Dionysos

What is a film genre, or rather any other conceptual category that is supposed to allow us to facilitate the understanding of the world? In any case, something that is meant to have only an auxiliary function and to be discarded once it is revealed that the subject of investigation restricts and distorts rather than helps to clarify. The same applies to the "documentary" genre - although I would not attach too much importance to it, for example, here on FilmBooster, the documentary genre is not mentioned for this film. So, what is it then? I leave the invention of this new film category to film scholars, but its formulation is a necessity in the 21st century, as today, only a metaphysicist can work with the dichotomy of "objective reality" vs. "fiction." This is also evident in Watkins' case - the hypothetical "objective" (because it is based on government regulations, decrees, etc.) reconstruction gradually transforms into a fictional (because it never happened) story (and it is a story, after all, because the author is fabricating it!). Yet even that is not a completely imaginary story - it is a logically consistent imagining of that truly objective reconstruction. Moreover, Watkins also obviously manipulates the emotions of the viewer (for example, his attacks against the Anglican Church are completely arbitrary, although accurate), and he does so in a predetermined direction - an "objective documentary" should not do this, as the "facts" in it should speak for themselves. It requires inventing a new category, a new genre that will cover what is fictional in a documentary and vice versa, what is objectively/materially real in fiction.

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.

Watching the helplessness, despair, and hopelessness of the main character, whose only desire is to work and provide for his family, is a heart-wrenching experience, as we see more and more bitterness and disappointment. The struggle for one's own dignity is even harder because it is not only happening in front of him but also through his son and in the presence of future generations. For a 21st-century viewer, the seemingly uniquely beautiful Rome of the 1940s hides rather a sense of hopelessness from which prayers or God himself cannot help, but so far neither can anything else...

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).

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 human face fascinated by a piece of meat, which will soon transform into it. Will it be transformed by the hands of fascist butchers or by its own hand? We must admire how Fábri was able to capture this transformation with the claustrophobic grip of a dimly lit camera in the first part of the film. The question of how to properly handle meat is not as difficult as whether it is worse to become a piece of meat passively enduring its fate under the butcher's knife or to become an emotionless master of the world. The film shows that neither position is morally superior. The constant reversal of moral superiority shifts guilt and bliss of conscience from one character to another, only for the one who most consciously approaches the position of a slave with a clear conscience, unburdened by the weight of the world, to become the most despicable informant, and for the uninvolved cynic to become an unknowing supporter of the life force for others, which he had to deny at first glance in order to gain it. It is as if moral opposites were not different in anything, not even in the fact that "evil" lies in "consciousness."

In many ways, the "backward" country with its traditional mode of existence - the self-propelled absurdity - refers not only to itself but to the entire "modern" situation. This is not just a film about the USSR/Russia, but ultimately about the USSR/Russia in every other country today. In Russia, only at the turn of the 80s and 90s did the aforementioned historical principle reach one of its world-historical culminating moments. The film exudes the classic artistic motif of pessimism from modern times, and the film form ironically solidifies this painful motif: the first part, the fictional story, despite its gloominess, offers both an explanation for the all-encompassing absurdity (the protagonist's suffering over the loss of her husband leads to her rejection of false social games) and a sort of resolution or hope in the fact that, like the widowed protagonist, we too will see the meaninglessness of the established way of life. This is followed by a brilliant transition from fiction to "reality" (which is only a different plane of fiction), in which there is no longer room for either explanation or hope, only for the desperate and futile attempts of the teacher Nikolai to escape through a fake death (a hard sleep). Black-and-white fiction with hope against color reality without resolution.

Cocteau just confirmed his initial words: "film is an admirable medium of poetry." Who else could confirm it in practice than a poet triumphing in all other spheres of poetry? A poet balancing his life and work with the knowledge that both will soon come to an end, he reaches the source of all poetry with the knowledge of death, which can create a flower through the death and sacrifice of the poet. That flower thus turns red with the blood of the poet. P.S. Do not make the same terrible mistake as me and first acquire Cocteau's film Orpheus (1950), you will save yourself frequent speculation about what meanings you may be missing during the numerous autobiographical symbols, often stemming from this film. But even if you don't understand everything and despite the numerous comments, whether directly pronounced by Cocteau himself or his voice-overs (which beautifully symbolizes the poet not only as the creator of the work /narrator's position/, but also as the character engulfed by his work and dragged by its laws /Cocteau as a character in the film/), you will be encouraged to watch it again and you shouldn't be afraid because, after all, "you mustn't want to know everything!"

Can the space of a movie theater for watching cinema be replaced with something else? Not at all - otherwise the viewer would be deprived of the trailer for another film before the start of the actual film: in this case, an advertisement for the film La belle époque, in which pensioners create an experiential agency in a film studio set in the 1970s, so they can relive their first love there... It has also been proven that Alzheimer's disease is best stopped in older people by placing them in period settings, with original furniture from their youth, exposing them to their memories, etc... Although Bellocchio, in his age as an author, logically lost many of his artistic iconoclasm and formal inventions, he is not only still above the level of ordinary conventional cinema, to which this film belongs in terms of its category but also functions as Bellocchio's historical tribute to the Italian film belle époque: a blend of poliziotteschi and Italian politically-engaged police thrillers, within which Bellocchio created one of his famous films, Slap the Monster on Page One from 1972. Italians to this day prove that they are the best in Europe at making American films.

The prototype for De Niro's character was the famous film producer Irving Thalberg (1899-1936), according to Fitzgerald's book, who was also a dazzling young talent and co-builder of the MGM empire. Yet that is not the only connection the film has with "cinema" itself: not only does it take place in the environment of film studios, but its entire structure contains many, albeit not flashy (which is quite suitable for this type of period film), metafictional elements. For example, the film (within the film) that De Niro is working on is a beautiful ironic reminder of both the old Hollywood era and an ironic balance of the (false?) nature of cinema in general. There are several of these nostalgic and sarcastic references in the film (the functioning of the film industry, communist screenwriters, marginal immigration to the USA), making it a personal reflection on Elia Kazan's past as well.