Dionysos

I want the Cold War, apartheid, nuclear threat, and class enemies to return! A paradoxical sigh that could be uttered by many modern people living amid a values crisis in Western material society. Where are the times when people believed in (even if naively and foolishly) ideas and tried to change the world, fight, take action... In today's world, people have already resigned from searching for a higher meaning of existence and active efforts to make deeper marks in society through their actions. Today - in a world of triumphant market and seemingly clear evidence of the victory of Euro-American civilization - where it seems that the individual cannot change anything and can only drown in banalities, there is only one thing left - to immerse oneself in an endless feast, to indulge in hedonism, in which shallowness is a virtue and to gulp down "life" to the fullest. The confrontation of a man thinking within the confines of the past with his counterparts 20 years younger does not bring a clear resolution, only a bitter sobriety on both sides.

In his first American film, Gorin does not hide that he is a European intellectual and apprentice of Godard during the Maoist period. It is not that the movie is political-philosophical experimental agitprop, but because it explores fundamental questions of language and identity (the golden age of the linguistic turn in social sciences), social exclusion (the story of the daughters from a poor, half-immigrant family on the outskirts of San Diego's agglomeration is truly not just about cognitive psychology and linguistics...), and presents it all to the viewer in the sophisticated and playful form of a highly personal documentary - Gorin, just like during the times of the Dziga Vertov group, breaks the (pseudo)documentary norm of a separate object and narrator, enters the plot, comments on it, etc. Yet that alone would not be all that exceptional, but from the period less than ten years ago, Gorin also retained a feeling for the multi-layered construction of a narrative combining different media (the initial sequences combining Gorin's reflections and the initial introduction of the central theme with children's immigrant comics seem as if they came directly from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s) and especially the excellent separation of the visual and sound components, which is crucial for Gorin's meticulous tracing of the speech of both girls. It turns out that the discontinuous and disjointed composition of sound and image can also serve in the documentary field. /// However, Gorin did not overlook the socio-critical dimension, even though it is hidden under the guise of a peculiar nostalgia - the disappearance of a unique relationship and a unique language, accompanied by the adoption of the dominant language, doubles the fate of the entire family, which is sinking deeper and deeper on the social ladder as it adopts a foreign dominant language of social conduct...

The main heroine between two men, Kira Muratova between two film worlds, and the Soviet Union between a muddy yesterday and a neat tomorrow. It is true that we can understand the script as Brezhnev idealization, but from the film itself, there is also a sense of resistance against any materialism in human relationships. Not only with typically Russian lyricism that I ever believed (and not condemned as kitsch) perhaps only in old Russian films. But it is mainly because of the central motto, the declaration of Ljuba, in which, among other things, says: "The most important thing in the world is true happiness. They don't produce it in factories, not even in the best ones." It is an antithesis of materialism and proof that the causality of the film does not meet the official communist ideology: in that transition - from the mud/bad relationship with Nikolay to the brand-new housing estate/great relationship with Mikhail - the soft piano literally screams to the viewer that Muratova sees this transition as caused by love itself, and not as something embedded in the concrete of material conditions. Mikhail is thus not a hero of socialist realism and historical materialism, but a lyrical hero who fell from somewhere from a different history (from a time when we did not fly into space but instead burned handmade ceramics). Love and happiness change us and our relationship to the world, not the other way around; there is no dialectic of both moments in the film, only a temporal synchrony of two internally unrelated motifs: the birth of love and the construction of a housing estate. That's why I give it one star less. /// Muratova, on the other hand, stands between two worlds - the film lyricism is balanced by her favorite formalistic games, here repetition, playing with the axis, and the camera.

Indeed, this film has a clear ideological structure. Why? Because its authors (the Dziga Vertov Group) held these positions. How is it that they appear so outrageously in the film itself?! Because there is nothing like an "objective" "documentary" when it comes to social issues, and definitely not in the field of a POLITICAL documentary. Let us therefore leave the mentally lagging garbagemen to their waste (and their sweet dream that their ideological standpoint is objective...) and let us enjoy the originality, humor, and freshness with which Godard tried to create a new concept of revolutionary cinema - just as he tried to reveal both sides of the contradiction of social unity in the real world, so he tried to discover their new dialectical unity in the unity of art. To combine two contradictions - image and sound - into a new unity of opposites, a revolutionary film.

The significance of this work cannot be overestimated - it is the symbolic beginning of the so-called direct cinema approach enabled by advancements in film technology (light cameras, improved options for synchronizing and recording sound on location), and it still influences the concept of documentary filmmaking today. In conjunction with cinema-vérité (which, however, direct cinema should not be completely mistaken for, as anyone who has seen representatives from both movements knows), it brought about a revolutionary change in capturing reality that did not end in the 1960s but must still be fought for again and again. Therefore, even Primary is not just a piece of history today. The utopian and inspiring core of direct cinema lies in the following: the attempt to dissolve the camera and the documentarian in the observed object through pure observation; capturing a pure and unrestricted presentation of individuals/society externally; capturing unfolding reality through transparent observation, but doing so gently, like catching a butterfly, without any external interventions that disrupt the smooth flow of unreflected reality. The author of the documentary only appears on the scene in the editing process - the camera and editing as the creators of the film. Handshakes, fake smiles, endless car rides, rows of people waiting for rehearsed jokes - these are the truths of politics that only direct cinema was able to discover.

The introductory spectacle: the police on stage beating people in order to protect them in reality, but whom?; a simulated revolt and virtual emancipation accepted as a gift from the outstretched hands of the consumer idol. The same gesture serves the same function, whether as a (marketing) symbol of rebellion calling for participation, or as a sign of mourning and return to humility/conformity = Watkins shows that the essence and meaning lie not so much in the content as in the form that people allow themselves to be led by (existentialism and the Moscow theater as a form for advertising walking apples; a rock & roll band playing for teenagers and the Lord himself; the relationship between the stage and the audience, the idol and the spectator, serves both fascism and late capitalism, etc.) /// Although the film was made based on someone else's work, Watkins, of course, couldn’t deny his alienating documentary style: even though the film is at its core a "normal" fiction, Watkins' genius is demonstrated in the perfectly alienating voice-over in the cathartic scene - at the moment when ordinary (consumer) films would celebrate the regained subjectivity and nature of the main character, Watkins ironically and coldly overlays it with external impersonal statements, thus relativizing her effort to break free from the clutches of the public from which she has become estranged. /// A critique of the film: Was it necessary to be so explicit and didactic at times?

Painful decision-making between two equally valid social demands - preserving the past, including its material remnants, which may become obstacles to progress at a certain point, or sacrificing something from ourselves and our ancestors for the sake of the future. Because if we want (and we must) move forward, we have to leave something behind. But on the other hand: "We are what we remember. Without memory, we disappear, cease to exist, and our past is erased, and yet we pay little attention to memory except in cases where it abandons us. I do very little to exercise, nurture, strengthen, and protect it." (Mark Twain) Yes, we must look forward, but at the same time, we must not forget what we have left behind. But what if we are in a fog, where is the front and where is the back? In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Russia found itself in a fog, as it had so many times in its long history...

Since I experienced Vyškov almost at the same time, albeit in a shortened form of a one-and-a-half-month basic training course for Active Reserves, instead of three months for future Voluntary Military Training, although 85% of the course content was the same, I can confirm that the documentary is, within its limits, very faithful. A time machine transported me a few years back and also to the 70s when the main part of the Vyškov complex was built. Of course, the film could have been more artistic, more critical, more contemplative, and it would have suited it better to be a sincere raw cinema vérité.

A story that demonstrates that sometimes fiction can be the truth of reality and that the night-time alcoholic retreat into the world of fiction can be a form of therapy for the soul and a way (or at least an attempt) to come to terms with one's own past mistakes. Reality offers the old man nothing but a false game of pretense, which we, as viewers, only fully see through thanks to our previous immersion into the old man's imagination. Within it, he can seek revenge on his (cold is a weak word) son (the great Bogarde) and attempt to reconcile with past traumas. Yet what surprises the viewer is often the rather humorous approach. Nevertheless, it is a depressing story about a man losing control over his body, his loved ones, and ultimately, his memory and imagination. The characters on the screen are largely presented as determined by an external power (the will of the story's old writer-narrator), reminiscent of Resnais' subsequent film My American Uncle, where the characters are determined physiologically or psychosocially.

1) Mise-en-scène. It is necessary to remember the true origin of this word - in the original term "mise en scène," which literally means "placing" "on" "the stage," i.e., placing objects and characters on that part of the theater boards or space in front of the camera that will be a substitute for the world for the following few minutes, and a substitute that is all the more believable the better you are able to arrange those objects. German demonstrated his genius precisely in how he was able to densify, shape, and make this film mise-en-scène perfectly plastic and tangible, and thus his entire fictional world. Just as a visitor to the Hermitage marvels at how every section of the palace halls is decorated with ornaments and gilding, here one marvels at how every corner of the imaginary space is filled with dirt, mud, decaying wood, and decaying people. 2) Camera. This time, German, as one of the greatest poets of the film camera, lent his services to the mise-en-scène, and his detailed and intimate shots allow the audience to almost touch everything that created the world of the planet Arkanar for three hours, and thanks to it and the mise-en-scène, the entire world of the audience. 3) Synthesis. A film about the dilemma of uninvolved observation versus participatory co-responsibility thanks to the camera, mise-en-scène, and resignation from narrating the plot, which would divert the viewer's attention from the proximity of all the dirt and mud of Arkanar, truly allows this dilemma to be experienced. It is because of all these techniques that the viewer experiences exactly what the main character undergoes, i.e., being irreversibly and fatefully drawn into a foreign world, be it another planet or the fictional world of the film.