Dionysos

One of the main representatives of the so-called cinema marginal, Rogerio Sganzerla (together with Julio Bressan, another exponent of cinema marginal who contributed to editing and production), once again directed a film that combines, with its ironic, cynical, and sarcastic content, as well as narrative iconoclasm avant-garde with mockery of the world and oneself. He referred to it as the "aesthetics of garbage." The unbelievable nihilistic energy of the film, subverting traditional ideological and film schemes, emanates from every shot – the long sequences shot with a handheld camera, sometimes creating the illusion of quasi-documentary, if it weren't for being used to capture (self-)destructive orgies, aimless farces of characters despising both their surroundings and themselves, a carnival of exaggerated eccentricity surrounding a (most likely) wealthy oddball and his wives (characteristically teetering on the edge of a depressive circus troupe). The film has a plot that leads nowhere, an underground fragmentation of a sequence of atomized scenes connected "only" (and therein lies the whole simple genius) by that roaring energetic rebellion, imprinting itself on the entire work. /// Sganzerla himself described his filmmaking as follows: "I will never transmit sanitized ideas, eloquent discourses or plastic images before the garbage (…) Crushed and exploited, the colonized can only invent their own form of suffocation: the scream of protest comes from an abortive ‘mise en scène‘ (…) I’ll continue to make an underdeveloped cinema by condition and vocation, barbarian and ours, anticulturalist." (Annotations from the Edge of an Abyss: Rogério Sganzerla’s Anthropophagic Film Collages, J. Didaco, Senses of Cinema, 2004, issue 31).

The ability of some Japanese art masterpieces of that time to transition from subjective to societal, from intimate examination of oneself and personal relationships to universal and thus political, i.e., simply from existential to critical, is truly fascinating (Teshigahara - The Pitfall, Oshima - Death by Hanging). The first quarter: Antonioni in Japan, undoubtedly and flawlessly - a man lost to himself, his family, and characters wandering in a dehumanized world of geometric shapes of modern architecture in its perfectly smooth, rectangular structure, negating any natural place for humans. But Yoshida goes further - memory, the past, and the future transform the concrete stage of modern individual purification into the purification of the political individual, fighting for their ideals. A purgatory of convictions, dreams, and illusions in which heroes are trapped by the past, present, and future, and in which they can experience their own failure, weakness, unhappiness, and guilt - and lose their illusions, currently, almost seamlessly (flashbacks and flashforwards do it for them). A dead end of political choice, which is inevitably linked to the choice of life. /// Perfectly sharp and regular framing of shots often locks the characters in a central composition from which there is no escape, just like from an allegorical purgatory. All-consuming surfaces of black and white, steel and concrete, futile efforts.

The film is situated in three dimensions - film, painting, and sound - without having any soundtrack. Frampton "filmed" the final (waste) parts of used photographic material, thus creating both the dynamics of colors and shapes worthy of film and a "created" painting (which actually created itself by chance) worthy of American abstract expressionism – it is as if Jackson Pollock was filming a close-up of his painting. He also composed them into a structure according to a clear and strict rhythm - Frampton played with the visual material not only in terms of its colors and arrangement but also with its temporal organization, creating a rhythm almost like music.

The subtitle "Chronicles of the Present Time" illuminates two aspects - 1) a countercultural perspective on the history of the present, viewed logically in an experimental but also popular culture (Clémenti met Warhol during the filming process) manner; and 2) the position from which this perspective was formed, i.e., the lived-in and intellectual world of the "chronicler," /// "The period from the making of Belle de Jour was wonderfully productive, but in 1971 Clémenti was imprisoned in Italy on drugs charges. He never seemed to fully recover from the ordeal, but the experience led to a book and a film, New-Old (1978), which he described as "my diary of my life before and after 1973." (The Guardian, B. Baxter, 21.1. 2000). New Old is less condensed than Clémenti's previous two films (which is understandable given its significantly longer length), yet it still successfully builds on their previous methods (especially the multiple psychedelic exposure in the passages of the impressions of the time), enriched here by capturing one's own thoughts or ideas of friends and fragments of the life of one's own circle of artists and friends. The film differs from the otherwise formally similar films of Clémenti's friend Etienne O'Leary, who also subjectively captured the surrounding world and his own privacy, but could not coordinate the viewer's perception, so his films appeared as a random mess, even though they captured the same things as Clémenti, who, however, is able to better distinguish both levels and make them more comprehensible and impressive.

Filmmaking, its sociology, and its history - and especially the border between Europe and the USA, which is by no means impassable. Wenders crosses it on several levels. Primarily on a formal level, which splits along the Atlantic line into two distinct filmmaking continents: the first half in a typically slow, introspective European pace, an atmosphere of emotions rather than a storyline, while the American odyssey takes the form of uncovering secrets, almost like detective hitchhiking, a game of explosions and camera that offers the essence (although more artistic) of American cinema. Therefore, the character sketch in the first half should not be seen as unsuccessful - it was not meant to be complete, because even the first part of the film is not complete without its second half. The second half, the dear half - Wenders' love for the USA is evident here, and it is simply fascinating how he managed to correct it with that European artistic filmmaking form in the 80s, something he could no longer achieve later on. /// The sociological aspect is apparent - Wenders himself, Robert Kramer as the co-screenwriter and actor of the film, a director originally from America but who eventually worked in Europe, Sam Fuller (for whom a European played an American?). The historical aspect of film in the context of Euro-American cinema is evident, not only thanks to countless references to classic films. /// Thus, when the characters discuss two different artistic visions of film, it is necessary to keep in mind that it is a metafiction perfectly captured by Wenders and applied to the entire film.

"Peter Greenaway's fascinating film The Pillow Book opens with heroine Nagiko's birthday ritual. We see her father gently painting a birthday greeting on her face. These images indicate how influential Lacan's ideas about our initiation into language, the symbolic and the law of the father have become. Lacanian notions of subjectivity and textuality are further invoked when Nagiko sees her own written-upon reflection in a mirror..." (An Introduction to Critical Social Psychology, Alexa Hepburn, p. 87). One interpretation understands Greenaway's work as highly post-structuralist, The Pillow Book is completely so, both in form and content. Greenaway's cinematic exploration of language here goes so far as to grasp language as a sovereign sphere of desire and pleasure, inseparably intertwined with bodily pleasure, always captured in language. This sovereign power of language is materialized by the use of writing, in which not only the materiality of language and the reality of its effects are prominently manifested, but also through the use of Japanese characters (mysteriously beautiful and "delightful" to a European, the mystery of this signifier's essential inscrutability, through which we are compelled to seek fulfillment of our desire. /// Greenaway additionally dissolved this power of the sign into the entire film by using that unique overlay of shots and images, which connect image and writing through a continuous series of overlaps, just as the characters connect their bodies with the signs. /// Of course, the film is not perfectly Lacanian or Barthesian, but no reader of their works should miss reading this film.

(Unknown literary source.) Postmodern in form and substance, the film is a brilliant study of the subjectivity of the main protagonist - or rather, "protagonists." Huppert's character is split within herself towards the remaining two characters, becoming inseparable from them - if she loses the mediating role of one of them, she also loses herself. The feminist motif is also evident - both of the remaining characters are men. The protagonist doesn't directly reflect on this decentralization of herself and her dissolution in others, but instead embeds it in the objectification of herself in the form of her own literary works (many references from her works/notes, where it's mentioned, for example, in the introduction, which it roughly translates as: "The place where places and time exchange, I, you, and others exchange."). This erasure of differences also legitimizes the "postmodern" erasure of differences between dream and reality, the dreaming of a film within a film with narrative reality, the substitution of characters in the initial and establishing parable of a nightmare (which is important for the examination of the protagonist's relationship with her father, which, as I quickly discovered, plays a bigger role in the book than what I, at least, was able to observe in the film.). Above all, it legitimizes Schroeter's filmmaking artistry, which manages to grasp this duality/split of the protagonist in various doubling and mirroring techniques. /// This is not the place to examine the relationships between language and reality, which are important for understanding firstly the objectification of the protagonist, (not only?) resulting in her insane relationship with reality, and subsequently to understand the form of the book itself (also written by a woman before her death), and by extension, the form of this film.

An almost complete disconnection between the effect of expressive means and the message that the film broadcasts to the viewer. The dystopian warning condemning a radical turn as an event, after which a worse power takes hold than the one that governs us today, is in absolute contrast to the form of the film as a whole - which is totally avant-garde, underground, and subversive. The film mocks the youth movement of the 1960s, its revolutionary leftism, etc., but paradoxically it is their perfect reflection in terms of appearance. I am confused. (Somewhere on the internet, I read the opinion that it could actually be just an ironic embodiment of the fantastic ideas that conservatives had about that movement – that’s interesting, but I don't think so). Terayama is once again on the edge of symbolism, surrealism, and naturalism. Uncompromising. The most interesting aspect is the use of various types of literary sources ("non-plot" texts like statutes, bureaucratic regulations, etc.) explaining the overall situation, but often only loosely or not at all related to the current plot. (I saw the 72-minute version.)

Gioli's popular technique of axial division of the image in the 1970s is once again used here, but on multiple levels: 1) Spatial and object-oriented - the car disappears into itself as a reference to a car accident. 2) Splitting is directly applied to the characters, often accompanied by color inversion through a negative - this splits the character's personality, making them inconsistent with themselves, and even the viewer cannot be sure of their meaning, neither in space nor in terms of their intentions/character (they can therefore be associated with multiple meanings). 3) Image splitting brings the synchronous connection of two distinct events and spaces - this can substitute not only the classical cut but also establish new connections between previously disjointed parts of the film (the question of the characters' responsibility and their relationship/adequacy to what is depicted). /// In conjunction with the repetition of film sequences, especially the key car accidents, an interesting comparison can be made with Pelechian's "distance montage."

The film pays tribute to Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography. However, "The Small Disassembled Film" not only examines the relationship between the decomposition of human and animal movement into scientifically observable categories but also extends the meaning of these analyzed images in different directions without deviating too much from the original inspiration. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is the establishing comparison of a series of skeletal movements, along with other allusions to death, evoking the connection between death and chronophotography, which must surely affect every contemporary viewer – this is not only because all those involved, as well as their era, have long been dead, but also because the principle by which they were immortalized is also dead (chronophotography was replaced by more perspective cinematography). Moreover, the scientific principle chosen by physiologist Marey and others was based on an absolutely dehumanizing positivist vision of science, which believed that living beings could be understood through their decomposition into mechanical motion. Worth mentioning is Gioli's game with image repetition - the author uses this device and an important external feature of chronophotography to play with the protagonists, completely changing the meaning of their movements. As a result of the analysis of Greco-Roman wrestling, two homosexuals emerge, not in spite of, but thanks to the process of chronophotography.