Dionysos

In December 1968, Garrel completed this film about the young Anna/Anémone, who tries to free herself from her family environment and step into adulthood with her newly found love. In the same year, not only did the French youth attempt the same, but on a larger scale... Can Anémone escape from the clutches of her loving and tolerant father, only until the moment his daughter starts living her own life? /// This is early and somewhat more civil Garrel, and Anémone's main attraction lies in its ending (erasing the difference between private and public, the collision of the state/repression and freedom/ love, reminiscent of the director's debut feature Marie for Memory, filmed the year before. The decent meta-fiction elements are pleasing. /// French actress Anémone (born Anne Bourguignon) chose her pseudonym precisely based on the main role she played in this film.

A mirror is not a case of complicated mechanics until the doubling starts to play out in the camera mechanism of the film mirror. She in the mirror and along with her, a line that splits reality like a mirror in the reflection of a foreign doppelganger of herself. A line that is no longer in front of her like in a mirror, but between her – like in an (experimental) film. A line passing through the center of the image, separating the girl from herself: a film that has thrown her to the edge behind the mirror, and in which she is forced to do the impossible – look at herself through that line. /// The Austrian school is one of the best, particularly in how it understands the original visual material in this film, and only through it and by playing with it (sometimes with external sound) is able to create completely new worlds and at the same time reveal the secrets of film as a medium.

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/

An experiment with underground content; depravity as its outer form. Commercialized mass genres exploiting violence or romance are turned upside down with all-pervading irony, nonsense, and cinematic nonconformism into a darkly humorous and biting farce of itself - meet Brazilian cinema marginal. Bressane constructs one disparate fragment of a bloody rebellion against norms after another around a non-chronologically narrated plot of lesbian love - the narrative of this film is therefore as surprising to the viewer's expectations as it is purebred (European) "art." However, it is not just about formal finesse, but about youthful (the director was 23) rebellion against both film and societal conventions, albeit without a positive vision (à la cinema novo) - it is about pure joy in a senseless cry of resistance, murder without a chance of escape. The impossibility of successful transgression does not prevent one from diving headfirst into it and in a self-ironic gesture, and like Pierot, nodding in agreement to the absurdity of life and film. "I tried to cry, but no one believed my tears. / I tried to love but love never came. / Such is life. / Such is life."

A crawling caterpillar as a traveling metaphor, splitting the story into many flashes of life changes and traumas, and most importantly: splitting and unifying the concrete and general, the personal and historical. Once again, the greatness of the 1960s is confirmed, a decade that managed to connect a unique life fate with its external conditions, and society's traumas with the protagonists' inner world. A seemingly external and foreign caterpillar, just like the external and "objective" documentaries on Hiroshima after the bomb, etc., becomes its interior, and intimacy becomes the backdrop from which it grows, without losing anything of its human urgency. Whether we realize it or not, this narrative style denies the still prevailing ideological liberal/bourgeois/Hollywood concept of a separate world of inner self-establishing individuals (fiction) and external objective reality (documentary) and shows that one can create a truly human testimony without closing ourselves off to "classical" oppositions such as interior vs. exterior, spirit vs. matter, the individual vs. society, and other metaphysics. /// I wish I knew more about Japanese culture because it seems I've only caught glimpses, but even that was more than enough. /// The Japanese cameramen of that time were also top-notch - oh, those shots, with one great composition following another...

Disenchantment of the world and sexuality by means of documentary alienation, or ironizing and sexualizing apparently serious/asexual topics? It's no wonder that Lacanian-oriented thinkers emerged from the former Yugoslavia, with Slavoj Žižek being the most well-known among them. They psychoanalytically reveal in the roots of the social phenomena the functioning of desire and... the death instinct. (The next film by Makavejev will actually focus on another psychoanalyst - Wilhelm Reich). Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator beats to the rhythm of 60s cinema and the force of modernity - even the central couple embodies the principles of modern liberated sexuality in contrast to traditional romantic and familial predispositions: male documentary cold sequences against the female spontaneous story? Self-governing socialism, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, science, and sociology opposing desire, fiction, and basic joys? Or more radically: self-governing socialism, the October Revolution, science, and sociology, hygiene inspectors killing libidinal desire within themselves and suppressing the consciousness that it is precisely desire on which their existence depends? In Makavejev's film, there is no private story or intimate desire, and the main characters are in contrast to reality. However, the interior and exterior interweave like Lacanian unconsciousness.

The main protagonist, an American doctor (Paul McIsaac) in his middle years, exiled voluntarily in Lisbon, Portugal, is haunted by bitter memories and disgust for the world and himself - he drowns his bitterness in alcohol and cynicism amidst an unfriendly and poor industrial suburb of the city, where the people hate Americans as the doctor hates himself and his surroundings. The monotonous life of a man without a future is interrupted by the arrival of his son (Vincent Gallo) whom he’d never met and who set out to find his father after his mother's death. Will the encounter of two men with disturbed experiences lead to a change in their lives? /// Kramer focuses more on the atmosphere that permeates the locations and the plot than on the story: the dirty and poor Lisbon with its already strong genius loci (similar to In the White City by A. Tanner in many ways) is transformed by the director and cinematographer into a symbolic edge of the world, the end of all expectations of a bitter individual who chooses his place of defeat in mournful melancholy. The paralyzing fluidity of the foreign environment and aimlessness envelop the actions of the main character, whose only chance is the element of fundamental foreignness towards the present and a reminder of the past, the time when he could still live. The return of the lost son - a happy ending? /// In addition, Kramer masterfully disrupts the otherwise coldly realistic flow with surprising and personal sequences, breaking down the barrier between the viewer and fiction and reality.

A paradox (confessedly by the author!): Lettrism, a continuation of Dadaism and Surrealism, stood (among other things) against the semantic value of words, focusing on their material existence detached from meaning, and allowed words, letters, their shape and sounds to play the main role. However, in Venom and Eternity, the literary word, admittedly novelistic, assumes the role of meaning creator and it is an image that is destroyed to the core of its material nonsense. In this film, three levels unfold: recital (first theoretical, then novelistic), a flow of unrelated images, and finally, the subconscious tectonic plate of Lettrist music - whose essence, just like in Lettrist poetry, which Isou also lets resonate, is onomatopoeia and, to the extreme, joy from pure sound. The author clearly proclaims that the word should prevail - the image should be crushed by it. The word should no longer merely complement/correspond with the image, and vice versa. Some might complain (just like the opponents in the film, whom Isou counted on from the beginning) that the film is non-filmic, that it could actually do without the visuals. Indeed, the images usually only add a new dimension to the words, but almost never the other way around. However, the question is whether these same opponents also complain about films like Arnulf Rainer and others, that they are not films (even though they are based on the same principle as Lettrism towards words) because they do not carry meaning, which is always formed only through language... /// In any case, Isou was ahead of all others by at least a decade in 1951 and his basic film principles (disjunction of image and sound, autonomy of the material force of the image in relation to discourse, and others) are the foundation for all truly artistic modern films.

Duras - intricacy of ideas and dialogues + Vierny - precise black and white camera that turns an otherwise "literary" film into an aesthetically smooth affair. In fact, even Vierny's camera for Hiroshima Mon Amour, based on Duras' motifs + excellent performances by Delphine Seyrig and the character of Count de Peyrac, was a classic (great) piece from the 60s. However, words and gazes do the main work in this film - a film about fading and reawakening desire lightly plays with hints and inscrutability, which best evokes desire: a riddle always entices more than the obviousness of the revealed, ambiguous words of a mysterious stranger lure more than his appearance, the melancholically purposeless gaze of a mature femme fatale more than the barrenness of beautiful youth, and above all - the dark and still unresolved past fuels desire much more than a certain future. Duras traps both the main characters and the viewer in a trap of time and the desire to experience something new, the desire to find something unknown in the another (a dialectic that can dangerously oscillate between both poles, between falling in love and horror at the otherness of the other). Mirrors and words split the pair into a quartet, splitting the present into the past and the future...

A typical and unremarkable film from the genre of "boulevard anabasis," which was the sandbox for future giants in the early days of the French New Wave, where they experimented with creative techniques and learned the craft. Eustache - although in 1963 it was already quite outdated, it must be noted – also created a simple story about two friends wandering around Paris and chasing girls. Shortly before that, he assisted Rohmer on his The Bakery Girl of Monceau and borrowed from him that slightly moralizing and reproachful tone that characterizes this first completed film by Eustache, despite its overall light-hearted irony. It is all the more surprising that the director's subsequent film Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1967), for which Godard supposedly lent him the film material, is even simpler in this regard, and the main character, played by J. P. Léaud, is a typical adolescent character whose only purpose is to spend time in cafés and nostalgically humorously chase young Parisian girls for the viewer. It is really not much for 1967, although Eustache was able to occasionally demonstrate a greater sense for the camera in both of his first films compared to the aforementioned Rohmer.