Dionysos

Cinema novo entered a new stage in the late 1960s, in which episodic and exalted satire, infused and intentionally tinted, transitions into the heights of silent visual allegory, thus merging the Brazilian underground with European contemporary hyper art. Pierre Clémenti wanders through the film as if wandering through a film by Philippe Garrel of that time or Pasolini's but moreover as if he simultaneously sank into the Brazilian underground film of that time - cinema marginal - with its unrestrained anti-logical assault primarily of verbal irony. The long visual parable shakes hands with the episodic nature of self-undermining discourse. It is so brilliantly disjunctive and at the same time synthetic that the result can only come from a great filmmaker, who in this case didn't forget about the political dimension of his work, making the film perfectly Latin American. Venceremos!

The essence of a book is to encompass all other books ("intertextuality"), the nature of reality is to contain within itself an infinity of realities ("representations"), and finally, the essence of an image is (not) to encompass all other images, all stories, and all interpretations, but also something more - a peaceful fascination with itself, free from interpretation, open to the flicker of an always new world, a new sequence. After all, sequences unfold in time, and when an entire life is needed for an hour of film, the ultimate refuge of films becomes a fragment of images, which have the power to compress entire centuries in their flashes. Or at least their own - the twentieth century of cinema. Jean-Luc Godard, even in his old age, does not change his likely definitive word of an abandoned revolutionary, who does not intend to abandon the hopes of his past and his images and becomes the Angel of Walter Benjamin, who redeems the victims of oppression and exploitation with his gaze (after all, Benjamin's textual metaphor has a prototype in... Paul Klee's painting).

Brazil, plagued by the tyranny of a military junta since 1964, is a real prototype for the fragmented story of a dictator who was sent by the Agency for Coups in Third World Countries to bring fascism to the poverty-stricken favelas, an order that is as already fragmented as the plot itself. Everything that is present in other Cinema marginals is here: discontinuity of narration, pop-art aesthetics, and asynchronous image and sound, given also by the fact that the film, naturally shot with a minimal budget, is dubbed with simple voice-overs so that the resulting "natural" mismatch between the characters' dialogue on the screen and the sound creates a good perceptual preparation for all the other musical and sound mismatches. Above all, there is something that crowns the whole approach and creates a strong experience out of this film, which at first glance is only a plaything without rhyme or reason. Mockery and undermining the dignity of the dictator's character could be considered an ironic mockery of the ruling military regime and its support from the United States, etc. This is undoubtedly true in the first plan. However, this irony drowns all the characters, including those fighting against the dictator, the entire situation - paradoxically, except for the film situation - so we find ourselves in a situation where positive identification with either pole is not possible: the protagonists end up in despair and failure, while the antiheroes are just ridiculous characters. After digesting the waste of Western civilization, American mass pop culture, and European fascism, there is only a taste of a dead end left after the mockery. The senseless ugliness of comic book costumes and political cross-eyed scribblers without a way out from the chaos of the audiovisual Latin American carnival gone mad.

What does continuity speak of through a flood of discontinuous fragments from visual diary notes of one's own life, besides the author's own life? It is also one intertitle with a paradoxical message, being even more paradoxical as the film is at first glance, and according to the author's claim, purely personal - "This is a political film." This is a political film? Yes: the film presents the humanism of human life, adoration of the small everyday life not only in contrast to any great history but - and this is the second paradox - also in contrast to the author's own life. Humanism of the moment against any effort, always necessarily violent, to achieve greatness and the desire to leave a mark on the world and history, but above all resistance against the desire - equally violent - to ascribe any meaning to one's own life. Indeed, it is heroic to look back at oneself in old age and say: This means nothing. Everything that you see and that I see, is nothing. Everything is randomly composed, any statement regarding the interpretation of what you see and what is presented before my eyes in a cinematic memory, says nothing more. The more it tries to be objective, and even if it were the most objective (only place, date, time, context), it cannot provide anything at all, because it is about nothing because life has nothing to do with it. So says the author. For the author, there is only a feeling, a moment, the joy of the moment, which merges with the pure joy of filming whatever, because life does not have predetermined important or big events, but a moment of joy can arise from anything. That is why this film is the only film by Jonas Mekas that is worth seeing because it also provides an "interpretation grid" (if it makes "sense" to use this term...) for the author's other films.

Where is the cradle of the crystal, where does it originate and what does the minimalist art crystal want to be? In the darkness of depth, in the loneliness of time, which stops in the darkness and surrenders the place to the desperation of closed self, to the self-crystallizing inner, which takes a long, long time to crystallize, but eventually the poet, director, and viewer will find what they are looking for. There may not be many crystals, but that makes them all the more valuable, and all the more the art film wants to be like it - rare, shining from the mass of shapeless rocks around it, only occasionally appearing in its brilliant beauty: like occasional music in the midst of silence, like illuminated faces in the midst of darkness, like poetry in the midst of silence, like paintings against the backdrop of emptiness.

It is rather the mistake of the writer than the film's author that, similarly to his first film "La lune avec les dents," I cannot free myself from film science parallels, which easily degenerate into empty categorization. But even in this film, you will again feel the atmosphere of the French New Wave directors, which is even more significant because the film relies on atmosphere rather than plot: surveyors delineating the future highway site are a great metaphor for a film that stands on the immobility of space, as opposed to the movement (non-existent cars) of the story, as they move more through the emotions and feelings of the characters and the viewer, as opposed to the story and camera movement. The camera itself and the overall slightly sentimental and humorous tone, as well as the overall impression from the first camera shots, recall Truffaut's nostalgia for silent films of the past, and it is not irrelevant to mention the involvement of Marie Dubois in this Truffaut context. However, this film reminds me of not only Truffaut and his Jules and Jim but also another French bard, especially J. Rivette because the enchanting duo of the main protagonists more than reminds me, avant la lettre, of Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating.

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.

Is it the infuriating abundance of overripe pleasures that begin and end within themselves, or the purity and simplicity that are never as simple as they seem because there is something else hiding within them? The headache is caused by the claustrophobia of details that cannot be visually processed in the same way, just as the stomach cannot digest an excess of even the best food... The image: Salome's body stripped of everything, including hair, against the backdrop of purifying fire... setting vengeance in motion. Vengeance, religion - no longer can one be here and now, enjoying life; it is necessary to see something more behind everything. Dance is no longer just movement, but a crime; the body is no longer an object of pleasure, but a (self)destructive idea. The moon is no longer just the moon and that's enough, but a sign that always signifies something more than the night, which should belong to joyous and colorful revels like those in a moving Rubens painting, but now it belongs to a principle that seeks something more in everything. Purity, therefore, kills; final purification and a flood of light can do nothing but torment.

Jordan Belson apparently regularly destroyed his previous works, which he retrospectively found inadequate during specific phases of his artistic development. At least until the late sixties, he also refused to screen many of his works. The gradual abstraction of the external world at the expense of the internally derived image penetrates the soul of the author. At the same time, the external world is not destroyed or closed off; in 1978, Belson stated, "The distinction between an external scene perceived in the usual way and the scene perceived with the inner eye is very slight to me." From the beginning, the author has been interested in Eastern religions, Buddhism, in which the unification of the internal and external worlds is to occur. American experimental art of the fifties and sixties is excellently depicted in its apparent contrasts in Belson: abstraction and structurality are not a sign of the displacement of the individual, but rather his higher self-realization in a newly perceived world that is abstracted to its most basic and most mysterious foundations through the camera, which resonates retrospectively with the observer and transforms them through this observation. It is only characteristic that it is necessary to proceed through destruction, which is a symptom of the fact that we can never be satisfied if we are seeking the higher foundations of anything: Belson destroys his older works, destroys the avant-garde with material representation, and remains with pure film enclosed in its mandala without reference to material reality.

The strain and trembling of the inner being, the destiny of a nation, events and turning points - these can be captured with minimal reliance on external support, action, and material representation: words and music, supremely immaterial entities that have the most powerful divine power to bring things into existence, to realize them. Straub and Huillet, with the purifying power of artistic prophets, announce the arrival of the cinematic idea, in which cinematic language is maximally subordinate so as not to taint the transparency of proclamation. The classic canon of Straub and Huillet, in which nothing distracts attention from the smallest tremors, which, like water in the desert, thus receive a life-giving force multiplied a thousandfold, creates one of their most perfect works, where classical biblical tradition is combined with Schoenberg's classic to create a classic and typical work of these filmmakers.