Dionysos

The car is an industry act and the film is an industry act. Both the car and the film grow from the soil of capitalism: after all, cars and films were already born in the advanced stage of industrial society, they are its children. In order for a product to grow, we need to water it: on the level of the base, with market mechanisms, and on the level of the superstructure, with ideologies. There is too much money in both cars and films for capital to give up its offspring. Why use the vocabulary of nature to describe human activity? The good old Barthes will answer: capitalist mythology delights in the naturalization of human relationships, making them something eternal. The film - the Hollywood one, the (so far?) only real one in its influence on humanity, yes, we have to admit it - as long as it remains the fruit of the capitalist film industry, it will forever repeat the same myth-making clichés (not to mention the myriad of already exhausted and repeatedly used narrative and visual clichés!). The wheels of industry, the racing car, and the film reel must never stop because it makes production more expensive. Everything must rotate smoothly and predictably so that profits can be predictable and reproducible. Films must be made to be watched and cars must be produced to be sold. The entire film is just the fulfillment of one myth, which Barthes just described directly in connection with the film: it shows us that greedy unscrupulous Management is bad, but it immediately negates this criticism by showing us that even under this cover of bourgeois power, one can live in accordance with their inner authenticity, preserving a healthy core. The result is that the individual remains a subject of the Company - they submit to its mechanism, but they live under the illusion that they have retained their freedom and achieved their own goals. No one stands up against the Company, capitalism continues to live on. We are in the perfect sphere of ideology: "I know well that a film or a car is just a product of industry, that its raison d'être is always primarily profit, but still...” And now, honestly, dear petrolheads like me, dear cinephiles like me: when you drive your Alfa Romeo like I do and when you watch a film that you enjoy like I do... How difficult is it to realize that your idea, that even though you drive an industry act, but in those moments, exceptional moments, when you forget about it and when you let yourself be convinced that your car was also created to fulfill the desire for speed, driving characteristics, etc... that... you are just giving in to self-delusion? It's difficult, I know, impossible - maybe. Perhaps not? Perhaps something needs to change so that it isn't like that...

The Wild West or perhaps Wild West Indies? The double nonsense of ahistorical comparison: this is not the USA, and this is not India. Nevertheless, the film is full of Eurocentrism and the centrism of the white race: the colonial state of the 17th century is like the Wild West - with the absence of law and the sanctification of one law only: personal profit at the expense of everything and everyone who is or was here. Cuba is truly like the India of the West, which Columbus never discovered and at the same time discovered - Cuba only appears here as a new "India" for Europe, a new field for its expansion. However, the double material enslavement is duplicated in the realm of ideas through cultural extrapolation from Europe - religion. It is fascinating to see, as in The Last Supper and other Latin American films, the ambivalent role that religion plays - from the more obvious role of enslavement to chiliasm visions of salvation. In this regard, the film surpasses the initial European idea of savages and the new land as a land of purity and uncorrupted people and completely confirms the historical shift (which naturally happened very soon) after which the new land and those who live in it become more of a danger and a subject of spiritual struggle rather than an innocent blank slate race prone to accepting the white truth of Jesus. The Church and Europe thereby confirm their own powerlessness indirectly proportional to their actual power. This powerlessness leads to disillusionment. The Europeans are left with only one thing: to choose. To choose between their total ideological emptiness and to become only what they have always been: power-hungry, pleasure-seeking demons, against whom religion has always wanted to fight on an ideological level. Or to be blind to their own emptiness and to throw themselves into religious frenzy even more strongly. The Europeans' own struggle with themselves as the foundation for the liberation of others from the Europeans could thus be the motto of the film. This is because people long for salvation, and the colonialist Europeans will never be able to offer it to them, having lost it themselves. /// Fortunately, even Alea freed himself to a certain extent from the Euro-North American heritage, and his film full of noisy and violent frenzy, flooded with raw images full of urgency and resistance, clearly recalls Cinema novo.

Confession of the moral and emotional dilemma of one generation in one country at one time, which maintains its role as an intermediate stage from today's retrospective perspective: looking back, it is necessary to reach into the American environment, just like the protagonists of the film, into the depth of their nonconformism in their lyrical expression, to the American Beat Generation, forming itself from the mid-1950s; looking forward, it is necessary to sense the unrest of the 1960s with the fight for nuclear disarmament, imperialist wars in the third world, and the desire for greater and greater self-realization in an explicit embryo. However, in the realm of film, this dual retrospective movement applies only on one level. From the perspective of film history in general, continuities can be sought: the film strongly evokes Cassavetes' cult film Shadows (1958) in the environment of the American independent film scene and at the same time serves as a very dignified precursor to later intellectual films and film essays (e.g., Jon Jost in the American underground scene), where fictional narration will intertwine with poetic, political, or otherwise appealing declamations. On what retrospective level, however, does the desire to pigeonhole the film into some continuous line fail? On the level of the author's own cinematic history - here there is no intermediate stage, but rather a rupture: his films will never be narrative like here (although this film is relatively non-linear and narrative compared to common bourgeois cinema!), fictional in the classical sense, universal in their testimony, speaking to everyone from the perspective of artistic depersonalization, sensed only by the hidden subject behind his work, which does not primarily speak about him. Mekas' later films will all be fragments of a private film reel, through which he will try to capture his life in images, without any intermediate stage that was supposed to be a fiction film sublimated by the author, as seen here.

"Papa's Cinema is dead." If New German Cinema with Reitz had to attack Papa's Old Cinema in the first place, even though his name was never and will never be carved on the monuments of film history in one of the first places, it had to attack the father himself – both the film and the new Germany have to be born without fathers. West German neo-corporatism and welfare state, in which everyone has their place in the structure of the economy and in which prerogatives are ideally transferred from father to heir while ideally preserving or most ideally appreciating family wealth, are falling apart – here, society, the individual, and film start at the very bottom, at the zero level, the starting point. A new film and a new person have no place, no history of their own, and they make themselves as best they can: and yet they can't when society operates on different principles. What remains is only the ghost of the unassimilable, indivisible residue, the waste of society, remains, wandering the world and constructing its reality through its unreality.

The eternal return of the same produces diversity in the bosom of unity, through which every moment branches out in three directions, only to converge in the consciousness of the viewer into a single - understanding, experiencing? - point? - in which there are not three different versions of one original, but a single material in three different embodiments, which must coexist within the viewer simultaneously. It is not about observing the possibilities of rendering one text in different times of human life, but about grasping the impossibility of approaching in the real world the seeing life's presence composed of all its possibilities at once. Words that obtain their truth only in someone else's mouth; repetition in a different context that retrospectively sheds light on something that is to come; reality disintegrating in an image and renewing itself in time. The strongest final piece of the vault (the film only works as a whole) - 60 - then in the movement of tragicomical metafictional reflection, so close to the 1960s, shows that such a grasp is still only possible in the world of illusory art, which becomes more powerful the more impotent it becomes in reality. Otherwise, I believe that the textual original of the film deserves more elaboration.

Terayama knew. He knew that the past is not something to be remembered, but something that arises only in the present - and without it, it never existed. (The use of the past tense in this sentence is itself incorrect, as it still evokes that it "existed" on a different level than the present, so it is better to say that "the past does not exist without the present." Period.) It is not a memory = Amarcord. ("And the film Amarcord (1973) has it right in its title: “a m’arcord” in the Romagnol dialect, or “io mi ricordo” in Italian, actually means “I remember.” Only collaborators of conventional cinema like Fellini and the common worldview can perceive childhood as a distinct universe, where poetry and eccentricities only serve as representations of a child's view of the world and where this poetry is only an author's tool for pathetic nostalgia, turning back to a world that once existed. On the contrary, Terayama knows. He knows that retrospection is a lie, masking the retroactivity of creative presence. His world of childhood is the world of his adulthood, and his surreal universe signifies only one thing - reality and the product of adult imagination merge into one. There is no difference between memory and fabrication, and ultimately between lies and truth, because such categories could only be preserved in reverence if we believe that the past happened once and for all. If Fellini and others were not afraid to understand their own superficiality and if they were not afraid to seize the surface of the screen in its liberating possibility to place reality and construct on the same level and thus create a truly personal image of childhood.

They had to fall in order to climb to the peaks, on which they would lay down in the calm of their finality and in the infinity of their suffering - and in the infinite calm of nitrocellulose, which has become their second mass grave. Through this film and its deliberate slow-motion of image and time, we can see for the last time the nameless and yet specific faces before being buried by the earth and covered by the snow from the heavens above the Alps. Through the color filters, frequently dominated by shades of yellow and red, we can catch a glimpse of the soldiers' last view, the sun they saw before it burned and engulfed them, the light and fire of the war machine, the last machine into which the proletarians in uniforms had to enter in order to attain painful calm. Thus, even though the film intentionally calms time and creates film contemplation with silence and meditative music, it evokes from the depths of nostalgia, into which it plunges the viewer, a restlessness in his spirit, calling for revenge and redemption.

Oh, Beckett, Kafka, Nietzsche, and everything else – the whole European culture seems to have condensed into an image of Hungarian countryside, and in that lies the unsurpassable greatness of Tarr: namely, that through his images evoking total perceptual identification (i.e., the viewer’s complete immersion into the observed object through a perfect sense of combining the visual field and the atmosphere it emits), every single detail of Hungarian reality becomes fully connected to the all-European message. The camera flows perfectly slowly like a stream in the Danube, and yet we are watching a Beckettian drama about senseless waiting for salvation, a Kafkaesque no less anti-deep drama about subordination of man to the equally senseless will and eye of Power, which exercises an act of universal distortion of everything into its silly logic, and finally a Nietzschean drama about the spark of ego that refuses to be restrained by anything, and yet always ends up as a faint flicker between darkness and light – between the black and white of the black-and-white camera.

Artistic geology consists of several fictional and metafictional layers that are built upon each other according to the changing emotional vectors of the characters. Various levels of film plans overlap according to the current and ever-changing temporal sequence, which is partially distinguished not only in terms of its duration but also in terms of the visual sensations it evokes in the viewer (yet also deliberately confused!) by a clear differentiation through color. Not only does color, but also the interior of the characters, shatter in a constantly rotating optical prism, which passes through the camera lens not at all randomly. Hanoun, who is still unjustly unrecognized, was a talented epigone of Godard, Resnais, and Robbe-Grillet, but at the same time, he feels relatively bloodless compared to them, but that should not be a reason for his highly sophisticated and avant-garde films to be forgotten.

The sleep of reason gives rise to monsters, fortunately, because Grandrieux's night full of emotions can be inhabited by monsters, but also by fallen women and fallen angels of self-destructive emotions. The night of reason gives rise to owls and bats in Goya and also in Grandrieux we descend with bats into the cave of a relatively isolated social milieu, in which every inclination is confirmed by physicality at the moment of its conception, just as the painter's imagination has given tangible form to falling ideas in the shape of animals – and we will truly observe the whole film as every speech, every deepest word passes on its way to the other person into a fully tangible sexual expression. Without compromising in any way, since chiaroscuro is a valuable technique that reveals that contrast can be more impressive than the formlessness of day, and the director proves that synthesis can unite image and word in opposition. To connect so perfectly fantastically that the viewer, who succumbs, feels an inexpressible understanding, even though the film cannot explain too much... How, after all, can one coherently express that connecting line that begins in one realm of human experience and ends in another?