Dionysos

The slow pace of minimal action is filled with apathetic characters constantly waiting for an unpleasant resolution in a house that should be a model of a warm family idyll were it not for the behavior of one of the children. At first glance, Nathalie’s angel, even without her physical presence in most of the film's plot, "floats" in it like a black moth coming from the future and paralyzing the present. The indifference of the characters is only broken by the arrival of a strange wanderer. The film may not want to convey any message, and perhaps we are just meant to immerse ourselves in the atmosphere of the house and its inhabitants. However, it is also possible to interpret a message about the growth of indifference and violence in an increasingly automated and alienated society (e.g., the washing machine, the educational system), as presented in the form of a radio broadcast of a pursuit of two teenage murderers, whose counterparts roam the screen in a slightly younger representation. It is thought-provoking in this regard that the male characters in the film are more emotional and action-oriented (Depardieu, the teenage murderers) than all the female characters, who, however, as mentioned above, will also "mature" to this stage. This is perhaps Duras' unintended contribution to the ongoing process of women's emancipation in society... The formal playfulness (repetition of the scene of the school interview, allusions to diegetic and non-diegetic music, and the camera and mirror games) is enjoyable, but after appearing sporadically, it is no longer further developed.

Love slides along the telephone line like a gaze through deserted shots. Where we expect to find a person, we find emptiness, and where we come across a face, we find someone else, someone different from who we were looking for, than who we always looked for, but never wanted to see: because she, whom sight would not recognize and would only truly know with eyes closed in the darkness of the world, cannot be seen, but especially not by me - there is no image in the text of desire, there is nothing to see here. The Boat called Night faces the Night of Time. Blind. Only with a blind gaze, wandering over her black image, can one see the one who needs to be hidden behind words, voices, Paris, so that they can merge with her, the one who cries in the night, dissolved in general desire, distorted by a chasm; the one transformed beyond recognition, beyond their own recognition… It is because only the one who allows themselves to be lost in the general desire of the night, where love knows no names, only faces that can belong to anyone at any moment, will not be afraid to tear away the scratch from their self and their you and look behind the black image, enter it, from which everything came and into which everything will submerge. The whole night...

The average viewer looking for a horror film will indeed find it, but in a reversed form, because this film is not the domain of conventional cinema, but quite the opposite - the average viewer will run away from the film in horror (by which Necropolis paradoxically fulfills one of the ideal goals of the horror genre). It is, in fact, a total European art film - the end of the 1960s, counterculture, long intellectual declamations in even longer shots, and traditional B-movie and historical characters turned upside down into pop-art material used to create completely different meanings (Frankenstein as a thinker/propagator of revolutionary ideas in the style of consciousness-raising, Bathory as a modern neurotic woman dissatisfied with her husband, etc.). The entire film is shot in a studio using minimalist but aesthetically exquisitely crafted sets, which provide a great background for detailed studies of characters and actors with the slow and static camera. The actors are chosen in an interesting way because they mirror the multi-layered nature of the film - from more avant-garde and art actors like Clémenti or Viva to the supremely avant-garde playwright and director Carmelo Bene, and even Bruno Corazzari, who acted in spaghetti westerns. The film also has a decent humorous component and, moreover, even at first glance, the sequence of scenes, which is only loosely connected, has a certain internal logic and relationships.

The subtitle "Chronicles of the Present Time" illuminates two aspects - 1) a countercultural perspective on the history of the present, viewed logically in an experimental but also popular culture (Clémenti met Warhol during the filming process) manner; and 2) the position from which this perspective was formed, i.e., the lived-in and intellectual world of the "chronicler," /// "The period from the making of Belle de Jour was wonderfully productive, but in 1971 Clémenti was imprisoned in Italy on drugs charges. He never seemed to fully recover from the ordeal, but the experience led to a book and a film, New-Old (1978), which he described as "my diary of my life before and after 1973." (The Guardian, B. Baxter, 21.1. 2000). New Old is less condensed than Clémenti's previous two films (which is understandable given its significantly longer length), yet it still successfully builds on their previous methods (especially the multiple psychedelic exposure in the passages of the impressions of the time), enriched here by capturing one's own thoughts or ideas of friends and fragments of the life of one's own circle of artists and friends. The film differs from the otherwise formally similar films of Clémenti's friend Etienne O'Leary, who also subjectively captured the surrounding world and his own privacy, but could not coordinate the viewer's perception, so his films appeared as a random mess, even though they captured the same things as Clémenti, who, however, is able to better distinguish both levels and make them more comprehensible and impressive.

The apotheosis of the city; long shots shape the scene, the city provides the backdrop, and the residents themselves can play their anonymous parts. After all, the letters, through their "tedious" repetition of family events, only remind us that the lives of these endless unknown masses are lives of work, breakups, love, longing, sickness... Or is it that the film we are watching is a depiction of people who "had to suffer a lot," in which Chantal tries to shoot something that, as we learn from the letters, should change our perspective on social problems? The film raises quite different questions for the viewer. However, the film can also be (and usually will be) interpreted as another personal reflection on the author's relationship with her mother, a topic crucial for the author's entire filmography, given the circumstances of her death (Chantal Akerman's final film, No Home Movie, is an intimate posthumous dialogue between Chantal and her mother, who died a year prior and with whom she always had an intense and problematic relationship. However, at the time of the premiere of this film, Akerman herself committed suicide). Impeccable colors, subtle editing work, and a true urban symphony.

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).

Lost in the metaphysical painting of de Chirico's cities emptied of people, encountering only their indestructible remains instead of man: their phantoms (in the polyglot universe of the film, both in the sense of Greek and Spanish, which are also heard in the film), which emerge from the desert as Dalí's impossible objects, those melting clocks that dissolve in the annihilation of time in the post-atomic wasteland in a microsecond zero and place this film alongside the surrealist films of the 1930s and 1950s. However, this flattening of time also leads to less categorizable formal play with editing, bending elliptical time, or quick cuts, as well as analeptic/proleptic montage, which creates a new reality without having to construct impossible surrealism. An essential element of the film is its literary anchoring, where the intertextual source in Camus' work is almost a complete generator not only of the film's overall statement but also of its specific fictional plots (the harsh sun, the revolver shots, etc.).

Existential horror, punk dystopia, a terrorist road movie of the free fall of a man, the search for lost time, and finding a lost film through which the forgotten Nihil has become - a mere nothingness that tears apart and collapses even the characters. As if the Red Army Faction, after the explosion of the remaining values of the world, set off on a wild race towards the final battle of discovering the absolute, whose purified "Being" is as terrifying as a raw body shedding its flesh; where the hidden inner being is only its stitched underside like the face of Frankenstein, and the journey of film surrealistic symbolism ends in images not unlike those of the later Begotten (1990). In a film where purity is conditioned by blood and the moment of redemption is stretched out by illusion, the purism of expression finds nothing contradictory in the extreme stylization.

A glimpse into the final days of a dying right-wing dictatorship that, in the changed global geopolitical situation, was unable to legitimize its worn-out and directionless system both internally and externally. Nevertheless, its foundations were unfortunately stronger than they might have initially appeared. Peace and order, work, three meals a day, and even the possibility for some to pay for their children's education - people suddenly begin to tolerate disappearances, murders, torture, and so on. What is sad about Chile in this case is not only this aspect but also the way in which it was defeated (at least according to this film, which unfortunately is not far from the truth). Democracy is actually amorphous, everything and nothing, functioning only on the basis of primitive emotional patterns that can easily be manipulated by people. And when democracy triumphs? Then it's time for the exchange again - trading material well-being for tolerance of inequalities, poverty, wasted prospects and potentials for those at the bottom, and so on. Therefore, the ending is chilling even for the inhabitants of the "free world" - democracy is actually a product created by a (political) advertising agency...

The interval between the limit of photogenicity and the purity of absolute film, already explored so many times by experimental film; abstraction from reality, or the precedence of metaphysics over real physics? Or like it is here, both at once - a moonlit night, a spotlight cutting through the darkness like the spotlight of an awakened consciousness, a firefly, a white eye awakening light in the darkness accompanied by a pair of orange taillights racing down a night road, or two crimson eyes emerging from the darkness like a predator lurking in the night of the universe for its prey. The barbed wire binding the moon and with it the viewer's path of consciousness, or just a drunkard's gaze through a fence who has strayed from his path? Can we legitimately attribute our secondary meanings to pure form at all? What if we attribute something to the night in our intoxication and wake up in the morning, filled with shame, slapping ourselves for something that so enchanted us and seemed so brilliant, clear, and fulfilling, but turned out to be so low, so ridiculous?