Dionysos

A true road movie. It’s not a Hollywood simulation, but the monotony of hundreds of tedious miles on a journey with a futile goal. The content of the film arises from American reality, but it borrows many formal techniques from European films: long static camera shots and a slow pace, but above all the lack of focus on plot twists - the film primarily builds on conveying the increasing feeling of frustrating hopelessness by merging the viewer with the time and feelings of the protagonist through the necessity of being immersed in the depressingly one-way direction of his journey, in which there is no room for the dynamics of the story, only for calming the viewer's pulse in patient anticipation of the outcome. The fact is that everyone can guess how the film is going to end. It is a matter of whether Jost will succeed in conveying the feeling of a stereotypical futile effort to change his own messed up life, manifested in a purposeless highway journey that is not movement on the horizontal axis but on the vertical axis - continuously deeper. He accomplishes this cinematically excellently through several techniques: with the first shot of the monotonous concrete road, Jost already establishes a mediating element that will separate the individual parts of the plot, i.e., shots of isolated roads, always the same, simulating movement par excellence (when you are not approaching an unreachable destination, you are actually standing still). Furthermore, the slow sunsets, the isolation of individuals that the protagonist meets in isolated encounters (direct communication with his own wife only indirectly - through a mirror, over the phone), lengthy speeches without a point or resolution, ending not with understanding but with arguments, etc. The entire film is deliberately structured according to the regularity of American highways, leading their victims, those without money, to disappointment from the fact that they themselves lead nowhere - and also to desperate actions.

Did Malevich's "Black Square" deal a deadly blow to painting as such and does the painter Rodolfo admit it? And yet he still continues to paint? This is called a love for creation as such, a love that all the main characters have more than enough of. However, it does not mean that there is no longer any room for human love. It can only be torn from a life in timelessness when the surrounding world speaks up, in the form of money, from which (unfortunately) artists must draw their livelihood. A funny, melancholic, and at the end bittersweet glimpse into the lives of three men who could have lived both 150 years ago and yesterday.

Paradoxically, one of the main characters of the so-called poetic film, Jurij Iljenko, made a film about rust, decaying water, death, and false hope, where the hints of poetry end up sarcastically trampled as a false illusion. It was the late 80s and early 90s when the USSR was experiencing not only glasnost, which led to the creation of this totally disillusioning film (one of many...), but also perestroika, which turned into no less than a total economic and political disaster. Like countless other perestroika films, this one offers only a dystopia, a land on the verge of human and natural catastrophe, where all human ties break apart and only the laws of violence and blunt power survive in the ruling anarchy. This anarchy leads nowhere and wants nothing - it just is and there is no way to escape it (the main character hides on a symbolic bridge between the zone and the outside world). The metaphor of the "escaped" prisoner who climbs into the very core of the long-empty Soviet reality in the form of a tin sickle and hammer and observes the manifestations of this reality from there, is perfect in terms of the script. When the inscription on the prison gate changes from "You cannot live in society and be free from society" to “cannot,” "live," "free," we should not read it literally but consider the original inscription as a whole. The film's authors are actually attacking the entire society of that time and the entire system of mutual relations, where only anonymity, egoism, and corruption reign, and where the only hope lies in the personal and unique actions of a few characters. Hence, another paradox - a collectivist society, from which alienation was to be eradicated, created a film about total alienation, where true life is represented only by the individual gestures of isolated individuals (such as a woman living on the outskirts in an abandoned railway building, etc.). For me, it's just a pity (but this is also a common feature of these films) that there were hints of Christian mythology in connection with the main character, although an interpretation in this spirit is certainly not the only possible one.

Where is the cradle of the crystal, where does it originate and what does the minimalist art crystal want to be? In the darkness of depth, in the loneliness of time, which stops in the darkness and surrenders the place to the desperation of closed self, to the self-crystallizing inner, which takes a long, long time to crystallize, but eventually the poet, director, and viewer will find what they are looking for. There may not be many crystals, but that makes them all the more valuable, and all the more the art film wants to be like it - rare, shining from the mass of shapeless rocks around it, only occasionally appearing in its brilliant beauty: like occasional music in the midst of silence, like illuminated faces in the midst of darkness, like poetry in the midst of silence, like paintings against the backdrop of emptiness.

"In the chain of representation, there is white space: in general, we learn about the text, play with it, and represent it. Here we read it. It is uncertainty that concerns the equation of The Truck. I don't know what happened, I did it instinctively, I feel that the representation was eliminated. The Truck is simply a representation of reading as such. And then there is the truck itself, a uniform element, constantly identical to itself, passing through the screen as if it were a musical staff." (Interview with M. Duras in Le Monde, 1977) We must not fall into two boundary traps that could destroy this film for us: we must not imagine that there is something before the text that the text says (this film "has nothing to say") nor must we imagine that the text is here to provide us with material for a superstructure, which is a graspable representation. The white space is always in the middle of the chain – everything graspable in the chain of things in front of the camera, behind the camera, before editing, and on the screen is composed thereof: the musical staff is pure white before and after each note, only it is definitive - only it is truly graspable. Only the thing is graspable, not the person. That is the message of both the film and its politics, a message strongly influenced by its time and the state of the French left since the late 1970s.

Perfect forethought in both the representation of the subject and, above all, in the completely conscious approach to the techniques of its representation. Metafictional methods and games with the functions of time and narration are not arbitrary allusions in Robbe-Grillet's works but rather a deliberate and inseparable part of the story itself, which irreversibly changes its essence. Example: when, during the opening credits, a voice-over utters a series of abstract words and verbal metaphors, we automatically begin to piece together these fragments into more coherent ideas, seeking connections between them and their meaning, etc. Throughout the film, these abstract words transform into actual events of the story, and verbal metaphors are replaced by visual metaphors and psychoanalytic/surrealistic symbols. In this way, the director has already provided us with the main components of the plot and their explanation in the introduction. However, this does not mean that we have been given the key to understanding the film - because, a) we only understand this during the course of the film, b) in the meantime, we are compelled to constantly contemplate the relationship between these inadequate pieces of information and the current plot, and finally c) we may reflect on the relationship between verbal representation and visual representation. There is certainly also a d), and e) – therein lies the beauty of it). Another example: symbolic compositions simultaneously split into general statements about the nature of desire and violence, comment on, or even anticipate the progression of the plot (when we see a blindfolded woman locked in a cage, it is both a reference to blinding and enslaving human desire and a foreshadowing of the future of the main character, who shortly thereafter ends up imprisoned with her eyes bound...). The main point is that the viewer never knows whether they are witnessing the course of the plot, a flashforward, a general symbol, a mere editing trick, or a character's imagination (which may later turn out to be the character's past and future). This could go on indefinitely…

The film is certainly not Italian soft porn, and the sporadic sex scenes in it (although quite explicit at times) only make sense in the context of the entire film, which primarily revolves around the overall societal movement in Italy from the late 70s and especially the 80s. The progressive era of consumptive "normalization" with the fading radicalism of the 60s and 70s brought most Italians to the embrace of simple pleasures such as color televisions, cars, and of course, sex (let us remember Pasolini's famous justification in Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom). The male characters in the film become symbols of this betrayal (Bellocchio himself was a member of the Communist Party and also a member of a Maoist cell in the 70s) or, for some, a sense of wisdom - notably Giulia's fiancé (who seemingly has no other role in the film) and her young lover. However, the film is not that simple, as it is complicated by (who else but) a woman. Giulia may appear at first glance as the most obvious manifestation of this primitive indulgence in sexual pleasures, but in her ambiguity, she would need to have not been played by the surprisingly very good M. Detmers and, most importantly, Bellocchio could not end the film with a perfect conclusion in which the role of the seemingly self-evident school lectures from antiquity to Feuerbach is fulfilled. Is Giulia a modern-day Antigone and therefore a positive character? And does the film thereby become Bellochio's denunciation of the times or a confession of his past mistakes?

In order to find a solution, whether it is chemical or political, it is necessary to dissolve. Dissolve hydrogen, dissolve parliament. Here, we are preparing to dissolve image and sound. The motto "decomposition, reduction, substitution, and reconstitution" of images and sounds into new forms is inherent in Godard's entire work, but after May 68, there was also a strong desire to discover new forms of social and political expression. However, this effort was not separate from the initial motto! Godard is thus fully the heir to the spirit of the May revolt in its innovative idea that man changes through action (for example, by participating in a new form of political self-expression and self-control, for example, the famous motto "autogestion" - self-management). Man does not change only after the revolution, but before it and through it, and the revolution completes itself only with the changed individual. Joy of Learning is the film equivalent of the same thing - this film is not the finished result of the author's reflections on film, but a 95-minute-long self-reflexive process in which the author seeks and constantly (re)formulates the relationship between image and sound, film and society (here, it is necessary to mention the touching desire with which Godard believed that a revolutionarily created film could be one of the building blocks of the revolution - see references to the magazine Cahiers de Cinema, other filmmakers, etc.). This film is thus not a perfectly closed structure unified by a single meaning, but it has a radically open structure that allows it to simultaneously convey a multitude of different messages and experiment with itself, change itself, and thereby prepare for new tasks that will lie ahead in the future for such a discovered film.

It looks seemingly simple: just go out on the street and engage in a conversation with a willing Parisian, talk to them using gentle maieutics (the film could be called "Le joli maïeutique"), film everything with cameramen who know that documentary shots don't have to mean just sticking a camera on a tripod into the ground and then focusing on the talking head, and finally, refresh the film with a few deeper thoughts for contemplation. But because over 50 years have passed and no one has yet truly followed up on this work in terms of quality or scope, it speaks of everything that stood before the authors as far as the simplicity of the task is concerned. The film complemented the emerging (French) cinema-verité movement in its time, especially the famous Chronicle of a Summer by the Rouch/Morin duo. The soul of France, traced on the streets of Paris, shedding its burdens of the past and searching for a different future. P.S. The original version of the film is approximately 160 minutes long, but the English version (originally for the USA) was edited down to just under 2 hours. Some important scenes were cut, especially those with political significance (such as memories of torture during the Algerian War).

Already in Garrel's debut film Marie for Memory, there was a quite non-conformist portrayal of Jesus, and here too I am unsure to what extent this undoubtedly contemporary situation of the non-revolutionary year of 1968 is meant as an authentic update of the Bible. But in this indecisiveness - at least for me - lies one of the film’s advantages, thanks to which even a leftist atheist can appreciate the New Testament story of Jesus and Mary and vice versa. The structure of the story is also ambiguous: Jesus' apparent Oedipal relationship with his mother (played by the same actress as Mary Magdalene) continues throughout the entire runtime, but individual scenes/metaphors prevail overall, in which the audiovisual element dominates. Michel Fournier's camera work - also a member of the Zanzibar group (another member, Frédéric Pardo, made the medium-length film Home Movie, autour du 'Lit de la vierge about this) - together with the sound, which alternates long silent passages with psychedelic rock, create a burdensome and lyrical atmosphere on the edge between harsh reality and the hope and defiance of stimulating myth. It's a film about the sad and lonely messiahship of young left-wing artists/revolutionary messengers of the Zanzibar group X Jesus Christ.