Dionysos

Between Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Popular Press, there is a shift (note - the term “shift” does not have to be taken normatively) towards a more classical narrative, and indeed we encounter a dramatic arc here. In the context of the author's previous films, it is almost a perfectly solid arch! I believe that the film has a more or less clear purpose and is therefore about something, i.e., it is an update of a classic literary work. However, unlike the original, Dorian does not see himself in painting, but rather in the tabloid press. But while in the original the painting becomes more hideous as Dorian changes, here Dorian transforms depending on how his media image changes. Herein lies the main theme of the film, based on contemporary social science studies (including gender studies, post-structuralism, media studies, cultural studies, etc.) - the theme of individual identity construction through media discourses, the secondary nature of the individual in relation to mass societal and cultural practices, etc. However, the film is not primarily an objectifying pseudo-documentary, as that would not be Ottinger - her penchant for costumes, dada or twistedly garish aesthetics (the 1980s!) is also present here. So is surrealism, but it is less prominent and the viewer can more easily relate the surreal scenes to the overall structure. Compared to Freak Orlando, the individual surreal scenes do not have complete autonomy - whether it is the opera scene or others – and they are always more or less connected to the film's underlying theme, which is the step forward that the character of the all-powerful media magnate D. Seyrig takes in relation to the poor Dorian (the opera as a distorted mirror of the actress and Dorian's publicized relationship; Seyrig, who also appears in seemingly purely personal delirious visions of the main character, who no longer has a private life, etc.).

This socially critical farce, surprising in its content and form, deals with the commercialization of love in the contemporary world, incorporating the consequences of the sexual revolution and women's emancipation into its consumerist framework, using absurd and black humor. Just as we can see the progressing emptiness and focus on immediate satisfaction in the realm of sex and love – a casual orgasm through at least two secondary characters (Dorothea's father, the owner of a company with funny objects; her friend's father, a worker in this factory), we are confronted with the second level of emptiness – the emptiness of work and life focused on immediate satisfaction - profit. Above all, we will be following Dorothea on her odyssey with contemporary society, which is caused by a simple question: what is love? The film had problems with West German censorship at the time of its release (although Fleischmann intended the film to be anti-pornography, authorities still perceived it as pornography...). [Cinefest 2014]

In the office of the secretary of the national committee, there are pictures of Beneš, Masaryk, and Stalin hanging next to each other in a prominent place. In the same historical atmosphere, this film is being made, clearly advocating for the emerging socialist order and specifically for nationalized industry. However, it is not an orthodox building film, as the main role is played by human calculation, trickery, and slyness, accompanying the public tendering and assignment. With almost all of the numerous characters, we encounter some form of selfishness, self-centeredness, and often even such stupidity that even the intentionally positive characters did not seem particularly sympathetic to me (except for the main protagonist, whose unwavering altruism is one of the few explicitly black and white things in this film). Today's viewers will certainly be interested in the circumstances of public tendering, which are still unchanged, such as commissions for council members, personal favors, manipulation of the public, etc...

In this film, Rivette drifted towards the shallows of the tendency he already demonstrated in Celine and Julie Go Boating and Noroît. The essence of the problem lies in the fact that his Duelle is trapped by the plot, but it is not about the plot. Duelle is undoubtedly a European independent art film, but it retains (or tries to, because Rivette never made conventional films and could not "retain" their principles) a "Hollywood" focus on the plot. Antonioni (Blow-Up) or Wenders (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) served to us an internally coherent plot, only to purposefully (thanks to the open, unexplained ending) demonstrate its existential absurdity; in the films of the 80s and early 20th century (which are the only ones that can be compared here) Godard also retained the plot, but to such a reduced extent that the film can do without it and finally, while other art filmmakers either directly show the senselessness/impossibility of any plot (Robbe-Grillet, Lynch's Mulholland Dr.) or do without it altogether (Akerman in the 1970s, of the ones I know and now come to mind, but there are many, even infinitely, if we look at the genre of experimental film). Rivette presents to the viewer a film in which nothing can be followed other than the plot (the camera, editing, form - mostly nothing, and if so, then nothing revealing), which is boring, meaningless, but nevertheless, is somehow explained at the end (the openness of the ending is lost; there is no reflection on the essence of the story as such, which we have access to when the author shows us a particular story as meaningless, etc.). The viewer is caught in a plot that he cannot leave, but which does not want to say anything. That is why this film also does not say anything.

A minimalistic black-and-white recording of the performance of the opera of the same name by German composer Arnold Schoenberg (premiere in 1930; libretto: Max Blonda, which is a pseudonym of Gertrude Schoenberg, the author's wife). The story takes place in a single room of a middle-class couple's apartment, who return from a party in the late hours and balance their marital relationship. The aging man wishes to escape the boredom and constraining mundane worries of a well-ordered family life, but after his wife returns the favor, he gladly returns to the tracks of a contented bourgeois life upon sobering up in the morning. The traditionally economical and hypnotically simple style of Straub + Huillet, who took Schoenberg as their model in their other film Moses and Aaron (1974).

The Misery of British Cinema I. Everything here is as expected, the misery of British cinema, albeit in its probably best period, in an otherwise relatively decent film. Is this a contradiction? Not at all. It is just a manifestation of the reasons why true cinema has never emerged in the UK (and when it did, it had to be made by lone artists who could have been born anywhere else). Kitchen sink realism - angry young men, meaning literature and theater translated to the big screen. Look Back in Anger - but who is looking back in anger? Cinema as such - the British never learned to express themselves through film and they always resort to words - Richard Burton is not acting in a film by Tony Richardson, but in a drama by John Osborne. Even if kitchen sink does not always come directly from literature, when will we see a play with the film medium in it, the mediation of the story through form? As Greenaway (that lone artist, symptomatic of the UK...) reportedly said: it was just an illustrated text. They are high-quality texts, with respectable and beneficial social themes, standing out in a positive sense in the history of British cinema - and yet, in this film (speculatively), all the misery of British cinema is contained.

Theater within theater in film; film as a link between two dramas, one performed in front of the fourth wall and its sets, the other behind it; two in one, it’s not 1 + 1, but rather 2 + 1 = 3. The first half falls into the classical genre of "theater as an image of the world," where we primarily do not understand the world as theater, but theater as a world in miniature, and thus theatrum mundi folded within itself. It portrays the reality of the Odessa world brilliantly, just like in The Asthenic Syndrome or German's Khrustalyov, My Car!, we see the anarchic, farcical, darkly humorous, bitter, superficial, and profound reality of the bizarre Eastern European reality. The second half offers apparent discontinuity (it also has a different screenplay writer), where the plot is truly different, but at its core lies the continuity of the director (the director as a representative of the film connecting the two screenplays as representatives of the dramatic genre) and the artistic approach: through visible means, especially great cinematography, but mainly through the smooth connection of the two stories that carry the same message - after all, the second half is equally bizarre, absurd, full of burned-out or characters wandering in the meaninglessness of their lives. In short, the combination of two images of a people's society without finality in a film that therefore cannot have its own conventional plot.

The harsh life of the Kyrgyz population during the Great Patriotic War seen in two ways - firstly as a personally emotionally tinted reflection on the past of the narrator's life from the perspective of an adult painter, and secondly as the immediate reconstruction of the bygone era through the recording of the painter's destiny as a child (the plot itself). The originality of the film lies in the separation (and subsequent unification) of both perspectives through the painter's memories materialized into colorful images, which, through their colorfulness, acquire a retrospective revival (colorization, if you will) of the black and white story itself as seen from the position of the boy at that time (and what seemed black and white, and cruel to him, still not understanding the events). Thanks to the love between Dzhamiliya and Daniyar, however, the boy matures and opens up to the beauty of life, which he will forever seek in his paintings. Great camera work. The script was also written by Aitmatov.

The view challenges, the heart tempts, the circumstances urge - the coward runs away: Yankee has recently awakened and turned his favorite genre, the road movie, into a tool for self-criticism of his own life project. The neurotic man (that is, the majority white so-called "normal" subject) has reached the end of his historical journey and, as he has so often realized, lacks the courage for the ultimate fulfillment of his desire. It is therefore finally deservedly left by the roadside of history. Tomorrow belongs not necessarily directly to women, but at least not to men (and if the future were at least half as beautiful as Talia Ryder, Jordan Peterson, the prototype of a fighter for male historical supremacy, who must take antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills...) would certainly dare to enter it, for example, as the archetype of today's North American defenders of old conservative orders. The Sweet East, just like this year's Beau Is Afraid, brilliantly shows male weakness and inability to fulfill their role, while Tom Cruise still probably managed to produce the appropriate reaction to Nicole Kidman's "Fu*k" in Eyes Wide Shut. Contemporary American heroes can no longer do that - whether it is shown to us through the surreal introspection of the male soul in Beau or, on the contrary, negatively through the fate of a girl whose vicissitudes are fundamentally shaped by male incapacity to achieve what they want for their cultural-political self-delusions... Fortunately, American cinema is partly getting rid of its Hollywood self and offers at least in these two cases films that are not afraid to step at least a little off the beaten track of cinematic storytelling.

The beginning of the film undermines the viewer's expectations by presenting the predictable behavior of both sides of the conflict - the mafia and the main protagonist, Salvatore, along with the locals who are terrorized. Fortunately, this initial idyllic image falls apart due to the cautiousness of the locals, who are determined to fight against the uncompromising activism and the "worldly" mainland Italy that Salvatore represents. His power struggle with the mafia becomes more complex and isolating, and as a character, Salvatore, portrayed brilliantly by Volonté, is surprisingly ambiguous. Given the development of the situation, his motivation to altruistically help the oppressed, based on his firm convictions, gradually blends with self-sacrificing martyrdom, bordering on self-adoration. However, the feature debut of the three directors did not achieve (and deservedly so, even though it's still a very good film) the same recognition as the famous films/debuts of the early 1960s that changed the face of Italian cinema, such as Accattone (1961) by Pasolini, Time Stood Still (1959) + The Job (1961) by E. Olmi, and Bandits of Orgosolo (1960) by Vittorio De Seta.