Dionysos

From the bones of martyrs, the long-dead survivor emerges from the morbid display of the Otranto church ossuary, for... Actually, I don't even know, but one thing is certain – the main character will wander through centuries, events, desires, and peripeties, like in a feverish, bitter, satirical dream, where the laws of time, profane and sacred, do not apply. It is partly an autobiographical-toned film (Bene plays the main character on whom the entire film relies; in fact, Bene was born near Otranto). Bene also often uses very short shots and brisk editing, thanks to which the resulting fast and surprising montage evokes in the viewer sudden and unexpected emotions, just as the poetic-philosophical passages evoke awe and confusion in the viewer's intellect. The film received the Grand Jury Prize (alongside Robert Lapoujade's film Le Socrate) at the Venice Film Festival in 1968.

A lonely Soviet-type ruin: a woman who sacrificed herself for society/the state/a better tomorrow for all - yes, it is a uniquely Soviet/Russian type that articulated the most altruistic of communist ideology with the fate of Russian history. Nadezhda Petruchina finds her alter ego in Kara's Tomorrow Was the War (1987), in Iskra's mother who sacrificed everything for the Revolution, and the Great Patriotic War, and transformed herself into an impersonation of the Idea - Petruchina loses her youth in the war, only to selflessly dissolve herself in building a better world for children, whom she cannot have precisely because of it. If her husband had survived, he would undoubtedly be Alexei Astakhov from Chukhray's Clear Skies (1961). And most importantly - if Petruchina had her own children, they would certainly be the children from Khutsiev's I'm 20 Years Old (1965) - those children who learn that one can work for Soviet society without sacrificing oneself (something that, in a selfish way, Petruchina’s stepdaughter, emphasizing the word “step,” tries to do!). /// For post-communist "thinking," the sacred idea of totalitarianism will of course never admit the existence of inhabitants of the USSR who willingly sacrificed their youth and lives in service to a society that was certainly not ideal, but who also never definitively abandoned the idea that that ideal could come (because they were indoctrinated by a totalitarian ideology, that is certain and scientifically explained). The civil war, the 1930s, industrialization, the Second World War, and the end of Stalinism - then came Petruchina, only to discover that no one needs her efforts anymore, that a different era has begun, which must forget about her in order to peacefully live off her work. What would she say about the fall of communism is another question that gives her solitude another dimension...

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 inferno turned upside down. It ultimately rages outside the boundaries of her first love's inner being and accuses her surroundings - her era. This is because in the context of the director's work (and the film itself), it is evident that the documentary retrospective of the personal history of the characters serves not only as a mere dramatic construction of characters outside of space and time, but on the contrary, it attaches them to their social conditions: the increasingly frequent structures of perversion on the part of adult male characters, the disintegration of the traditional family, and women's emancipation form faithful backdrops for the psychology of the main characters, which also adorn the habitat of every modern film viewer. Moreover, what was common in this (and the best) period of world cinema - the story, psychology, and general statements - are combined with formal equilibristics, whose visual style may be self-serving in some places, but not unimpressive. In any case, the film deliberately does not achieve the status of a truly experimental film. The first love of the (post)modern era will have to overcome internal and external obstacles (forever?), but will never again encounter innocence, violated already in childhood and violated by perversion, and passed from victim to victim like from generation to generation.

An avant-garde surrealist film by avant-garde director Marc'O, who was closely associated with the French Lettrism movement at the time of its creation and also contributed to the production of the movement's magnum opus Venom and Eternity (1951). The film presents itself as both a cinematic and psychological experiment, capturing the unorganized flow of the author's consciousness onto the film screen, which is simultaneously animated by materializing these fleeting thoughts and ideas through various visual motifs, ranging from staged scenes with live actors to shots of artistic works (which aesthetically resemble the best of independent creations of that time, such as Dadaist collages by Fernando Léger and Jean Cocteau, who personally heavily promoted the film, including at the Cannes festival). Overall, this is a high-quality surrealist and impressionist film, of which there were already many in the sphere of independent experimental cinema, but it is uniquely enriched by the addition of a second layer above the plane of purely visual representations of the artist's subconscious ideas: the sound, monologue, and internal dialogue, all of which give the already suggestive images greater depth and new meanings.

Maestro Terayama clearly did not fear very sharp irony, bordering on mockery within his own ranks - already in his feature film debut about the ketchup emperor, it was strange to see a legend of avant-garde Japanese theater ridicule the youth counterculture of the late 1960s (thus one of the important conditions of the underground/independent/experimental scene of that time, in which Terayama himself was involved) - but here the irony is balanced with tolerance towards youth as such and in places even genuine appreciation of its radicalism. The overall (intentionally) humorous scenes of the coming-of-age of the main non-hero provide the backdrop (somewhat condescendingly - Terayama was 35 years old, so almost a generation removed from the main characters of the film) for the double exploration of a generation and its world. The surreal image of a burning airplane with a red flag in the background, which burns along with it, can serve as an explanation of the author's entire perspective on the student movement: the inexperienced youth (symbolized in the film by the airplane) turns to ashes as part of the protagonist's maturation, and likewise, the red flag (which in the film uniquely symbolizes a red flag) ends in flames - the left-wing radicalism of the youth at the time serves as a mediator in their transition to a more mature phase of independent creation and life. /// Otherwise, it is truly a product of a unique period in cinema - metafiction, the insertion of separate sequences capturing artistic performances in the streets of Tokyo, surrealistic scenes, playing with filters, etc. One slightly disappointing aspect was the unexpectedly simple portrayal of the central plot. However, for some (more so the majority of viewers) this will be seen as a positive aspect, as it doesn't get lost in the complexity of the form.

It is true that the film corresponds to the contemporary discourse and practices of leftist art cinema, but again, it certainly can't be said that they correspond to the contemporary discourse (as a whole) - it is simply non-mainstream art, close to Kluge, Sander, etc., but certainly not to the prevailing conditions in the film industry or society. /// What is interesting is the introductory narrative approach to social conditions in the form of fictional highly stylized theater, which is subsequently replaced during the film by the anti-fictional quasi-documentary style of the fictional protagonist, replacing theater with sociology. It is also interesting to observe the depiction of the slow fading of the political determination of the 1968 generation. The feminist motif, where the film is narrated from the perspective of the female protagonist and where the woman is internally stronger in the relationship, etc., is presented in a non-aggressive and rather subtle way, but it doesn't change the fact that it is somewhat predictable.

In his first American film, Gorin does not hide that he is a European intellectual and apprentice of Godard during the Maoist period. It is not that the movie is political-philosophical experimental agitprop, but because it explores fundamental questions of language and identity (the golden age of the linguistic turn in social sciences), social exclusion (the story of the daughters from a poor, half-immigrant family on the outskirts of San Diego's agglomeration is truly not just about cognitive psychology and linguistics...), and presents it all to the viewer in the sophisticated and playful form of a highly personal documentary - Gorin, just like during the times of the Dziga Vertov group, breaks the (pseudo)documentary norm of a separate object and narrator, enters the plot, comments on it, etc. Yet that alone would not be all that exceptional, but from the period less than ten years ago, Gorin also retained a feeling for the multi-layered construction of a narrative combining different media (the initial sequences combining Gorin's reflections and the initial introduction of the central theme with children's immigrant comics seem as if they came directly from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s) and especially the excellent separation of the visual and sound components, which is crucial for Gorin's meticulous tracing of the speech of both girls. It turns out that the discontinuous and disjointed composition of sound and image can also serve in the documentary field. /// However, Gorin did not overlook the socio-critical dimension, even though it is hidden under the guise of a peculiar nostalgia - the disappearance of a unique relationship and a unique language, accompanied by the adoption of the dominant language, doubles the fate of the entire family, which is sinking deeper and deeper on the social ladder as it adopts a foreign dominant language of social conduct...

A young priest arrives in a remote and dilapidated town to replace his deceased predecessor - he doesn't know for how long, and he is unfamiliar with the locals. Apart from the poor villagers, mixed-race Indians, and diamond seekers, who live in a place of faded prosperity, living here are only a local dignitary, his beautiful young protégé, and another young, peculiar white man. The title of the film suggests where the plot will lead. However! The film relies more on the overall atmosphere (the play of silence and music is worth contemplating), the characters, excellent camera work, and interesting editing of certain scenes. However, one user on IMDb wrote, "The characters are sketched to remain mysterious (it's all suggestions, nothing is defined), but you could also call them underdeveloped." Nevertheless, they are still interesting characters within the context of the film - a woman transforming from a victim into a danger; feminine love and the body as a threat to male purity of spirit and character, or conversely, as a challenge for cleansing action towards others and one's neighbor. The film thus builds tension through the (absence) of music, the editing, and occasionally impressive black-and-white visual compositions.

The average viewer looking for a horror film will indeed find it, but in a reversed form, because this film is not the domain of conventional cinema, but quite the opposite - the average viewer will run away from the film in horror (by which Necropolis paradoxically fulfills one of the ideal goals of the horror genre). It is, in fact, a total European art film - the end of the 1960s, counterculture, long intellectual declamations in even longer shots, and traditional B-movie and historical characters turned upside down into pop-art material used to create completely different meanings (Frankenstein as a thinker/propagator of revolutionary ideas in the style of consciousness-raising, Bathory as a modern neurotic woman dissatisfied with her husband, etc.). The entire film is shot in a studio using minimalist but aesthetically exquisitely crafted sets, which provide a great background for detailed studies of characters and actors with the slow and static camera. The actors are chosen in an interesting way because they mirror the multi-layered nature of the film - from more avant-garde and art actors like Clémenti or Viva to the supremely avant-garde playwright and director Carmelo Bene, and even Bruno Corazzari, who acted in spaghetti westerns. The film also has a decent humorous component and, moreover, even at first glance, the sequence of scenes, which is only loosely connected, has a certain internal logic and relationships.