Dionysos

The experimental and highly atmospheric film by the acclaimed nonconformist filmmaker G. Bódy creates a sense of endings, futility, and transitions (both in life and history) in which time momentarily slows down. Hungarian soldiers fighting for the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49 and in subsequent decades of European national liberation conflicts eventually find themselves in the American Civil War, which itself is nearing its end. Europe and the world have partly fulfilled old ideals, and therefore they can be completely forgotten. Yesterday's outlaws and warriors can return home under amnesty; today it doesn't matter to anyone. The raison d'être of the main characters slowly fades away, and the twilight of wartime turns bullets into the buzzing of bees on a peaceful spring meadow, bees that no longer sting but will soon perish themselves. The characters flow into new directions, forced to choose in timelessness - emigrating back home, starting a new life in a new world as a railway engineer? Bódy divides the image using various masks, excelling in the use of the deliberate cross motif, symbolizing both the gaze of rifles under which the characters' lives unfolded and their possible future as professional surveyors - the work of railway engineers in peacetime, like death after the end of all wars. To appreciate this formal approach, I recommend watching the author's experimental structuralist exploration Four Bagatelles from the same period, which adds a new dimension to both this motif and the film.

Those who do not let themselves be seduced by the superficial categorization and organizing of films into genres (which is one of the common flaws in thinking about cinema among the gray masses of average critics, academics, and viewers), will discover a playful and self-aware film that truly borrows from Blow-up, and that is the most important thing: the vain pursuit of emptiness, a game of tennis without a ball, late sobriety. Brass' film is deliberately "about nothing" from the beginning, and the criminal plot is only a tool to graft images onto emptiness, the editing, the tension, and the love of characters commenting on their story. Trintignant's character never fully merges with the film but jumps on a passing train just to experience a fast ride and go through sobriety from a romance that also reveals nothing more and nothing less than the foolishness of expectations and the emptiness it offers. Experimentation, pop art, tribute to the greats of the time, and a sexy grasp of the best of contemporary art cinema.

Here, the surrealism of the defective humanity in a strongly underground distorted guise paves the way for Noisy Requiem, in which a person also transforms into a solitary monster: inhumanity in the classic form of an animal and in the form of a classic metaphor and absolutely unclassical form makes Pig-Chicken Suicide a study of modern alienation. The community of obscure characters, taking on the form of the animals they keep, the animals that all other people need, the animals that the first ones transform into and receive the contempt and exclusion of all others who are already that filthy beast. A lonely wandering child who takes pleasure in death and indifference: a child conceived from the sexual encounter of masturbating characters, a child of its time. Depression, expression, and discontinuous cuts throwing the materiality of blood and vapors into the core of images of human ruins.

A chronicle of countercultural communities in the first half of the 1970s in the USA, a left-wing hippie report on the state of the Union, Kramer's sweeping meditation on the relationship between individual and collective life and the possibility for both to establish a relationship with truth and authenticity. Although the film was made during Kramer's obviously militant period, his readable yet unbreakable (probably) sadness, and nostalgia - the character of a returnee from prison who was imprisoned for aiding emigrant deserters fleeing from the US from the war in Vietnam, a character who can no longer integrate back into past struggles, the gradual disappearance of enthusiasm: Kramer's probe into the time period and his fate as a nonconforming filmmaker, exiled to European solitude (and the fact that the USA still hasn't accepted Kramer and probably can't is evident from the fact that the film, shot on 16mm, was restored by the French and Portuguese). A generous mosaic on the edge of a documentary, an essay on American life, history, and identity, and a point and feelings that amplify fiction.

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.

A grandiose experimental opera about facts, and an artistic chronicle of dreams and nightmares of one nation and one Europe; a film studio as Theatrum historiae, where the imagination of the German nation and the director's ideas of how to understand the past come to life behind the scenes. The film is controversial mainly because it shows the blame of everyone in the creation of the character of Adolf Hitler, a character more resembling a tragic megalomaniac opera rather than real history - the character rising from the grave of Richard Wagner, written into the script by the entire European civilization. From the irrationalism of romanticism, from the phantasms of nationalism, from the deaths of emperors and god, from the bourgeoisie's desire for certainty and glory and the workers' desire for a voice through a prophet of better tomorrows, from the dominance of the economy giving birth to soulless masses, who could not resist the allure of what is sacred, race, greatness, and togetherness. As Syberberg shows, even the post-war period gives birth to the fascination with that titan, who in the middle of Disneyland (which Europe turned into after the death of all traditional transcendent values, whose death Hitler accelerated so much) is seen as a great source of income for the new masses (the overall work strongly reminded me of Arendt and her book "The Origins of Totalitarianism"). We can agree or not, but the work is nevertheless very thought-provoking. /// Syberberg uses a variety of techniques and genres, from philosophical reflection to factographic reconstruction of historical events and particularly Hitler's personality, from intellectual abstraction to poetic insight, and from nostalgic ballads to ironic satire. The set and background materialize feelings and thoughts, dreams and phantasms with rear projection, thus best objectifying the deceased era, which allowed itself to be imprinted with the phantasm of an unrecognized painter, reader of Karl May, and lover of Wagner.

It is fascinating how Godard manages to make a film about a specific love whilst developing a discourse about love in general at the same time. It is fascinating how the camera movement combines in one direction from left to right diegetic and non-diegetic space (two rooms with two pairs of characters in one house with a view of the sea) only to connect both situations in the opposite direction through sound (the cawing of a seagull, which subconsciously settles in the viewer's perception because they are already forced to follow several other visual and auditory lines). An amazing recontextualization of visual and literary experiences and thoughts. Lubtchansky's camera is very nostalgic and strangely painfully sweet. /// Love means being an active random witness to one's own change: what is it like to look back on the time of greatest love, which we never actually experience as such, only in retrospect: "By seizing this beginning of happiness, we may be the first to destroy it." The deliberate involvement of legend Alain Delon and the self-reflective title New Wave is just another such "grasping" of a filmmaking era that has already passed (similarly, one can feel the sad Godardian irony in relation to the characters of capitalists and servants - only consciously hinted at in 1990, then unresolved - radicalism belongs to past decades).

Marker, as a member of the revolutionary filmmaker group SLON, created an agitprop documentary that aimed to show workers as a class the value of the strike as such (this was made easier by the fact that the specific strike depicted in the film was largely unsuccessful...). The film aimed to strengthen solidarity and build a collective class consciousness based on the understanding of the incompatibility between capitalists and the working class: "The real result of that strike was not a 3 or 4% rise but the education of young workers, discovering the true identity of their struggle." Marker allows the actors of the strike to speak for themselves, choosing moments when the workers and union members reach similar conclusions. I have two comments on this: 1) The idea that behind the workers' nominal desires (for wage improvement/maintaining current bonuses/fear of layoffs, etc.) lies the "true" desire for overall social change can be seen as either the authors' naivety or as an understanding that this hidden "truth" of the workers' struggle does not exist until it is brought to light through ideological struggle. 2) Marker was undoubtedly skillful, and thus his films never descend to mediocrity; however, even in this film, it does have limitations that can be observed in most of the then "revolutionary" French productions: constant talking, blah blah blah, talking (although Marker does allow the workers, who speak honestly and simply, to have their voices heard, which may not have been so distant from the target audience of the same social class). The cherry on top is the spontaneous student films during/after May 1968, where the viewer only witnesses youthful intellectual chatter, which only another convinced, left-wing student or intellectual is willing and capable of understanding...

An explosion of primordial energy - animality, blood, a world without convention because it is without culture: the sinking of culture into a total mixture, in which things lose their shape and a bicycle lies on the table - explosion of the frenetic force of film, feverish unrestrained editing, sinking into the film. The return of the artist from the mid-20th century to this state through imitation of the creative process of a caveman, covering the walls and ceiling of his cave with drawings composed of simple lines? Ana as a Paleolithic Venus, unappealing and even terrifying to our modern conventions, but in the world of Freudian patria potestas before Oedipus, an embodiment of animal beauty? A bit like a sped-up Zwartjes.

The regularity of the outline of five lines giving the condition of the possibility of freedom for music, which must always be embodied in itself standardized notation marks in order to be able to be heard in its always similar and yet new arrangement. Straub and Huillet created an extremely faithful chronicle: Bach's life is composed of musical notes, which are constant repetitions of all those own names, names of institutions and cities he went through during his career, of all the titles he fought for, and of all the names of people who shaped his family and life. The directorial duo perfectly doubled the genre of period chronicle and created, as it can only be done, a faithful (because not anachronistic, thus not violated from today's perspective) reconstruction. It is faithful because the people of that time considered these exact themes worth recording for future generations: the era of romantic individualism - bourgeois novels full of emotions and psychologies came later. If we compare this film with the Hollywood "crap in silk stockings" (as Napoleon dubbed the classicist genius Talleyrand) "Amadeus," we once again have proof of the Hollywood ideological violation of anything that is not Hollywood into its own form. Straub and Huillet therefore created a fragmented and flat portrait, but nevertheless a portrait composed of authentic historical sources without retroactive domestication for the 20th-century viewer.