Dionysos

The pearl necklace explosively unravels disparate scenes of Brazilian carnival dancers from the Third World, connected by a thread of ecstatic resistance against everything that turns misery into misery and turns the poor into the poor - thereby resisting itself. This is formally manifested in irony toward its critical discourses and the discourse of film as such. Perhaps it won't be more stereotypical symbolic violence if I say that this film, in the style of more animalistic late Cinema Novo, activates the strongest of South American temperament. Under the parade of unrestrained images and proclamations, as a viewer in the Sambadrome stands, you can sense their common latent Dionysian energy, a carnal carnival of the will for freedom, redemption, and the struggle in the blood of dignity that will not be tamed by any capitalist, white man from the North, or any critical theory. The will for the growth of life, sprouting from the muck of the global South.

The view challenges, the heart tempts, the circumstances urge - the coward runs away: Yankee has recently awakened and turned his favorite genre, the road movie, into a tool for self-criticism of his own life project. The neurotic man (that is, the majority white so-called "normal" subject) has reached the end of his historical journey and, as he has so often realized, lacks the courage for the ultimate fulfillment of his desire. It is therefore finally deservedly left by the roadside of history. Tomorrow belongs not necessarily directly to women, but at least not to men (and if the future were at least half as beautiful as Talia Ryder, Jordan Peterson, the prototype of a fighter for male historical supremacy, who must take antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills...) would certainly dare to enter it, for example, as the archetype of today's North American defenders of old conservative orders. The Sweet East, just like this year's Beau Is Afraid, brilliantly shows male weakness and inability to fulfill their role, while Tom Cruise still probably managed to produce the appropriate reaction to Nicole Kidman's "Fu*k" in Eyes Wide Shut. Contemporary American heroes can no longer do that - whether it is shown to us through the surreal introspection of the male soul in Beau or, on the contrary, negatively through the fate of a girl whose vicissitudes are fundamentally shaped by male incapacity to achieve what they want for their cultural-political self-delusions... Fortunately, American cinema is partly getting rid of its Hollywood self and offers at least in these two cases films that are not afraid to step at least a little off the beaten track of cinematic storytelling.

The Theater of Essence or How to Achieve Purification not through Reduction but through Overload: a cleansing excess through which Carmelo Bene achieves his eidetic artistic style. Another person would hide behind an empty mask of minimalism and cowardice, which must protect what little it has to say in the incubator of a lack of further experiences. In contrast, Bene overwhelms the audience, explosions of sensations and paranoid cuts bombard the spectator's mind without pause, forcing it finally to free itself from the effort to grasp all the tangle of meanings, reconstruct a one-sided plot, capture every breath of meaningfulness; in short, it compels it to freedom, which can finally find the gesture behind all gestures, the speech behind all speeches, the acting behind all actors, and the film behind all theater. It is no coincidence that his collection of interviews and thoughts about film is called "Against Cinema," because it truly contemptuously tears conventional film to pieces in the name of essential expressionism, as his style should be called. The beauty of the true film image shines through the stylistic allusion, which is the filming of expressive facial expressions of the actors in ostentatiously colorful costumes of basic geometric shapes against a purifying-white backdrop of not theatrical but metaphysical scenery.

When it comes to the breaking of the bread of the history of German cinema, we come across the source of its modern source with The Bread of Those Early Years, and while watching it, I somewhat feel like "I am at the source, and I perish of thirst." This is not only because the plot of the film tells the story of a young man dissatisfied with the predetermined bourgeois future (in line with the resistance intentions of the Oberhausen Manifesto against "Papas Kino," of which this film was a pioneer), but also because the plot and partly the story somehow - at least to me - did not completely fulfill expectations of greater iconoclasm. The story indeed uses many avant-garde approaches, such as local freezing of the image and above all the non-linear storytelling, but especially in the case of the latter, certain limits of this film are revealed: the local non-chronology does not create the same temporal aporias as in Robbe-Grillet/Resnais of the same period, which lead to a new perspective on art and life, but still allow for reconstructing separate 'before' and 'after,' and thus the form remains more of an ornament than a transcendental hammer of the new... However, it is still an above-average ornament compared to the myriad of conventional films created in the history of cinema before and after... This temporal progression of "two steps forward, one step back" thereby noticeably reminds me of the fate of H. Vesely himself, because this film also feels like a step back compared to his previous masterpiece Nicht mehr fliehen (1955), which with its stylized and surrealistic style may have attacked the old world and film more than this more civil piece that is closer to reality.

A scientific autopsy of a human being, at the end of which is a living person; the appearance of ironically detached structuralist methods of dissecting a human and a country only into their objective system of relationships leads to a glimpse of the flourishing of humanism - a flower extracted from a child's head crushed by a bulldozer. A glimpse and fulfillment of experimental structural film of the 1960s to the 1970s: If, in May 1968, at the student barricades in Paris, there was a chant to overthrow capitalism, saying that "structures do not march in the streets" (les structures ne marchent pas dans les rues), then in this Brazilian short film masterpiece, it actually happened – a film based on a cold structure created a human teeming with life and freedom. So that he could be killed. So that we could all kill him.

Probably murder, definitely escape. However, it wasn't a person who was killed, but a "parallel cut" that disrupts the idea of the connection of events and confuses the ability of the average viewer to connect unrelated things, like in a children's fairy tale: the director, like a child, replaces the conventional bourgeois continuity of meaningful cuts with the montage of two lines, each dancing its own solo; only the dancers' glances, from the whirl of their closed pirouettes, rhythmically flash onto the other soloist - and at that moment a new, freer meaning is born, one that does not rustle with paper inserted in advance by the screenwriter, but one that is born spontaneously during the dance-film from the viewer's perspective. Symbolically, Hanoun most often uses classical and baroque music in his tetralogy of four annual films - the beats of times when instead of two clearly defined pairs dancing in a close embrace, contradance took place, when, for example, individual dancers intertwined in various combinations in two randomly grouped opposite lines... In this film, no music is playing - a symbolic possibility of even greater detachment from the dictate of expressing logical meaning through editing... Otherwise, it may also be a nice film about fatherhood and a mother-in-law.

“Renaissance collections aimed to show the connection between natural and artistic forms, the transitions between the wonders of nature and human creations. The Kunstkomora thus presented a vivid image of the world in its multiplicity and breadth, according to natural philosophy and magic principles, that "everything is contained in everything" (omnia ubique). (Description in Umprum) Greenaway's films are this kunstkomora, in which the microcosm of the author's artistic vision burdened by so many internal images through a dark room is projected into the macrocosm of baroque overflowing mise-en-scène, a kunstkomora that wants to say everything and indeed says everything: one film image is not enough, the superposition of images duplicates the leafing through of a book, which is the definitive inventory of all knowledge - in Greenaway's work, films need to be seen as a natural transition from book to film and vice versa, as writing and knowledge can be aestheticized at any moment and visuality can always be absorbed by the alchemy of words which "was at the beginning" of everything and from which the author's mannerism also arose, in which the sole essence of the divine demiurge - the director - manifests not only through the seven liberal arts but through all artistic forms within the reach of classical spirit.

"Do you remember the problem of harmony? From the forbidden union of Area and Aphrodite, a child was born and was named Harmony. Born from the god of conflict and the goddess of love, she inherited contrasting traits from her parents. Harmony is harmonious disharmony." Here, a film is also born based on the disjunctive synthesis of the great with the small, the verbiage of the intellectual bohemian with the vulgarity of bodily shock; a film image captivated by discourse alternating with elegant pomp of refined imagery drowned in silence - or music. In short, the modus operandi of Bressane. The viewer can choose whether the moment when it lights up will collide with the moment when the world is colored, or - when the image becomes black and white, and thus more pleasing to Harmony with its contrast: or must the pendulum of the viewer's attention, on the contrary, constantly swing between the two poles in order to enjoy the smooth transition between static framing of passing words and flowing camera movement of paused words?

As a blind spot, sometimes it forces us not to look directly at the thing, but through the perspective of others, so an artistic view sometimes needs a digression through a different genre of life, in order to return to its goal, but not through a traditional dramatic arc: like when the Nouvelle Vague had to express its still immature artistry and novelty through allusions to silent grotesques (perhaps that is where the humorous appeal of the young old people comes from), like when Duras/Resnais update the past in every present without justifying why I wrote present in the first place and not the other way around (explicit metaphysical and intertextual reference by Fábri to Hiroshima, and not the only one!) or in the extreme, like when the Slaughterhouse-Five pass through the past of war massacres through the future of space sci-fi (the overall 1960s zeitgeist of the film, made by a slow aging Horthy, war, and Sorella!). Similarly, the line between trauma and the present cannot be direct, but jerky - memory games as a choppy cut. As a Robbe-Grilletian, I must remark that it would be a big coincidence if in this film about a man who lied his whole life, there were no anticipatory games with frozen images and frames connected with scenes from a pharmacy partially used as inspiration in the film The Man Who Lies, which was made a year later in (Czech) Slovakia, just beyond Fabri's Hungary.

"What shadow, what person, there, behind the image, pushes or pulls the image; which worker outside the frame pushes or pulls the camera trolley?" Marcel Hanoun asks in his book “Cinéma cinéaste, Notes sur l’image écrite,” p. 72, from 2001, symptomatically a director of an art ghetto outside the ideological mainstream, a director who never experienced ideological frenzy like Godard, only artistic frenzy... How is it possible that a former Maoist (1974) resonated with a slowly dying art lover (2001)? Because not only Cinematic Marxism, but every true art always grasps itself as a creator; the simultaneity of its identity and the process of its creation; the consciousness of its unconsciousness = its conditions of emergence, whether productive or creative. Only then are scientific theories and philosophies born, which do not forget the world, and works of art that do not force us to forget about life. Is this film therefore standing on the gradual border between Godard's Cinematic Marxism and his late poetry on the film image, as he did from the late 70s until his death, similarly to the early "film" Godard of the 60s being somewhat in contrast to the "talkative" Godard of his audiovisual essays? This is just another example of the fallacy of thinking in simple temporal boxes, which thinking about cinematography and art filmology often satisfies: we can, on the other hand, agree with Hanoun that "there is nothing between camera writing and film reading other than the continuity of perspective." Similarly, the view of all of Godard's "periods" will have to reveal them as the continuity of one movement of an emerging and self-perpetuating truly artistic film - this view will be difficult, as it will already belong to the prolegomena of any future film metaphysics that may become a science. This is because the current era, where the conformism of the hegemonic bourgeois ideology blinds viewers, viewers who do not understand how it is possible in nature and in the only possible nature - because it is artificially created by the director... - to connect film, sociology, reflection on the essence of film in relation to image and sound, video, childbirth, poverty, France, the world, voice and thought with reflections on the birth of the film we are currently watching ("there will always be a blind female soldier shooting at the light," p. 77)... because this current era is not the future era, the one that will already understand for itself that every true art is at the same time "Marxist!" And that is why Godard and Hanoun could agree: "The image sneaks in through the gap of sleep" (p. 72). Sleep that awakens the unconsciousness, which awakens dreams, which awakens imagination, to which we must give all power so that films like Godard's can be created, which people of today don't want to understand, or films like Hanoun's, which often couldn't even be made due to lack of resources, and therefore didn't have to be immediately misunderstood...