Dionysos

Peter Greenaway is very insightfully introduced first in the film because otherwise, this segment could effectively spoil the overall impression. The comparison to a children's PowerPoint presentation is absolutely accurate. I imagine that in the future, cheap museum tours or informational videos will be processed in such a way. It's better to quickly forget about it. Edgar Pêra – a quite playful and at times funny metaphor of the development of the film taking place in a single movie theater. In my opinion, it clearly stands against the trend of laziness, consumerism, and false dreams that cinema has embarked on after the invention of sound film and culminating in the emerging 3D technology. Jean-Luc Godard - the obvious visual and conceptual peak of the film ("save the best for last"), a work reminiscent of his other works (and directly referencing them several times), at times feeling like a sequence from Histoire(s) du cinéma performed in 3D. The possibility of seeing typical Godard intertitles in the format of the future will fill film lovers of the New Wave with more than one sentimental feeling. [Parallax 2014]

1) Mise-en-scène. It is necessary to remember the true origin of this word - in the original term "mise en scène," which literally means "placing" "on" "the stage," i.e., placing objects and characters on that part of the theater boards or space in front of the camera that will be a substitute for the world for the following few minutes, and a substitute that is all the more believable the better you are able to arrange those objects. German demonstrated his genius precisely in how he was able to densify, shape, and make this film mise-en-scène perfectly plastic and tangible, and thus his entire fictional world. Just as a visitor to the Hermitage marvels at how every section of the palace halls is decorated with ornaments and gilding, here one marvels at how every corner of the imaginary space is filled with dirt, mud, decaying wood, and decaying people. 2) Camera. This time, German, as one of the greatest poets of the film camera, lent his services to the mise-en-scène, and his detailed and intimate shots allow the audience to almost touch everything that created the world of the planet Arkanar for three hours, and thanks to it and the mise-en-scène, the entire world of the audience. 3) Synthesis. A film about the dilemma of uninvolved observation versus participatory co-responsibility thanks to the camera, mise-en-scène, and resignation from narrating the plot, which would divert the viewer's attention from the proximity of all the dirt and mud of Arkanar, truly allows this dilemma to be experienced. It is because of all these techniques that the viewer experiences exactly what the main character undergoes, i.e., being irreversibly and fatefully drawn into a foreign world, be it another planet or the fictional world of the film.

Behind the painting. When one of the characters drills through a head in an Art Nouveau painting and uncovers a deadly secret behind it, the viewer is forced to go beyond the surface of the film image - the horror genre may be profoundly absurd when it comes to meaning, but it is very close to overcoming the image in terms of techniques and effects. Just like in Amer, perhaps the main unifying element here is the evocation of a material, the physical effect of the image on the viewer, who must not remain only at its visual level. The cutting of the skin, stabbing of flesh, blood-tears-saliva, and the impact of sound and objects into the characters' tissue and the viewer's perception - this is the dialectic of the film and the viewer, which logically connects the incompatible story. In The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears, the process by which this is achieved is particularly visible - the physiological effect of the film image always occurs in the (horror) moment of tension, in the suspense of all usual expectations of the ordinary world. Precisely at that moment, there is a screeching sound, stabbing, an attack of the hand or the revelation of an eye, etc. In connection with this, it is necessary to focus on the function of repetition: it is not just about Lynchian repetition on the level of the story, but precisely about the continuous function aimed at suspension - we are always more surprised, more tense, and less certain about what will come, and this feeling is paradoxically strengthened by the procedure when the repetition of plot elements or visual analogies always brings something new at the end. Therefore, the sequence in the middle of the film, serving as a cognitive scheme, is instructive: the main character always wakes up annoyingly to the stabbing sound of the intercom, forced to experience his death in a different way each time in a cutting, stabbing, suffocating, etc., form.

The breeze of butterfly wings causes an earthquake on the other side of the world, or everything is connected to everything else, the world and everything living in it is unity, unity of causes and destinies, in which there is a connection from anything to anything else, where civilization contracts itself into the smallest elements and vice versa or precisely because of it - man is just a molecule in the Brownian motion of the world. Above all, the film and its story mimic this creative movement, while the narrative also explores forbidden connections, time, space, and the fates of characters reside in close proximity, to the extent that they are permeable or even interchangeable - one can complete the other because they are just fragments of a single existence of the world. Sound can pass through scenes just like the intentionality of the protagonist's actions in Hollywood films. Human characters can be nothing more than unprivileged particles in the game of nature. /// As an atheist, I am reserved towards this main idea, and the film also seemed (but it's just an impression, after all, like everything in this film) typically American - Americans are hopeless optimists (it's a shame that it's more of an ideology of optimism, but that's irrelevant here) - in how (but it doesn't deviate from the logic of the film) even in the most chaotic world, two people can find each other on public transportation in an act of fate.

It may seem stereotypical to some but Costa-Gavras clearly did not want to create a subjective human drama, but an objective view of the world of big banks. I dare say that (especially thanks to the catalytic effect of the economic crisis after 2007), the film also has a didactic function in this sense. This is also related to the stereotypical nature of the characters, but what can be done when in a work whose title the film bears (I mean Marx's "Das Kapital," not the book "Le Capital" by Stéphane Osmont, the literary source of this film)? We can read, for example, on page 251: "As a capitalist, he is merely personified capital. His soul is the soul of capital. However, capital has only one life instinct - the instinct to grow, to create surplus value...." It is not surprising then that the left-wing Costa-Gavras could not make the film any other way. Nevertheless, it is definitely not just cliché and predictable, definitely not. The motivation of the main character is not clear from the beginning and the course of events can be said to be doubly unpredictable. These are conventional film techniques that will not bore you even during the runtime of the film's less than two hours.

The film captures the nearly twenty-four-hour-long self-destructive descent of one man, one archetype, and one mental world. The desire to obtain and understand abstract pure power, passing through wealth itself, the desire to predict, control, and live in the future, enjoying a primitive sense of superiority and strength without sympathy for the surroundings due to one's position. All of this collapses upon realizing that the future cannot be controlled and that death awaits everyone indiscriminately. In the end, it did indeed catch up with Eric Packer not only for how he lived but mainly for how he thought. The film is an above-average faithful adaptation of its source material, which is both a positive and a negative. The disadvantage is for those who have not read the book - then the film will probably turn into a series of scenes that are only understood by chance, or rather, or not at all... I cannot overly criticize that the film did not capture all the thoughts of the printed source, as that is simply a limitation of almost all films based on any book. I had not seen R. Pattinson in any major role before this, so I can objectively say that he does not (particularly) detract from the quality of the film.

A glimpse into the final days of a dying right-wing dictatorship that, in the changed global geopolitical situation, was unable to legitimize its worn-out and directionless system both internally and externally. Nevertheless, its foundations were unfortunately stronger than they might have initially appeared. Peace and order, work, three meals a day, and even the possibility for some to pay for their children's education - people suddenly begin to tolerate disappearances, murders, torture, and so on. What is sad about Chile in this case is not only this aspect but also the way in which it was defeated (at least according to this film, which unfortunately is not far from the truth). Democracy is actually amorphous, everything and nothing, functioning only on the basis of primitive emotional patterns that can easily be manipulated by people. And when democracy triumphs? Then it's time for the exchange again - trading material well-being for tolerance of inequalities, poverty, wasted prospects and potentials for those at the bottom, and so on. Therefore, the ending is chilling even for the inhabitants of the "free world" - democracy is actually a product created by a (political) advertising agency...

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.

The greatest strength of the film is its greatest weakness: the counterpoint of matter and spirit, body and soul. The materiality of the body brilliantly intrudes into Sokurov’s otherwise typical slow flow and into lyrical classical/preromantic images. The repulsive bloated body of Mephisto amidst female purity in the beginning; Margarete’s beauty gradually ending in a shot of the vulva: the symbol of the gradual disturbance of the balance between soul and body, and the reduction of what is noble in a man (his disgust for God) to an animal (non)essence. Who introduced imbalance and Sin into the world of balance between soul and body? Who abandoned patient asceticism of knowledge, and who exchanged the promise of a constantly advancing future of science for one night with Margarete? The answer is also the answer to the question of why this typically religious interpretive framework is the film's greatest drawback: unlike Goethe's masterpiece, it completely flattens Faust's story into a Manichaean struggle between soul and matter - only Mephisto can come from the body, matter, and sex. Faust is no longer a self-destructive hero who has already achieved everything in knowledge and who joins forces with the devil to know even more, and thus he must also know what escapes science. Now he is just an impatient and defeated renegade of spiritual work, who succumbed to desire and ended up in a barren desert on his journey for bodily pleasures, which means the death of the body and the spirit. Sokurov's Days of Eclipse also took place in a desert, but the direction was the opposite: detachment from a filthy reality led upwards... here, falling away from God is inevitable. Therefore, the review must also be less.

First of all, the characters are superficially outlined. Perhaps intentionally, and it might not be generally harmful. When the protagonists are diminished by their flatness, it can create space for everything between them - the film space can be plastic. However, the director did not succeed in that either, which is the real problem, as he probably tried to grasp the space of the whole of Eurasia (see the second title of the film). Something from the director's unfulfilled goals speaks to the viewer through numerous shots of cities from Moscow to Paris, but this formal gimmick alone cannot save the absence of the overall atmosphere. The feeling of a cold and insurmountable current that engulfed the main character did not happen to me. All that remained was a gangster film, which is also predictable, at least in terms of the fate of the main characters (perhaps deliberately as a symbol of the inevitability of that "eastern" current?). This is my first Bartas film, but I think his previous films were, at least from what I've read, better so I won't be discouraged by this film from the author (because on its own, let's admit it, this film could have done that).