Dionysos

Sometimes, as written by an Italian poet-director, it is "necessary to be insane in order to be clear" (Pasolini, “Gramsci's Ashes”), and in this eclipse, going hand in hand with clarity, twilight and light illuminate for us the black and white of film, whose sovereign aesthetics liberate people from the nocturnal dictatorship of both politics and logocentrism. In a world where speech is finally revealed as sporadic absurdity, throwing a helpless smirk at the freedom of voluntary aphasic film, personified by the aimless movement of the protagonist, the viewer cannot help but feel sorry that from the beginning, we know that we are only following a construct, which reminds us that the fall of Franco was just a dream during the filming, into which we have fallen, and the fall of our remaining conventional bourgeois reality is still out of reach today. The film is irreducible to its relatives, with which it is equal: the surrealist unveiling of striking unattractiveness of the bourgeoisie and specters of freedom á la Buñuel, the absurdity of lost communication á la Beckett, "eclipsed" wandering through existential wasteland á la Antonioni, and last but not least, at times a prelude to Pythonesque surrealist sketch comedy.

From the bones of martyrs, the long-dead survivor emerges from the morbid display of the Otranto church ossuary, for... Actually, I don't even know, but one thing is certain – the main character will wander through centuries, events, desires, and peripeties, like in a feverish, bitter, satirical dream, where the laws of time, profane and sacred, do not apply. It is partly an autobiographical-toned film (Bene plays the main character on whom the entire film relies; in fact, Bene was born near Otranto). Bene also often uses very short shots and brisk editing, thanks to which the resulting fast and surprising montage evokes in the viewer sudden and unexpected emotions, just as the poetic-philosophical passages evoke awe and confusion in the viewer's intellect. The film received the Grand Jury Prize (alongside Robert Lapoujade's film Le Socrate) at the Venice Film Festival in 1968.

A unique synthesis of high and low, nihilistic, satirical, and ironic towards everything and everyone. It is one of the founding films of the so-called marginal cinema, a purely Brazilian category of films on the border between (deliberate) ignoble and underground. Similarly, this film, which is primarily an anarchic burlesque, playing in a free-thinking and unrestrained way with form and content, to which nothing is sacred, situates itself on the edge of pop art and avant-garde. It mocks (just like the entire marginal cinema "movement") the left-wing intellectualism and snobbery of the legendary Cinema Novo, as well as the police, criminals, and terror to guerrilla and army or officers, which only shows that, unlike its purely commercial Western counterparts, this film is not a genre film for its own sake, but with its undisciplined nihilism, it is an authentic statement by a 21-year-old director about the state of his country - after all, the country was ruled by a military junta since 1964, and by the end of the 60s, the country slowly but surely found itself in the midst of political violence of state and guerrilla terror. But what primarily attracts attention is the form, which, with its deliberately (but thoughtfully) chaotic combination of two main storylines, a barrage of editing combining various visual and sound sources (fictional story, fragments from period films, music from classics to contemporary pop, fake TV shows, etc.), and comedic coloring, creates a film that is, especially for foreigners, a unique, although of course highly subjective, source for understanding the reality of Brazil at that time. It is precisely the unusual combination of image and sound of the film that gives it a new dimension and, above all, new meanings, mostly of a cynical and humorous nature. /// Despite its irony and self-irony, the film is truly a smart testimony of the social situation at that time - the feared bandit who asks "Who am I?" throughout the film is ultimately shown as a powerless, uncertain, and insignificant person-symptom of a society that projects its own fears onto him like a projection screen (communists see in him "a man from the highest stage of capitalism," while right-wingers see him as a criminal and terrorist who takes from the rich and gives to the poor), and the ending shows how the all-powerful bandit is just a temporary affair in a time of the country's descent into unnecessary violence on a much larger scale.

Who else is better suited to capture the minutiae of American middle-class life than an American director who impressively utilizes zoom and details? It is only through the camera that we can see up close that the faces of the protagonists are just character masks, from which despair, futility, and bitterness shine through in sneaky glimpses. Laughter, which is just a sneer, is only a means to convince others and, above all, ourselves of something. Similarly, searching for salvation and forgetfulness in entertainment is futile for people who no longer know how to have fun, and therefore their parties end in the hangover of falsity. In that moment of realization that we ourselves did not believe in our own pose, that everything is really screwed up, that instead of being in a luxuriously equipped row house, I find myself at rock bottom, that moment when the non-diegetic music stops (and Cassavetes can do without it just fine), Cassavetes knows how to direct it like no one else.

A thoroughly original copy, which not only pays tribute to/steals from/lets itself be inspired by the visually striking references and forgets itself in the film Last Year at Marienbad. It is difficult to determine what is Japanese about the film, apart from the two main actors and the (invisible) crew, when everything else we see is European material viewed in the style of Resnais and Antonioni. Yoshida and his team have created a strangely fascinating simulacrum of European progressive cinema, which, together with the story of a painful melancholic search and missed love, fascinates with its relevance to the time and icons. This is especially true of the form, which, in its somewhat empty (often slavish) imitation of its models, reminds us of the artificiality of the choice of kitschy stage sets of the "most beautiful" and "most iconic" European destinations, from the Eiffel Tower through the Roman Forum to London and Lisbon, where the entire film takes place. However, these scenes are also among the most interesting in their own way. Nevertheless, Yoshida absorbed the experimental narrative structure through (not only) this film (not entirely successful in itself, but reaching above the average of that time as well as today), which he soon after ingeniously and completely originally used in his subsequent films, following in the footsteps of his European teachers, playing with the temporality of the plot and the nature of the characters, dealing with alienation and love/life/politics, etc.

We should evaluate a work of art only "here and now" and try not to overly incorporate external factors into its assessment: the most dangerous thing in this regard is the inclusion of the author's personal life. I mostly agree, but here I cannot - Chantal Akerman's life and work should serve as an example as the muse of cinema. Certainly, Blow Up My Town is not an extraordinary work in and of itself, but... the freshness with which a barely adult girl decides to jump (and certainly in no way sophisticatedly) into the film, mainly into a socially, gender-sensitive topic. Here, of course, Jeanne Dielman is born, whose defiance against the conventions imposed on women by the male world takes on a reversed form in Blow Up My Town, as the author herself expressed later and there is no doubt about it. The muse of cinema: making films experimentally, sometimes lightly (even musicals, comedies) - but always striving to make something new and, most importantly, to make films ABOUT SOMETHING. Although it may not be evident to the conventional viewer at first glance, beneath the heavy experimental form or, as in this case, under the façade of youthful barefoot comedy, there was always a real person hidden, whether female or male, but always real.

Dual separation in terms of loss that we should mourn? (We have lost meaningful conventional film. Who will build it for us?). Or dual emancipation, which is equally hopelessly painful as it is redemptive? Jane Arden's dual approach in the intentions of feminism and "antipsychiatry" symbolically intensifies in the counter-movement of separation, which is the collision of the object of female and psychotic emancipation in the form of a single character - the psychiatrist-husband, whose dual paternalism disappears in the movement of the woman's detachment from his and reason's rules, and in the movement of the film being liberated from the rules of the Hollywood forefather. The collapse of these two poles in one film character thus foreshadows the collapse of bourgeois ideas about the one correct film, ideas that only see otherness as nonsense anyway, just as they see "common sense" as a deviation from normality in a madman.

I have not read the book, so I do not know what S. Lem was talking about in the first place. However, both Russian adaptations luckily avoid indulging in purposeless sci-fi genre extravagance with imaginary technological acrobatics (which adolescent American fantasies often enjoy). Therefore, it is also less important whether the ocean is trying to examine or even destroy humans with its own weapons, that is, with humans themselves. It is also unimportant that the set of the Soviet television from 1968 does not convince the viewer on its own that it is from the distant future because it deals with the innermost human psyche here, about the relationship to another human being, without which no psyche can exist. Those materialized beings are indeed fragile neutrino creatures, whose existence relies on an external source of energy that keeps them together, but we must not forget that it is no different in real life, as the main protagonist has already realized on Earth. Because even in ordinary life, a person close to us can become a fragile structure that is not sustained by a foreign ocean while alive, but by a completely different source - ourselves. Both films (and undoubtedly the book as well) are intellectually and emotionally very grateful themes.

The overall tone of the film is hinted at by the expressive opening captions and the first introduction to the main character through his distorted subconscious dreams. Impulsive, fervent, and unpredictable painter Franco Nero decides to retreat to an abandoned country estate in an attempt to immerse himself back into his work, where he fully descends into the depths of delusions, dreams, obsession, and inner conflict. The horror element of the film is manifested during the painter's obsessive exploration of the past life of a beautiful aristocrat who lived in the house before him during World War II and served as his inspiration. The film is particularly pleasing with its surreal visions, the materialized dreams of the artist, and the blurring of the boundary between reality and imagination, culminating in a tragicomic ending.

An academic art film about an academic that is as closed off as its main character. A film about a self-centered man (his self-isolation is already shown to us in the opening lecture, where he refuses the idea of the subject of his interest to come into interdisciplinary contact with other sciences) and no one else. The other characters simply do not exist. If it were not for the contrived beginning with an abundance of unnecessarily drawn-out, universally philosophizing, and variously distorted musings about death, angels, and language, the viewer would not understand this. We simply need to go back to the theater rehearsal scene, where everything is explained to us through the character from the medieval play "Elckerlijc," where it is clearly stated that "the entire play is a monologue," that Elckerlijc's entire conversation with Death is actually a conversation with oneself (be careful if you watch the film with English subtitles, where "entre le soi et le moi" is nonsensically translated as "between the self and the not-self," which is simply horribly translated). The entire film, from the conversations with Anne, the travels of the trio of academics (who are of course nothing more than the main character himself, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and not autonomous characters) to all the other scenes (for example, in the cemetery - it is difficult to find one's own grave...) takes place within the immanence of the main/only character. It is then not difficult to surmise that Anne is the personification of Death (cinematically, this is beautifully subtly demonstrated when Montand speaks the crucial words about the division of Elckerlijc within himself and about Death, and Anouk Aimée slowly moves to the background of the shot), and that the main character must end up the same as Elckerlijc, alone.