Dionysos

The story takes place in the first half of the 13th century on the western edge of the disintegrating Kyivan Rus. The film can be divided into three parts (half an hour each): the second part is perhaps the most interesting, reflecting the real historical situation of the collapse of early medieval family structures in favor of high medieval feudal relationships between lord and vassal. This part is also spiced up by the historically accurate "collaboration" of the emerging feudal class with the Tatar "occupiers." The third part is a straightforward and simple (but not bad) clash between defenders and attackers. Why didn't I start with the first part? Because it's unnecessary and, most importantly, the weakest of the three. It's half an hour dedicated to witnessing the birth of love between the daughter of a treacherous boyar and a heroic figure from the "Ukrainian" defenders' camp. This Tristan-esque motif is not further developed in any interesting ways and only serves to slow down the rest of the film.

This documentary captures sometimes truly incomprehensible mistakes and errors made by the previous regime, especially its governing nomenclature. However, the form they chose cannot be given more than one star. Impartiality means nothing to the creators, half of all information is based on the subjective evaluation of people directly affected by the decisions of that time (and thus their objectivity can be questioned). The nature of this series implies that the authors selectively choose only those projects that were squandered, but almost completely fail to mention other similar ones that made it into production/distribution, etc., and were successful. Simply put, it is a work created ad hoc, with minimal factual and technical added value. The only positive aspect is that at least the work of our ancestors, who surely deserve some recognition, has returned to the light of day.

Aware viewers immediately see in the human struggle of moral principles and cruel utilitarian conventions a typical example of the "schizophrenia of communist totality" or something similar, as if it only existed in barbaric communist Russia (and the Third Reich, pushed into the same, no less ideological, category of "totalitarianism" as the USSR for current ideological reasons). When we dream the dream that we could only have been truly evil in some sort of past life and somewhere else, we no longer have to fear that we could really be evil today - liberal democracy and the free market inherently exclude that! Fortunately, the Russians knew and know from experience that all social systems are bad, and that is why they can make such good films. The motive of perestroika here lies in the fact that the virtues and principles of good communists and citizens of the USSR (whether we think they are good or not, or real or not, as presented in the film) were betrayed by Stalinism and its carriers, but not defeated. This was largely achieved, although of course not completely, through the deadly war, which, along with late post-war Stalinism, helped suppress the older honorable principles of the revolution. Perestroika thus aligns itself with these ideals, personified in the film by the Komsomol youth, the youth of the party, and the whole USSR, which was torn apart by Stalinism and then Brezhnevism before perestroika came. In politics, this found reflection in Gorbachev's return to Lenin.

Either I.) An interpretation from the outside of the film (retrospective, historical-critical, and speculative): when the film discovers its ability to express anything, any topic, in short, everything through itself since the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, it also brings the dialectical necessity to demonstrate this fact by the opposite pole of extremes, which confirms this fact, creating a film about nothing that expresses nothing. To prove that a film can represent anything, as it is essentially not connected to anything. Or II.) An interpretation from the inside of the film: the anti-representative character of the film sign creates an arc through the viewer's head, through which the sign speaks for itself. However, it shows that emptiness is unbearable, and the viewer seeks anything to hold onto - from random material damage to the film strip, to, for example, the "study" of the edges of a white square and their symmetry, to the fact that they won’t finish watching the film, which is the best proof that it is better to live with the illusion of something than to experience nothing, which is impossible in itself. In any case, it is a beautiful case of a film manifesto of experimental creative destruction.

Perestroika in film: dealing with Stalinism, the motivational burnout of the contemporary generation of the 80s, sequences capturing a concert of the famous rock band Nautilius Pompilius, etc. The film is primarily about the intergenerational clash of values and life attitudes, embodied by the father, who experienced active years of life in late Stalinism, and his son, who grew up in the (relative) comfort of Brezhnevism. Prologue: the father reproaches his son for his indifference toward the surroundings and the deteriorating fate of their homeland. The son counters with the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Stalinist generation, who passively witnessed the devastation of the same country during their youth and adulthood. Plot: the son falls into the year 1949, forced to relive one day of the past reality. He sees two things - the sad but factual impossibility of changing things for the better back then, and the undeniable effort and sacrifice of the generation of that time (building industry on green grass before the war, suffering millions of losses during the war, and being forced to rebuild the destroyed industry after the war). Epilogue: the son reconciles not only with his father but, more importantly, accepts the Stalinist era as it was. That is where the film differs from many of its peers - Stalinism is not condemned a priori (although its shortcomings do become evident), but it is also shown in its positive aspect (not in the sense of justifying purges, trials, etc., but in emphasizing that Stalinism was not only about purges and trials but also about the tremendous effort and sacrifice of ordinary people who lived their lives as best they could). The film flows rather slowly, playing more on details and subtle shifts in meanings, making it more suitable for viewers interested in Russia and its history.

The American avant-garde of structural film, to which this film belongs, is a cinematic offshoot of the contemporary intellectual movement that found much more in language than just a neutral means of communication. Words do not merely reflect reality; they change and even transform it according to their own image. With its claim to totalization, the language system serves as a model for the systematicity of human action and thought (and even the most inner processes within ourselves as Lacan postulated when he said that the unconscious is structured like a language). Words and language thus create their own system, to which both the surrounding social world and we submit, as we view the world according to its system. An illustrative example from this film is that individual letters are gradually removed from a series and replaced by the same images of reality (for example, the letter "f" is replaced by a tree). This automatically prompts the viewer to seek the connection between these images and the letter "f" or words beginning with "f". This is, of course, due to the fact that the film initially constructs the entire sequence solely from words. However, this is only a reminder that language (without which human orientation in the world is not possible) always precedes perceived reality. Another example of how words subject reality to themselves is the constant repetition of individual shots of reality. The continuous repetition of the same alphabetical system prevents short shots of reality from exceeding the predetermined space and forces them, along with letters/words, to repeat an endless loop. Interestingly, after the last word disappears, the fragments of reality also disappear because reality cannot be understood without the system of words, the same system that cruelly defines and limits reality. Of course, the film offers much more (due to a completely different filmmaking approach, the introduction and ending are the subject of quite different reflections). For example, some letters, just before they disappear, are represented by words like "system" in the case of "s" and "cycle" in the case of "c" (which is the very last letter in the entire cycle).