Dionysos

Directors Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli made a film set in the Roman counterculture of the 1970s (so it is not about the everyday life of the middle class). The underground content - discussions with friends about politics, open sexual relationships, clashes with the police, demonstrations, and life in a semi-legal state, on the streets - intertwines with an equally independent underground form that blurs the line between fiction and reality. The central plot, revolving around a segment of the life of a sixteen-year-old (approximately) prostitute picked up from the street by an altruistic forty-year-old, is set within an overall framework that at times resembles not only Cinema vérité, but also the "revolutionary" European cinema à la the Dziga Vertov group, meaning the breaking down of the wall between the actor and the character, the film crew and the world being filmed, the application of collective decision-making, etc. The viewer, in fact, almost never knows whether they are watching a staged, improvised, spontaneous/"documentary" scene, whether they are following the character or the actor who is already "playing" themselves and dealing with their own personal matters with another "character." In this aspect, as well as in its focus on the character of the modern young woman, the film resembles (a much more independent hippie) a version of I Am Curious (Yellow), and I Am Curious (Blue) by Vilgot Sjöman.

In the original <--->, but for the (cowardly) world, standing instead on the immediate and unbearable materiality of the world on its ridiculous linguistic substitute, known as Back and Forth - the back and forth of the film camera that scans a single room in horizontal (and also vertical) pendulum motion (similar to Wavelength). The camera as a boundary to the viewer's perception, the camera as a closed interval, limiting the space of events with its movement and its boundary positions - film as the boundary of my world. An event, a character - a moment, a defined place in an ever-widening movement that, with its repetitive linear nature, resembles the movement of a film strip, in which each captured object is like a bead threaded on a string of constantly sliding film frames. Add to that the magic of editing, eternal pleasure for those who have fallen into the enchanting land of cinema, and which proves that above the sovereignty of the camera still hangs the sovereignty of montage.

From the bones of martyrs, the long-dead survivor emerges from the morbid display of the Otranto church ossuary, for... Actually, I don't even know, but one thing is certain – the main character will wander through centuries, events, desires, and peripeties, like in a feverish, bitter, satirical dream, where the laws of time, profane and sacred, do not apply. It is partly an autobiographical-toned film (Bene plays the main character on whom the entire film relies; in fact, Bene was born near Otranto). Bene also often uses very short shots and brisk editing, thanks to which the resulting fast and surprising montage evokes in the viewer sudden and unexpected emotions, just as the poetic-philosophical passages evoke awe and confusion in the viewer's intellect. The film received the Grand Jury Prize (alongside Robert Lapoujade's film Le Socrate) at the Venice Film Festival in 1968.

A lonely Soviet-type ruin: a woman who sacrificed herself for society/the state/a better tomorrow for all - yes, it is a uniquely Soviet/Russian type that articulated the most altruistic of communist ideology with the fate of Russian history. Nadezhda Petruchina finds her alter ego in Kara's Tomorrow Was the War (1987), in Iskra's mother who sacrificed everything for the Revolution, and the Great Patriotic War, and transformed herself into an impersonation of the Idea - Petruchina loses her youth in the war, only to selflessly dissolve herself in building a better world for children, whom she cannot have precisely because of it. If her husband had survived, he would undoubtedly be Alexei Astakhov from Chukhray's Clear Skies (1961). And most importantly - if Petruchina had her own children, they would certainly be the children from Khutsiev's I'm 20 Years Old (1965) - those children who learn that one can work for Soviet society without sacrificing oneself (something that, in a selfish way, Petruchina’s stepdaughter, emphasizing the word “step,” tries to do!). /// For post-communist "thinking," the sacred idea of totalitarianism will of course never admit the existence of inhabitants of the USSR who willingly sacrificed their youth and lives in service to a society that was certainly not ideal, but who also never definitively abandoned the idea that that ideal could come (because they were indoctrinated by a totalitarian ideology, that is certain and scientifically explained). The civil war, the 1930s, industrialization, the Second World War, and the end of Stalinism - then came Petruchina, only to discover that no one needs her efforts anymore, that a different era has begun, which must forget about her in order to peacefully live off her work. What would she say about the fall of communism is another question that gives her solitude another dimension...

The subdued light of the long Akerman-style shots mixes the shadows of the characters' dull figures with the night of reason into which the main character falls. What is the director's last fictional film about? It is about the eternal European chimera of its own superiority, the impulse for Citius, Altius, or Fortius (faster, higher, stronger), which reduces people and nature to mere symbols and materials of its own success and dream of victory. It is about the rebellion of one of the objects of this madness, which is intertwined with a family rebellion - the effort not to appear in a stranger's dream, even if it was the father. Is all this not just intertwined with the rebellion of youth, escaping from the authority of the father/culture toward love, regardless of profit and prestige - wanting to live in a world that is true to itself? Isn't this supposed to be the fate of the entire third world, which was not even named in the film? How should we interpret the opening scene, which uncovers hopes of defiant gestures: a young mixed-race woman loses hope despite Frank Sinatra's voice - was it the lover's killer who took it away from her, or was it Sinatra himself, revealing the end of a different illusion, not European but the illusion of the youth of the third world about their own world? The minimalism of already dead characters imitates the death of Almayer's world and the world of his daughter. Not to forget means to die, and to forget means to lose the meaning of life - in this space between two deaths, the main heroine is captured in the opening scene, in which her gesture sadly beautifully misses the situation to which she no longer belongs.

The inferno turned upside down. It ultimately rages outside the boundaries of her first love's inner being and accuses her surroundings - her era. This is because in the context of the director's work (and the film itself), it is evident that the documentary retrospective of the personal history of the characters serves not only as a mere dramatic construction of characters outside of space and time, but on the contrary, it attaches them to their social conditions: the increasingly frequent structures of perversion on the part of adult male characters, the disintegration of the traditional family, and women's emancipation form faithful backdrops for the psychology of the main characters, which also adorn the habitat of every modern film viewer. Moreover, what was common in this (and the best) period of world cinema - the story, psychology, and general statements - are combined with formal equilibristics, whose visual style may be self-serving in some places, but not unimpressive. In any case, the film deliberately does not achieve the status of a truly experimental film. The first love of the (post)modern era will have to overcome internal and external obstacles (forever?), but will never again encounter innocence, violated already in childhood and violated by perversion, and passed from victim to victim like from generation to generation.

An avant-garde surrealist film by avant-garde director Marc'O, who was closely associated with the French Lettrism movement at the time of its creation and also contributed to the production of the movement's magnum opus Venom and Eternity (1951). The film presents itself as both a cinematic and psychological experiment, capturing the unorganized flow of the author's consciousness onto the film screen, which is simultaneously animated by materializing these fleeting thoughts and ideas through various visual motifs, ranging from staged scenes with live actors to shots of artistic works (which aesthetically resemble the best of independent creations of that time, such as Dadaist collages by Fernando Léger and Jean Cocteau, who personally heavily promoted the film, including at the Cannes festival). Overall, this is a high-quality surrealist and impressionist film, of which there were already many in the sphere of independent experimental cinema, but it is uniquely enriched by the addition of a second layer above the plane of purely visual representations of the artist's subconscious ideas: the sound, monologue, and internal dialogue, all of which give the already suggestive images greater depth and new meanings.

Maestro Terayama clearly did not fear very sharp irony, bordering on mockery within his own ranks - already in his feature film debut about the ketchup emperor, it was strange to see a legend of avant-garde Japanese theater ridicule the youth counterculture of the late 1960s (thus one of the important conditions of the underground/independent/experimental scene of that time, in which Terayama himself was involved) - but here the irony is balanced with tolerance towards youth as such and in places even genuine appreciation of its radicalism. The overall (intentionally) humorous scenes of the coming-of-age of the main non-hero provide the backdrop (somewhat condescendingly - Terayama was 35 years old, so almost a generation removed from the main characters of the film) for the double exploration of a generation and its world. The surreal image of a burning airplane with a red flag in the background, which burns along with it, can serve as an explanation of the author's entire perspective on the student movement: the inexperienced youth (symbolized in the film by the airplane) turns to ashes as part of the protagonist's maturation, and likewise, the red flag (which in the film uniquely symbolizes a red flag) ends in flames - the left-wing radicalism of the youth at the time serves as a mediator in their transition to a more mature phase of independent creation and life. /// Otherwise, it is truly a product of a unique period in cinema - metafiction, the insertion of separate sequences capturing artistic performances in the streets of Tokyo, surrealistic scenes, playing with filters, etc. One slightly disappointing aspect was the unexpectedly simple portrayal of the central plot. However, for some (more so the majority of viewers) this will be seen as a positive aspect, as it doesn't get lost in the complexity of the form.

It is true that the film corresponds to the contemporary discourse and practices of leftist art cinema, but again, it certainly can't be said that they correspond to the contemporary discourse (as a whole) - it is simply non-mainstream art, close to Kluge, Sander, etc., but certainly not to the prevailing conditions in the film industry or society. /// What is interesting is the introductory narrative approach to social conditions in the form of fictional highly stylized theater, which is subsequently replaced during the film by the anti-fictional quasi-documentary style of the fictional protagonist, replacing theater with sociology. It is also interesting to observe the depiction of the slow fading of the political determination of the 1968 generation. The feminist motif, where the film is narrated from the perspective of the female protagonist and where the woman is internally stronger in the relationship, etc., is presented in a non-aggressive and rather subtle way, but it doesn't change the fact that it is somewhat predictable.

In his first American film, Gorin does not hide that he is a European intellectual and apprentice of Godard during the Maoist period. It is not that the movie is political-philosophical experimental agitprop, but because it explores fundamental questions of language and identity (the golden age of the linguistic turn in social sciences), social exclusion (the story of the daughters from a poor, half-immigrant family on the outskirts of San Diego's agglomeration is truly not just about cognitive psychology and linguistics...), and presents it all to the viewer in the sophisticated and playful form of a highly personal documentary - Gorin, just like during the times of the Dziga Vertov group, breaks the (pseudo)documentary norm of a separate object and narrator, enters the plot, comments on it, etc. Yet that alone would not be all that exceptional, but from the period less than ten years ago, Gorin also retained a feeling for the multi-layered construction of a narrative combining different media (the initial sequences combining Gorin's reflections and the initial introduction of the central theme with children's immigrant comics seem as if they came directly from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s) and especially the excellent separation of the visual and sound components, which is crucial for Gorin's meticulous tracing of the speech of both girls. It turns out that the discontinuous and disjointed composition of sound and image can also serve in the documentary field. /// However, Gorin did not overlook the socio-critical dimension, even though it is hidden under the guise of a peculiar nostalgia - the disappearance of a unique relationship and a unique language, accompanied by the adoption of the dominant language, doubles the fate of the entire family, which is sinking deeper and deeper on the social ladder as it adopts a foreign dominant language of social conduct...