Dionysos

To end your war when Europe has lived in peace for a generation, to start living normally, or to die in exile in a futile struggle, to be at home again, to be human again. Erotic scenes as a symbol of liberation from the duties and virtues of a professional revolutionary. Affection for Nadine is an example of an attempt to escape from her current life - Nadine is also called Nana (see Zola), in addition, she calls Diego (Domingo) "Dimanche," which means Sunday. On Sunday, one does not work, and the famous Nana from the novel does not need to be introduced. The film is once again endowed by Resnais with a multitude of premonitions and above all premonitions. They beautifully illustrate the protagonist's uncertainty about the future – the many flashforwards (from which the viewer expects to be provided with an adequate glimpse into the future as it is "truly" going to happen, or happened, since the story, in order to be fully filmed, had to first happen and occur just as it did...) end somewhat differently during the course of the story than we originally expected, and in the way the protagonist imagined. Well, the future in both the film and reality often ends differently than we desire. For bored viewers, it should be noted that they will not find a garrote or anything similar in the film.

It has been said about Robbe-Grillet that: "In his works, we never have a sequence of presences that pass by, but rather a simultaneity of the presence of the past, presence of the present, and presence of the future, which make time terrible and inexplicable." Grillet thus breaks the established flow of film narration, replacing chronology with sequences of overlapping and returning shots, memories, anticipations, and brief flashes of presence that cannot be transitioned into a single reference time. The future has already always occurred, the end comes a quarter hour before the end, and the past is uncertain and perhaps did not happen at all, or it happened differently than the protagonist and the viewer had just experienced. The resulting impression is thus not primarily based on what happens in the shots themselves but on what happens BETWEEN individual shots, on the relationship between these three presences, and on the necessity for the viewer to (re)construct the hero's memories, current experiences, and anticipatory future into a single (yet impossible) unity. The second thing is the unsettling game with space. Changes in temporality lead to changes in the spatial relationships of characters and objects, achieved through repetitive variations of the same environments. Because the past, present, and future (and because Grillet edits between different present times as if it were a normal narration) have taken place (are taking place, will take place...) in the same location, the characters' locations and the course of events are constantly changing. All of this undermines the viewer's confidence in how they are accustomed to understanding storytelling and their observational abilities, making them feel uncertain.

The pearl necklace explosively unravels disparate scenes of Brazilian carnival dancers from the Third World, connected by a thread of ecstatic resistance against everything that turns misery into misery and turns the poor into the poor - thereby resisting itself. This is formally manifested in irony toward its critical discourses and the discourse of film as such. Perhaps it won't be more stereotypical symbolic violence if I say that this film, in the style of more animalistic late Cinema Novo, activates the strongest of South American temperament. Under the parade of unrestrained images and proclamations, as a viewer in the Sambadrome stands, you can sense their common latent Dionysian energy, a carnal carnival of the will for freedom, redemption, and the struggle in the blood of dignity that will not be tamed by any capitalist, white man from the North, or any critical theory. The will for the growth of life, sprouting from the muck of the global South.

This film offers an equally corrupted "happy ending" as all other corrupted and tasteless happy endings in American mainstream Hollywood films. It's a sharp satire on life and work in the factory of dreams, where your ideals and visions are twisted and forcibly squeezed into a traditional commercial template and where your work is decided by people who are willing to walk over corpses for their careers. "That's reality."

Bertolucci's debut bears clear influences from Pasolini's work - after all, Bertolucci was an assistant director on Pasolini's Accattone (1961), and Pasolini also provided the source material for The Grim Reaper. The Grim Reaper therefore necessarily carries Pasolini’s distinctive interest in the characters of Roman outsiders, lumpenproletarians, youths, and poseurs. It is precisely these types of people who become the main protagonists and about whom the film primarily speaks - the subtly portrayed criminal background serves no purpose other than allowing us, as the focal point of the plot, to get to know several such human types and take a glimpse into their typically spent night (culminating in an atypical event). Although the individual fragments describing the specific tales of the protagonists are unified and related to the moment of the nocturnal murder, it is not, unlike works like Rashomon, primarily about reconstructing the truth of the event from various perspectives (the plot hardly attempts this at all), but rather "only" about exploring the lives of the Roman golden youth of the street through testimonies given to the police. In his debut, Bertolucci already adopted a magnificent camera, similar to that of the then-emerging Elio Petri, and it is precisely in the sequences where the focus is primarily on the use of camera and music - and not words - that the film is at its best.

G. Kozincev was able to create very high-quality films throughout his career, and it must be noted that he was able to do so in various styles within the history of European cinema. In The Overcoat, we witness Kozincev's/Trauberg's unique incorporation of elements of German expressionism: indeed, the winter St. Petersburg under the cover of night, in which long shadows of criminals and bureaucrats crawl in the light of gas lamps, reminiscent of a certain Murnau vampire, is similar to the supernatural world of the German classics; the mysterious "surrealistic" story (after all, it is Gogol about Russian bureaucracy ...) about the world of bureaucracy, which is even further removed from the ordinary person than the most magical world of the relevant German classics. It is astonishing that as early as 1929, the same directing created The New Babylon, which is characterized by a high-quality (although not at the level of the best) reception of the montage school elements of their compatriots, in which, unlike in The Overcoat, the notable stylization, the tight little fictional world, and the game with the camera will give way to the game with editing and large, directorially demanding scenes with political and historical motivation. It is unnecessary to mention that Kozincev would end his career as a master of the most faithful and realistic film adaptations of classical Shakespearean dramas.

The story of a failed unequal (class) love, mediated by a little boy, who not only discovers the functioning of English aristocratic customs from the turn of the century but also finds answers to his own childhood questions. Although it is not a particularly innovative topic, it was soberly processed to my liking and without kitschy romantic schemes, which made the story seem believable to me.

A convenient connection of two worlds, two moments of human life. At the beginning, the main character drives through the USA - an alienated landscape, alone without deeper meaning or fulfillment in life, yet intensified by the surrounding and local (advertising) way of life. This is followed by a journey across The Netherlands and Germany - initially, the forced care for a child gives the main character feelings of satisfaction and a deeper reason for life. It has wonderful poetry, great cinematography and music, and Wim Wenders...

The second part continues exactly where the previous part ended, after the main character's transformation from a white terrorist into a friend of the people. This transformation seemed very poorly managed to me throughout Hungarian Rhapsody: 1st moment = István is bred with the intolerant attitude of the aristocracy, and he cruelly fights on the side of counterrevolution; 2nd moment = István recommends allocating land to retail farmers, in order to "take the wind out of the sails of the reds," so it is clearly just an opportunistic calculating gesture; 3rd moment = István, dressed in peasant rags, sits at the table with the former aristocracy. Nothing happened between moments 2 and 3 that would coherently explain this transformation. Fortunately, this problem no longer exists in Allegro Barbaro (and it is therefore paradoxical that a story in which characters do not transform is better), and we can enjoy the eternal struggle of arrogance and brutality of wealth and power with the suffering and resistance of poverty in the background of passing history. There is no need to talk about the mastery of mise-en-scène, and the playful placement of individual characters is also very pleasing, which is not only the result of clever movement of actors on the stage but also of miraculous film editing.

Formally, even with Jost's victorious reiteration of Euro-Atlantic liberalism at the turn of the 80s and 90s, there was a prevailing backward movement towards an even more classical narration than what we knew from films of previous decades: the experimental intellectual guerrilla warfare of American social relations with post-structuralist leftist discursive and socio-political critics gradually disappears and what remains is the best of the long-gone promise of reasonable, moderate, intelligent democratic liberalism that was also dreamed of in Czech fields and woods after the end of state socialist dictatorship, and that, as we later discovered, never existed. While watching the film, not only because of the shots of Vermeer and at one moment also of Rembrandt, I remembered Joseph Heller and his "Picture This" from 1988, in which Rembrandt looks down at humanity and its history from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The film gives off the same feeling as that old good Jewish liberal Heller in all its grandeur: the sensitive irony towards the vanities of everyday life's afflictions and the focus on what is important, even though what is important may not even exist, and even if it did exist, we may never achieve it. And yet, there is no choice but to try. This sentiment is felt much more in this film than in Jost's Rembrandt Laughing from 1988 (Yes! That cannot be a coincidence.). For Jost, just like with Godard, his former inspiration, from whom, however, his work will fundamentally diverge from this moment on, there seems to have been, briefly, a predominance of the desire for something enduring after the disappointment of iconoclasm, something that hides behind the disillusionment of the world and the disillusionment of its effective criticism and transformation, which both authors hoped for but did not come true... Just like in Godard's The Detective (1985), perhaps the only way out of the confusion of life appears to be love, which is eternal.