Dionysos

The film tells us something about cinema, but also about art as a whole. The classic thesis about a work of art is that its individual parts are interconnected, relying on each other to form a cohesive structure that can be more than the sum of its parts but should not be less than this sum (otherwise it is a bad work, a postmodern broken mirror with only shiny shards left). 31/75 Asylum proves to us how individual point fragments taken from something as uniform as a static landscape painting can also function as a whole in a completely different work - a square of winter snowscape transferred to the spring creates a pleasant reflection of light, now suddenly we have an idyll, etc. In addition, the black masks covering the whole for most of the time and separating individual points have the effect of making it even more impossible to find a definitive image of the entire landscape (not only spatially but also temporally fragmented) - the whole is thus determined only at the end, firstly when Kren reveals his film material to us, but mainly when the viewer himself composes the whole in his own imagination.

Flickering Windows or the flicker effect went for a walk in the park, and Austria obtained its second Kubelka, thus permanently establishing itself in the history of experimental (structural) film. Already in 2/60 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test, Kren pressed the film window below the threshold of perception and thus created something that is sometimes called a retinal collage - countless individually imperceptible human faces combine to form different faces, or rather invariant human faces, in the viewer's perception. However, in 3/60, we do not find new trees or the invariant of a tree, but we move from the whole to the parts - from the tree to its leaves. Indeed, by correctly aiming the camera and reducing the number of windows in the shot, the branches themselves can become their own miniature components, i.e., leaves, with their branched veins. Or rather, a film synecdoche. But in 3/60, the flicker effect is used completely and entirely - the viewer's retina finds its reflection in the film just as the branches of trees creating new images of leaf veins double the viewer's veins in the eye.

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]

An explosion of primordial energy - animality, blood, a world without convention because it is without culture: the sinking of culture into a total mixture, in which things lose their shape and a bicycle lies on the table - explosion of the frenetic force of film, feverish unrestrained editing, sinking into the film. The return of the artist from the mid-20th century to this state through imitation of the creative process of a caveman, covering the walls and ceiling of his cave with drawings composed of simple lines? Ana as a Paleolithic Venus, unappealing and even terrifying to our modern conventions, but in the world of Freudian patria potestas before Oedipus, an embodiment of animal beauty? A bit like a sped-up Zwartjes.

Repetition to the new, or a direct route to always the same thing? A clear example, obviously escaping the authors: the original book logo MaM changes to MM in the miniseries, and in this difference everything is contained - the illusory conjunction & created internal differentiation and the appearance that two M's are something different than the single person Milo Minderbinder, who stands behind all the business: we thus had sameness that differentiates itself from itself and creates something new, a constantly expanding world within a world, a circular economy from M to M with the symbol &, full of twists and circularity of time. In contrast, MM connected by a common vertical line where one M ends where the other begins refers to unidirectional verticality of time, also known as linearity of time and storytelling, which in the case of American TV series, Netflix series, Apple TV products, HBO miniseries, and Hollywood films is always the same, an eternal return of the same narrative pattern, visual and narrative clichés, and with it, the smoothed contents that are so contrary to the very basic building block of the book source that this cannot be reflected, as it is not a legitimate change (because any adaptation from a book to a film is always perceived by the original readers as simplification/distortion, etc., which is not the case with this rape of the basic narrative structure itself), but it is political, ideological, and Artistic with a capital A, against which one must fight always and everywhere and by all means!

The film was shot in the 60s but not completed until 1984, which coincides with H. Frampton's death. The entire film takes place between two camera perspectives: that of A) J. Wieland and B) H. Frampton. These two are both the subject and the creators, the subject-substance of the film. Thanks to their mutual effort to film each other during their own filmmaking/cinematography work, an image of themselves and the image of the city of Ontario gradually emerged. This fact is characteristic: all the other film cameras in all other films progress in a similar manner, despite the absence of such an obvious splitting that I witness here. Each camera primarily records itself and only secondarily the world/what it wants to depict because it always destroys the world and shapes it according to its own nature (referring to both the technical aspect and the artistic intentions of the director and cameraman, etc.). A and B in Ontario is a material demonstration of this.

Another in a series of bleak films that in a raw way and without sentimental embellishments capture the harsh life of survival in a depressing economic situation, set in gloomy tones and where the frosty weather serves as a backdrop to the pre-Christmas rush to emphasize the cold reality. As in any society, especially in the Western consumerist society, money is, unfortunately, a necessary means for even basic simple happiness, but when it is lacking, even an otherwise orderly person can succumb to an easy but illegal way to get rich. It is sad that (especially in the USA), money is perceived not only as important but as the main source of happiness (a new television, a nicer house, more expensive toys). Thus, the true "happy ending" is that this perception changes for the film's protagonists in the end.

Marker, as a member of the revolutionary filmmaker group SLON, created an agitprop documentary that aimed to show workers as a class the value of the strike as such (this was made easier by the fact that the specific strike depicted in the film was largely unsuccessful...). The film aimed to strengthen solidarity and build a collective class consciousness based on the understanding of the incompatibility between capitalists and the working class: "The real result of that strike was not a 3 or 4% rise but the education of young workers, discovering the true identity of their struggle." Marker allows the actors of the strike to speak for themselves, choosing moments when the workers and union members reach similar conclusions. I have two comments on this: 1) The idea that behind the workers' nominal desires (for wage improvement/maintaining current bonuses/fear of layoffs, etc.) lies the "true" desire for overall social change can be seen as either the authors' naivety or as an understanding that this hidden "truth" of the workers' struggle does not exist until it is brought to light through ideological struggle. 2) Marker was undoubtedly skillful, and thus his films never descend to mediocrity; however, even in this film, it does have limitations that can be observed in most of the then "revolutionary" French productions: constant talking, blah blah blah, talking (although Marker does allow the workers, who speak honestly and simply, to have their voices heard, which may not have been so distant from the target audience of the same social class). The cherry on top is the spontaneous student films during/after May 1968, where the viewer only witnesses youthful intellectual chatter, which only another convinced, left-wing student or intellectual is willing and capable of understanding...

Loznica films do not want to say anything - they simply show it. And yet they are able to shout their message to the world. The USSR/Russia had and still has special luck with the montage documentary genre: Esfir Shub invented it in the 1920s and eighty years later Loznica proves its power even for a 21st century documentary with artistic ambitions. At the same time, yesterday and today, the manipulative power that the director holds is demonstrated. Shub was already able to direct the viewer's understanding of historical events through editing and commentary intertitles. Loznica also pushes the perception of the recorded material but through a different medium - sound. Sound, or rather how it is missing in many moments, or how it is lazy, muted, how it rarely but urgently attacks, and how it evokes a strange frozen atmosphere in the viewer. It is as if even the sound was slowly starving and no longer had the strength to shout or scream - like in weeklies from the war, like in war movies, and like in second-rate documentaries, where the same images appear anyway. Or in the case when Loznica pulls them out of the (silence) archive after sixty years and gives them a voice - but a muted, waiting, resigned voice, perfectly opposite to the normal lively city. That is far more impressive than any shot of lying dead bodies.

Sartre's cliché that hell is other people is fully valid - hell is indeed not a place, just as death has no topos: it is in music, words, looks, and the objective of the camera. And death is in the soul instead of the "sun in the soul," the sun of beauty, the Brazilian sun, the sun of the Tropic of Capricorn, the state of Minas Gerais. There is something mythological about the theme, in which a family of decaying former aristocracy or high bourgeoisie closes itself in its isolated, nostalgically wallpapered Petri dish and is observed from the outside with an artistic microscope, just as it is threatened from the outside by the draft of modernity. The biggest contribution of this film lies in two things: firstly, this draft does not represent any simplified agitational symbol, but a character equally hysterical and in its defiant energy almost equally feeble-minded, which means that senseless conjectures, accusations, jealousies, envies, illusions, and chimeras do not sound out, as if there were a simple way out in the right direction. Therefore, secondly, the film is at its strongest when it leaves that external appearance and dives inside its Petri dish - death as a depth permeates the whole mise-en-scène, framing, and a dramatically sweet neo-romantic musical underscore.