioned randomness/arbitrariness. Just as the stereotypical idea of language is shattered, so is our traditional expectation of film. It is a perfect work in this respect but it simply should have been shorter.

Many things could be written given the authors' excellent work with one feast and a few flashbacks: about the paradox that allowed the first socialist country (the most progressive of the era) to revive ancient Byzantine patrimonial practices in only 20 years of existence, practices in which the ruler is the sun – illuminating all with their greatness and to whom all the nation's views and hopes return. Or about how a Georgian terrorist became the ruler of Russia, etc… As a filmmaker and artistic paradox (but let’s be thankful for it), it personally seems to me that, given the mastery of the film's authors and the book source material, the character of Stalin transcends a simple Manichean division of absolute good and evil, day and night. The cruelty remains, but the ambiguity of his gestures, as well as the almost moving (fictionalized, of course) confession and testimony of Stalin's power, make this cruelty believable because it is human. That is because a human is always more of an enigma than an embodiment of a principle (be it evil or something else). The authors managed to create a very grateful paradox for the audience – they faithfully showed Stalin's worst sides but made him into a human being. The exact opposite is achieved in movies like The Fall of Berlin, and so on.

A human face fascinated by a piece of meat, which will soon transform into it. Will it be transformed by the hands of fascist butchers or by its own hand? We must admire how Fábri was able to capture this transformation with the claustrophobic grip of a dimly lit camera in the first part of the film. The question of how to properly handle meat is not as difficult as whether it is worse to become a piece of meat passively enduring its fate under the butcher's knife or to become an emotionless master of the world. The film shows that neither position is morally superior. The constant reversal of moral superiority shifts guilt and bliss of conscience from one character to another, only for the one who most consciously approaches the position of a slave with a clear conscience, unburdened by the weight of the world, to become the most despicable informant, and for the uninvolved cynic to become an unknowing supporter of the life force for others, which he had to deny at first glance in order to gain it. It is as if moral opposites were not different in anything, not even in the fact that "evil" lies in "consciousness."

This classic Ferreri film offers us many things from his traditional repertoire again - bizarre black humor (storks in the bedroom next to an open refrigerator in which there is... well, I won't reveal that, a tribute to the deceased beloved dog /in the picture/), symbolic behavior of characters, a slightly weaker aesthetic aspect, and surprising and accurate analogies. Of course, there is also the relationship, especially sexual, between a man and a woman, updated this time to the situation of the early 90s. Atheism and communism not only in Italy seem to have lost, so we are left with God again and, as always, a woman (love and sex), and both become the subject of the main character's twisted obsession. How can both be combined and preserved forever? (Spoiler alert!) As Christians show us in every mass, the answer is obvious - just kill and eat your God, and then He is with us forever.

To be able to capture things beautifully, originally, and suggestively is an art, but discovering new, previously unsuspected, or unnoticed relationships among things is mastery. Eisenstein was able not only to capture the motionless beauty of things, nature, and masculine faces (otherwise terrifying...), but he was also able to capture the relationships between them. It is in the relationship between two or more things that tension and movement arise, which he was able to not only breathe life into but also capture with his dexterity. That is why there are both beautiful details and the dynamism of scenes in such situations, which would bore a different filmmaker capturing the construction of an agricultural cooperative in two silent hours. The analogy with humor and seriousness, the ability to create a visually breathtaking experience from the most ordinary scenes of haymaking or the operation of a milk centrifuge, is simply mastery, in my opinion. There is no choice but to agree with another master of the silent era, Griffith: "What the modern movie lacks is beauty – the beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful blowing on the blossoms in the trees. That they have forgotten entirely. In my arrogant belief, we have lost beauty." Considering the historical context of the film in the context of Russian history and the betrayal of the author's commitment to Stalinism, it is a tragic beauty.

With this film, Wenders was not yet able to grasp the aimlessness of the "existential" situation as he did in his later films from the 70s, although he (presumably) attempted to do so here. The main character, a soccer goalkeeper (do not be misled by the genre stated here on FilmBooster or on IMDB because this film is definitely not a "sports" film), appears to be involved in a criminal plot at first glance, and later the film exhibits certain signs of the detective genre. Yet all of this is merely an intentional game with the viewer - the built-up "tension" finds its release in a surprising ending, which retrospectively permeates and explains the entire film: In the absolute lack of explanation for the motivation behind the protagonist’s actions and even the mere indication of his future destiny, we witness a metaphor for the radical lack of anchoring of a person to the world, an infinite field of possibilities that unfold before him but that he can never comprehend and choose with certainty (the true dilemma of a goalkeeper facing a penalty shot), and above all, in the context of the behavior of the main character as a whole, the incomprehensibility and unbridgeable otherness of human actions towards the Second Person, which is the viewer in this case.