Dionysos

Confession of the moral and emotional dilemma of one generation in one country at one time, which maintains its role as an intermediate stage from today's retrospective perspective: looking back, it is necessary to reach into the American environment, just like the protagonists of the film, into the depth of their nonconformism in their lyrical expression, to the American Beat Generation, forming itself from the mid-1950s; looking forward, it is necessary to sense the unrest of the 1960s with the fight for nuclear disarmament, imperialist wars in the third world, and the desire for greater and greater self-realization in an explicit embryo. However, in the realm of film, this dual retrospective movement applies only on one level. From the perspective of film history in general, continuities can be sought: the film strongly evokes Cassavetes' cult film Shadows (1958) in the environment of the American independent film scene and at the same time serves as a very dignified precursor to later intellectual films and film essays (e.g., Jon Jost in the American underground scene), where fictional narration will intertwine with poetic, political, or otherwise appealing declamations. On what retrospective level, however, does the desire to pigeonhole the film into some continuous line fail? On the level of the author's own cinematic history - here there is no intermediate stage, but rather a rupture: his films will never be narrative like here (although this film is relatively non-linear and narrative compared to common bourgeois cinema!), fictional in the classical sense, universal in their testimony, speaking to everyone from the perspective of artistic depersonalization, sensed only by the hidden subject behind his work, which does not primarily speak about him. Mekas' later films will all be fragments of a private film reel, through which he will try to capture his life in images, without any intermediate stage that was supposed to be a fiction film sublimated by the author, as seen here.

"Papa's Cinema is dead." If New German Cinema with Reitz had to attack Papa's Old Cinema in the first place, even though his name was never and will never be carved on the monuments of film history in one of the first places, it had to attack the father himself – both the film and the new Germany have to be born without fathers. West German neo-corporatism and welfare state, in which everyone has their place in the structure of the economy and in which prerogatives are ideally transferred from father to heir while ideally preserving or most ideally appreciating family wealth, are falling apart – here, society, the individual, and film start at the very bottom, at the zero level, the starting point. A new film and a new person have no place, no history of their own, and they make themselves as best they can: and yet they can't when society operates on different principles. What remains is only the ghost of the unassimilable, indivisible residue, the waste of society, remains, wandering the world and constructing its reality through its unreality.

The eternal return of the same produces diversity in the bosom of unity, through which every moment branches out in three directions, only to converge in the consciousness of the viewer into a single - understanding, experiencing? - point? - in which there are not three different versions of one original, but a single material in three different embodiments, which must coexist within the viewer simultaneously. It is not about observing the possibilities of rendering one text in different times of human life, but about grasping the impossibility of approaching in the real world the seeing life's presence composed of all its possibilities at once. Words that obtain their truth only in someone else's mouth; repetition in a different context that retrospectively sheds light on something that is to come; reality disintegrating in an image and renewing itself in time. The strongest final piece of the vault (the film only works as a whole) - 60 - then in the movement of tragicomical metafictional reflection, so close to the 1960s, shows that such a grasp is still only possible in the world of illusory art, which becomes more powerful the more impotent it becomes in reality. Otherwise, I believe that the textual original of the film deserves more elaboration.

Terayama knew. He knew that the past is not something to be remembered, but something that arises only in the present - and without it, it never existed. (The use of the past tense in this sentence is itself incorrect, as it still evokes that it "existed" on a different level than the present, so it is better to say that "the past does not exist without the present." Period.) It is not a memory = Amarcord. ("And the film Amarcord (1973) has it right in its title: “a m’arcord” in the Romagnol dialect, or “io mi ricordo” in Italian, actually means “I remember.” Only collaborators of conventional cinema like Fellini and the common worldview can perceive childhood as a distinct universe, where poetry and eccentricities only serve as representations of a child's view of the world and where this poetry is only an author's tool for pathetic nostalgia, turning back to a world that once existed. On the contrary, Terayama knows. He knows that retrospection is a lie, masking the retroactivity of creative presence. His world of childhood is the world of his adulthood, and his surreal universe signifies only one thing - reality and the product of adult imagination merge into one. There is no difference between memory and fabrication, and ultimately between lies and truth, because such categories could only be preserved in reverence if we believe that the past happened once and for all. If Fellini and others were not afraid to understand their own superficiality and if they were not afraid to seize the surface of the screen in its liberating possibility to place reality and construct on the same level and thus create a truly personal image of childhood.

They had to fall in order to climb to the peaks, on which they would lay down in the calm of their finality and in the infinity of their suffering - and in the infinite calm of nitrocellulose, which has become their second mass grave. Through this film and its deliberate slow-motion of image and time, we can see for the last time the nameless and yet specific faces before being buried by the earth and covered by the snow from the heavens above the Alps. Through the color filters, frequently dominated by shades of yellow and red, we can catch a glimpse of the soldiers' last view, the sun they saw before it burned and engulfed them, the light and fire of the war machine, the last machine into which the proletarians in uniforms had to enter in order to attain painful calm. Thus, even though the film intentionally calms time and creates film contemplation with silence and meditative music, it evokes from the depths of nostalgia, into which it plunges the viewer, a restlessness in his spirit, calling for revenge and redemption.

Oh, Beckett, Kafka, Nietzsche, and everything else – the whole European culture seems to have condensed into an image of Hungarian countryside, and in that lies the unsurpassable greatness of Tarr: namely, that through his images evoking total perceptual identification (i.e., the viewer’s complete immersion into the observed object through a perfect sense of combining the visual field and the atmosphere it emits), every single detail of Hungarian reality becomes fully connected to the all-European message. The camera flows perfectly slowly like a stream in the Danube, and yet we are watching a Beckettian drama about senseless waiting for salvation, a Kafkaesque no less anti-deep drama about subordination of man to the equally senseless will and eye of Power, which exercises an act of universal distortion of everything into its silly logic, and finally a Nietzschean drama about the spark of ego that refuses to be restrained by anything, and yet always ends up as a faint flicker between darkness and light – between the black and white of the black-and-white camera.

Artistic geology consists of several fictional and metafictional layers that are built upon each other according to the changing emotional vectors of the characters. Various levels of film plans overlap according to the current and ever-changing temporal sequence, which is partially distinguished not only in terms of its duration but also in terms of the visual sensations it evokes in the viewer (yet also deliberately confused!) by a clear differentiation through color. Not only does color, but also the interior of the characters, shatter in a constantly rotating optical prism, which passes through the camera lens not at all randomly. Hanoun, who is still unjustly unrecognized, was a talented epigone of Godard, Resnais, and Robbe-Grillet, but at the same time, he feels relatively bloodless compared to them, but that should not be a reason for his highly sophisticated and avant-garde films to be forgotten.

The sleep of reason gives rise to monsters, fortunately, because Grandrieux's night full of emotions can be inhabited by monsters, but also by fallen women and fallen angels of self-destructive emotions. The night of reason gives rise to owls and bats in Goya and also in Grandrieux we descend with bats into the cave of a relatively isolated social milieu, in which every inclination is confirmed by physicality at the moment of its conception, just as the painter's imagination has given tangible form to falling ideas in the shape of animals – and we will truly observe the whole film as every speech, every deepest word passes on its way to the other person into a fully tangible sexual expression. Without compromising in any way, since chiaroscuro is a valuable technique that reveals that contrast can be more impressive than the formlessness of day, and the director proves that synthesis can unite image and word in opposition. To connect so perfectly fantastically that the viewer, who succumbs, feels an inexpressible understanding, even though the film cannot explain too much... How, after all, can one coherently express that connecting line that begins in one realm of human experience and ends in another?

Cinema novo entered a new stage in the late 1960s, in which episodic and exalted satire, infused and intentionally tinted, transitions into the heights of silent visual allegory, thus merging the Brazilian underground with European contemporary hyper art. Pierre Clémenti wanders through the film as if wandering through a film by Philippe Garrel of that time or Pasolini's but moreover as if he simultaneously sank into the Brazilian underground film of that time - cinema marginal - with its unrestrained anti-logical assault primarily of verbal irony. The long visual parable shakes hands with the episodic nature of self-undermining discourse. It is so brilliantly disjunctive and at the same time synthetic that the result can only come from a great filmmaker, who in this case didn't forget about the political dimension of his work, making the film perfectly Latin American. Venceremos!

The essence of a book is to encompass all other books ("intertextuality"), the nature of reality is to contain within itself an infinity of realities ("representations"), and finally, the essence of an image is (not) to encompass all other images, all stories, and all interpretations, but also something more - a peaceful fascination with itself, free from interpretation, open to the flicker of an always new world, a new sequence. After all, sequences unfold in time, and when an entire life is needed for an hour of film, the ultimate refuge of films becomes a fragment of images, which have the power to compress entire centuries in their flashes. Or at least their own - the twentieth century of cinema. Jean-Luc Godard, even in his old age, does not change his likely definitive word of an abandoned revolutionary, who does not intend to abandon the hopes of his past and his images and becomes the Angel of Walter Benjamin, who redeems the victims of oppression and exploitation with his gaze (after all, Benjamin's textual metaphor has a prototype in... Paul Klee's painting).