Dionysos

Director: Patrick Deval. The film belongs to the (nowadays) so-called Zanzibar group, a group of young leftist intellectuals and, as stated in the subheading of one of the current books about this group of "dandies," who, influenced by the intellectual climate in Paris at the end of the 1960s and May 1968, created radical films both in terms of content and form. Headless is precisely such a product on the edge of film experimentation and a political-worldview essay. Formally, it relies on a contrasting black and white camera and long static shots, deliberately disrupted and "liberated" by rare and beautiful camera movements. In terms of content, it is an uncompromising hymn to the radical rejection of contemporary society and a call for a new beginning. Thoughts are expressed in the form of long declamations on the edge of a political manifesto and poetry... poetry: the thoughts surprisingly resemble those of F. Nietzsche. Did the main character perhaps represent a new Zarathustra? The film emanates, especially due to the involvement of members of the Zanzibar group, the semi-improvised, unofficial, youthful spirit of filmmakers, for whom the film was both entertainment and a personal, artistic, and political mission. /// Interview with the author: http://sensesofcinema.com/2008/before-the-revolution/patrick-deval/

A brutally precise post-sorella film for Latin America that somewhat misses every box in which the viewer would automatically want to put it, and it is precisely this missing that leads to its greatness. It just needs a few short speeches of self-confusing introspection of the main character and a few scenes whose musical motif and overtly parodied filming undermine the seriousness of the situation, and the blocks of capitalist slave masters, carved by workers, take on a completely different meaning than the precise fulfillment of their function in the historical drama of a class on the path to realization. Paradoxically, the author didn't add anything to the characters' false chimera of psychological depth (which none of us have ever had), but still remains at a higher level, albeit still just a "mere" function, allowing them to perish in the hundreds in the audiovisual dramatization of the choreography of the idea of execution and brutal injustice, reminiscent of works of this type by Miklos Jancso.

Together with the subsequent film Mamma Roma and his very first prose book "Ragazzi di vita" (1955), it is about Pasolini's contradictory view of the life of the Roman lumpenproletariat. By contradictory, I don't mean formally, but as life itself is contradictory (and as his life and work were too). The characters are both sincere and treacherous, their laziness is undeniable, and they rob others and each other, but they can also be generous like few "decent" people, and so on and so forth. It is as if they have preserved something childish within themselves (friendship, the desire for eternal holidays), which, while maintaining it into adulthood, proves incompatible with our society (at least with the "honorable" part). The characters suffer for it, it can be said partly rightfully so, but that does not mean that their lives are not too dearly redeemed. Pasolini lingers in these works over the fact that the victims of these people are greater than their sins.

Filmmaking, its sociology, and its history - and especially the border between Europe and the USA, which is by no means impassable. Wenders crosses it on several levels. Primarily on a formal level, which splits along the Atlantic line into two distinct filmmaking continents: the first half in a typically slow, introspective European pace, an atmosphere of emotions rather than a storyline, while the American odyssey takes the form of uncovering secrets, almost like detective hitchhiking, a game of explosions and camera that offers the essence (although more artistic) of American cinema. Therefore, the character sketch in the first half should not be seen as unsuccessful - it was not meant to be complete, because even the first part of the film is not complete without its second half. The second half, the dear half - Wenders' love for the USA is evident here, and it is simply fascinating how he managed to correct it with that European artistic filmmaking form in the 80s, something he could no longer achieve later on. /// The sociological aspect is apparent - Wenders himself, Robert Kramer as the co-screenwriter and actor of the film, a director originally from America but who eventually worked in Europe, Sam Fuller (for whom a European played an American?). The historical aspect of film in the context of Euro-American cinema is evident, not only thanks to countless references to classic films. /// Thus, when the characters discuss two different artistic visions of film, it is necessary to keep in mind that it is a metafiction perfectly captured by Wenders and applied to the entire film.

In a sensitive and peaceful spirit, Olmi reconstructs the vanished Europe divided between the agrarian and industrial eras, with factories and the world that comes with them only vaguely and somewhat ominously outlined on the horizon for our protagonists. Today's Europeans can only imagine what it was like when countless estates, mills, fields and gardens, churches, roads, and paths were scattered throughout the countryside, where people worked and lived at an unchanged pace for generations. However, idealization is not appropriate (and credit to the director for not forcing it into the film) – people suffered from the injustice of the social order, were held captive by superstition, they certainly did not reject profit and money, and work was mainly seen as a duty. Yet what can be done when they did everything in their lives with such simple sincerity that no one has today?!

How to liberate the suffering when suffering is the means to fulfill their desires – Hirszman performs a cut into the morality of the Brazilian petite bourgeoisie, in which the struggle of the favelas and poverty against the external/class enemy is replaced by the internal struggle of the declining petit bourgeois against themselves. The wife, representing a model hysterical structure in which there is a constant shifting of her own life dissatisfaction onto new objects, finds her complement in the husband's inability not only to find work but to not even look for work: any real resistance á la traditional cinema novo is inconceivable for the protagonists who enjoy their own satisfaction in privacy. As the film (and probably its literary source) brilliantly shows, the symbolic and intellectual horizon of the protagonists does not go beyond the framework of their class, which lacks the abundance of the upper society and the radicalism of the low classes' poverty, and therefore they need to never have too little but also not too much - the closer that power is, the more internal sabotage occurs (abandoning a lover, squandering easily earned money, etc.). The cornerstone of the work's construction is that it is precisely this view of their class, which regulates and motivates the actions of the main protagonists, that is visibly personified in the character of Glorinha, a wealthier relative – her omnipresence in the field of the protagonists' internal motivation is balanced precisely by her factual absence.

Earthly life is sad and violent, while the world of supernatural beings is magical and pleasant. In this film, however, things are definitely not like that. Yet in the supernatural world, you can at least eventually find justice. In the earthly world, no. Or yes? Just as Ophelia cannot reconcile herself with the (albeit inconspicuous) injustice done to an innocent creature and, as a result, becomes an innocent victim herself, Spain was forced to become a victim of Franco's fascism for four decades. Ophelia is rewarded for it in the fairy tale world. Spain, in the real world, may not seem like it at first glance, but there is still a chance - if the Spaniards were not willing to sacrifice the innocent for their own happiness, the new generation, even if it emerges from the horror of the previous generation, can experience more just and free times.

Pasolini is a communist without progressive faith in economic modernization, nostalgically looking backward rather than forward, seeking authenticity in human life unspoiled by the empty greed of capitalist civilization. Pasolini finds a non-utilitarian way of experiencing the world either in the past (his work inspired by antiquity, later the Trilogy of Life set in the Middle Ages), or in the (lumpen) proletariat of southern Italy (a recurring theme in his work, strictly speaking, however, also - through the irreversible disappearance of this way of life in post-industrial Italy - belonging to the order of history), or as here - in the combination of both. Africa as the intersection of history and the present: the present symbolizing modernization in the form of pervasive consumerism, sparing no developing countries, which are presented as the only possible future; history as the experience of a time when soulless rationality and the utility of market society had no place alongside liberating irrationality, the uselessness of actions imbued with freedom, and naïve yet eternal connections between people and beliefs, traditions, customs, and religions. Africa as a challenge to the third world, fighting against imperialism and thus against the consumerism of the first world, in order to create a better future through the synthesis of the past and the present.

The ship's siren reminiscent of one from a stereotype factory and the roar of a horn announcing the everyday private apocalypse evokes a paradoxical feeling of stagnant harbor water, with the ship stuck in place and yet inevitably drifting towards its end. The farewell balances on the border between life and death in the anxious timelessness of a black and white camera, when the viewer, as tense as the main character, awaits the gust of wind that would finally move the ship aground - in any direction. This perhaps slightly worn-out theme, but always relevant, is elevated by superb direction, especially by the beautiful cinematography.

The text of the drama is read for oneself, before any introduction on the stage: it is not the actor who brings the text to life, but the reader - the empty space of the stage is the world. Space itself, text itself. Love itself. And yet, through this formal emptiness, it is given to us - the audience, to its lovers. The content of ourselves comes with a delay, with even greater force, only to then recede like a wave on the Atlantic coast, momentarily giving way to some prefabricated obsessive motifs of the Durassian universe, one of which is precisely the end of love, departure, flowing, and dissolving. Cut, blackness, extreme film emptiness. Silence. And in that moment, the viewer can once again begin their merging with the text and image, like that shot in which the sky, sea, and beach merge into one.