Dionysos

Everything in Sharits' films is as we are accustomed to: objects, stories, emotions, and ideals. They are just not visible - they are dissolved in their essence, which inevitably manifests itself every time they enter the film medium. In the abstraction of absolute form, they become diction, the rhythm of the structure of basic materials from which reality is created - colors, lights, shadows, and vibrations of sound. Some already sense it - it is precisely the vibration of the image in which those things dissolve. Hence Sharits' emphasis on punctuation, separating (and connecting) letters in the title of his films: T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G; N:O:T:H:I:N:G. This film is also an example of how we can watch with our own tired eyes a human face taking on form and disappearing into it.

In this film, Schlöndorff maintains the tendency from the beginning of his career, which focuses on the phenomenon of rebellion against society and its values, carried by strong individuality. Based on Bertolt Brecht's original work, the film updates the revolt of a poet who refuses to submit to either prevailing conditions or basic laws of human coexistence. Gradually, in its precise but alienating lyrical diagnosis, it distances itself from not only ridiculous bourgeois but also its own friends. /// Schlöndorff's placement of the play from 1918 in the contemporary setting evokes in the viewer (also thanks to the use of folk-rock music - hopefully that's what it's called - to underscore Brecht's original choral) thoughts of the Western counterculture or Eastern underground culture of that time. At its core, it is a strangely romantic idea that in a dive pub, a drunkard could step forward and start reciting verses... /// The casting of R.W. Fassbinder in the leading role of Baal was very fortunate - the enfant terrible of German film and culture of his time perfectly fits his role (which is essentially anti-Brechtian...).

What did Godard contribute to postmodernism and, in this case, cultural studies? The subjectivity of women in the post-industrial consumer age shaped against the backdrop of advertising discourses; the relationship with one's own body acquired not only through contact with a lover but increasingly more from the pages of women's magazines. The purely personal dilemma of a woman trying to find certainty in emotions and love (which man is the right one) merges with the dilemma of a woman who generally does not know what she wants. The choice between men and the impossibility of choice - orientation in the world and the impossibility of one's own immediate (our character loves the present) and certain path. Expression: an intimate speech composed of a mixture of fragments, not allowing or offering certainty of will; the intimacy of a solitary mental life not providing a definite meaning. Result: indecision, passivity, eternal touches and words not offering resolution. However, unlike in later films, the female character is portrayed in this film ambiguously, perhaps more in a positive light - albeit slowly unconsciously submitting to passivity, in which the will to succeed must not be her own, but someone else's, nevertheless resisting in her own way in her dilemma and doubts about "fate" and "the world". /// In this film, Godard brilliantly interrupts fiction with a distinct documentary style or rather the ethnology of Western contemporary life = media, advertising, framing of certain scenes, dialogue/interview.

Pasolini is a communist without progressive faith in economic modernization, nostalgically looking backward rather than forward, seeking authenticity in human life unspoiled by the empty greed of capitalist civilization. Pasolini finds a non-utilitarian way of experiencing the world either in the past (his work inspired by antiquity, later the Trilogy of Life set in the Middle Ages), or in the (lumpen) proletariat of southern Italy (a recurring theme in his work, strictly speaking, however, also - through the irreversible disappearance of this way of life in post-industrial Italy - belonging to the order of history), or as here - in the combination of both. Africa as the intersection of history and the present: the present symbolizing modernization in the form of pervasive consumerism, sparing no developing countries, which are presented as the only possible future; history as the experience of a time when soulless rationality and the utility of market society had no place alongside liberating irrationality, the uselessness of actions imbued with freedom, and naïve yet eternal connections between people and beliefs, traditions, customs, and religions. Africa as a challenge to the third world, fighting against imperialism and thus against the consumerism of the first world, in order to create a better future through the synthesis of the past and the present.

Robbe-Grillet is instructive in many regards, especially in the explicit inclusion of a description of the creative process in one character's mouth - but there is a minor problem in this case: in 1971, the intellectual community (not only in France) was already well aware of Robbe-Grillet's artistic approach, which had been literary since the 1950s and cinematically processed since the 1960s. Apart from this fact, this film once again offers a pure Robbe-Grillet anti-causal diamond with a thousand facets, each reflecting light, logic, emotions, relationships with other scenes, or the viewer's understanding in a different way. Compared to his other films, the narrative is even looser, relying on previous meanings that the viewer can or does not need to use as a guide to new meanings. With this second level of distance (the first being Eden itself) from the monocausal story, the author almost perfectly prevents the viewer's spontaneous orientation in the film and that is what the author intends: the viewer is forced to "steal" the meaning, the aesthetic impression, the emotion, and the visual association from the film that he or she creates on their own. It may not seem like it, but even in this case, Robbe-Grillet's film is not by any means a random mixture - several elements are syntagmatically repeated and combined on different levels (verbal, visual), acquiring new meanings as they gradually travel across the film (e.g., the word "prendre" = to take).

If it had been only Antonioni - and Fellini and Malle. But that hardly takes away from the film (except for its historical film firsts). It's fascinating how the socio-economic conditions of Brazil at the time allowed for the creation of cinema novo films like Barren Lives about the poverty of the agricultural northeast and Eros about the habitus of the urban elite of the capital city, whose class experience was not inferior to that of their Roman or Parisian counterparts. The film itself is a brilliant modernist study (predominantly featuring exteriors of modern buildings characteristic of the architectural style known as the "international style" in its post-war mass variant, which Antonioni had already used) of representatives of a social group. However, not of the callousness of capitalism stripped of basic means of livelihood and a dignified life as in the deserts of sertão, but on the contrary, by the same Latin American capitalism freed from any worries about basic needs - but about dignity (for that very reason?) coming anyway (this collective level of alienation of the elite was already captured by La Dolce vita). A game of falsehood, self-deception, poses, and characters objectified in the lifeless masks of their egos, just like the faces of stone statues. The other person as a mirror, one that is equally alluring because it reflects our narcissistic image, and terrifying because, at any moment, we could see ourselves entirely in it. It is a film that had its finger on the pulse of its time.

Passage à l'acte (= acting out), i.e., a psychoanalytic category for describing a patient's behavior that replaces the memory of a traumatic experience, with actions replacing the recall of trauma that cannot be admitted into consciousness. Arnold, as the best psychoanalyst, examines the Hollywood psyche to uncover what it is running away from. In doing so, he liberates the film from its lack of recognition of itself and its history. In Arnold's hands, the film image and sequence from a certain scene are freed from the singular identity attributed to them by the script, ideology, culture, editing style, narration, etc., of Hollywood and America (not only) at that time, and can openly reveal all repressed traumas of suppressed choices that stood before the director, editor, screenwriter, producer, and viewer during the creation/perception of the film. Subversion is injected into the heart of every movie frame.

Image, editing, and temporal loop as cinematographic means of the return of the repressed, suppressed not by the machinery of Hollywood, which would imply consciousness, but by Hollywood mimesis. In the film, Arnold's classic creative approach fittingly meets with the overwhelmingly psychoanalytic theme of the Oedipus complex. Arnold thus liberates the source material from his hidden and suppressed undercurrent, which would hardly find recognition in mass culture, here in the films produced by MGM. However, this also applies to all other films by Arnold explicitly not referring to this theme - moreover, in this film, we are flooded with subversive work with editing and repetition, which releases from the image what is not visible in the normal flow of film frames, but what is always contained in them as a repressed possibility that cannot be escaped without getting rid of the whole (or until we get rid of Martin Arnold).

Arnold took the Hollywood horror film Invisible Ghost (1941) with Bela Lugosi in the lead role as his working material and reworked it - in addition, largely atypically to his characteristic artistic techniques known from his previous films - into a new product that speaks to the underlying principle of Hollywood movies. Deanimated because Arnold gradually erased one character after another from the original film (which was completely re-edited). As a result, we do not experience the traditional Arnoldian repetition of cyclic movements of characters, but rather the repetition of scenes in which the center and main character is emptiness. The presence in absence and absence in presence of the "invisible ghost," which is the very principle of Hollywood film = tension, anticipation, and the self-deceptive illusion of the viewer wanting to believe in an empty cause, setting up the plot and generating excitement, which ultimately can function even in the factual absence of the creator of tension. The viewer is thus forced to fill in the emptiness, indicated by the very structural relationships of American films, and "see" the ghost where it is not (stairs, curtains, trees, hallways, etc.) because it was never there in the original source, even though it was beautifully depicted there (in other words, it doesn't matter who assumes that structural role). /// Arnold, however, also plays with the film in other ways, and here too, the characters find themselves in originally unimaginable = repressed situations, which change their character.

When the cinematic image and the entire situation depicted by the camera break their immediate merging with the so-called natural course of events and actions, Arnold's Pièce touchée arrives. In the total fragmentation of the situation and its movements, Arnold distances characters and objects from themselves, from the "only correct" course of events (which is manifested in ordinary cinema by naturalizing (ideological) uncompromising linearity of shot sequences). Pièce touchée is at the beginning of Arnold's trilogy (along with Passage à l'acte and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hard, in which the methods of experimental film psychoanalysis precisely revealed the unconsciousness = the apparent non-existence of the displaced possibility of simulating external reality. /// The author of the book "The Logic of Sense" could observe the formal principles of Aion, the time of the "eternal" truth of events, in which Alice becomes smaller as she grows... /// The film analyzes several levels, which become apparent only thanks to this repetitive decomposition of motion and image, and above all which establish new relationships between characters and events, thus breaking the "natural" (Hollywood) flow of events: 1) the husband's hand synchronized with the wife's head - which bourgeois lady dances as the husband whistles?; 2) Where the repetitive image gives the characters only minimal will, they become, in our perception, just puppets in the hands of the master of the film image. /// However, the main thing is what Arnold creates by including the vertical axis, splitting the image in two and at the same time turning it over; 3) Doors opening from right to left in one viewer experience "change" (they really are!) to doors closing from right to left; 4) A character is moving away and approaching at the same time in "one" motion, their distance simultaneously increasing and decreasing, depending only on the correct composition of the repeated motion and the axis reversal; 5) The axis reversal creates completely new movements - or rather, more complete movements. The hand draws a perfect circle where it previously only made a semi-circle. = The characters thus find their development and completion only in the mirrored reversal. /// Arnold introduces freedom into the visual perception of the course of reality through his work with image and time and thus disrupts reality without having to physically change anything about it.