Dionysos

A perfect nod and postmodern mockery of the film genre - this horror-giallo is a tribute to Argento and his essential overcoming: the film is above all clever and its formal aspect is refined to the edge of the best formal mastery, even leaning towards experimental pioneering. The entire de facto silent film is based on the creation of mental associations through visual shortcuts, establishing "short connections" between (contrasting images for the majority of people, not so much for giallo fans...) otherwise contrasting images - death, pleasure, young bodies in the throes of sexuality, wrinkled corpses; (genius!!!) the coquetry of naked skin with synthetic rubber and metal. In short: a constant reversibility of life and death, morbidity and pleasure, achieved through the frenzy of the camera and editing, fetishistic details (substituting for the viewer's touch), and the actual absence of words and a "plot," which forces us to rely on our most lascivious senses sight and touch. This is further proof that films can be told primarily through images! Another question is the reversibility of the victim and the killer, and above all the killer and the viewer, giving birth to perverse film pleasure.

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.

What if the seriality of consumer culture became a film image? What if the victim/subject of this image became the one who, as one of the first, was able to capture the fact of mass reproducibility of modern artistic production in its images? Just as Warhol captured the very possibility of serial reproducibility of any object of mass industrial culture, from soup to an art representative, Macumoto imprisoned the pop art Nestor in the horror of his own reproducibility in the multitude of his identical copies. The film image is divided into a mosaic of individual fields, which mask the lack of quality with their quantity, and mask the steps of their own significance with cosmetic differences - how could the sound track gain meaningfulness in Macumoto's film afterward? Andy Warhol becomes a sad Mr. Campbell, trapped in the can of his own creative process.

In December 1968, Garrel completed this film about the young Anna/Anémone, who tries to free herself from her family environment and step into adulthood with her newly found love. In the same year, not only did the French youth attempt the same, but on a larger scale... Can Anémone escape from the clutches of her loving and tolerant father, only until the moment his daughter starts living her own life? /// This is early and somewhat more civil Garrel, and Anémone's main attraction lies in its ending (erasing the difference between private and public, the collision of the state/repression and freedom/ love, reminiscent of the director's debut feature Marie for Memory, filmed the year before. The decent meta-fiction elements are pleasing. /// French actress Anémone (born Anne Bourguignon) chose her pseudonym precisely based on the main role she played in this film.

Another one of the fundamental films of Brazilian cinema marginal from the late 60s and early 70s, overflowing with irony, dark humor, rawness, and uncompromising form and content, all against the backdrop of a brutal story about two heartless criminals fleeing across Brazil. Here, just like in the no less fundamental film of this rebellious "movement" - Sganzerla's The Red Light Bandit - we can only rejoice at the combination of the degraded crime genre with a serious (which does not exclude irony and disregard for good morals and conventional expectations, quite the opposite!) statement about the era and society. After all, the total nihilism of the heartless characters (let's not be deceived by visions of an angel - they only signify that heaven is already here on earth, unfortunately) merely doubles the nihilism of the real world. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is once again the formal side, which perfectly fits the label with ease and originality, characteristic of a young creator: the unpredictable uncompromising nature of impulsive characters corresponds to the surprise of the form, sometimes breaking down the wall between the real world and gangsters, sometimes reveling in the aesthetic self-sufficiency of the film camera (which again precisely corresponds to the labeled - the purposeless pleasure of breaking the law alongside the joy of purposelessly long shots).

Directors Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli made a film set in the Roman counterculture of the 1970s (so it is not about the everyday life of the middle class). The underground content - discussions with friends about politics, open sexual relationships, clashes with the police, demonstrations, and life in a semi-legal state, on the streets - intertwines with an equally independent underground form that blurs the line between fiction and reality. The central plot, revolving around a segment of the life of a sixteen-year-old (approximately) prostitute picked up from the street by an altruistic forty-year-old, is set within an overall framework that at times resembles not only Cinema vérité, but also the "revolutionary" European cinema à la the Dziga Vertov group, meaning the breaking down of the wall between the actor and the character, the film crew and the world being filmed, the application of collective decision-making, etc. The viewer, in fact, almost never knows whether they are watching a staged, improvised, spontaneous/"documentary" scene, whether they are following the character or the actor who is already "playing" themselves and dealing with their own personal matters with another "character." In this aspect, as well as in its focus on the character of the modern young woman, the film resembles (a much more independent hippie) a version of I Am Curious (Yellow), and I Am Curious (Blue) by Vilgot Sjöman.

Does the title, referring to the Russian classics (Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov), create a framework for analogies and thus understanding the meaning of the film? No.) This film does not want to be bound by a coherent narrative and instead wants to rely on a chain of surreal scenes that depart from film realism towards emotional and atmospheric pulsation that aims to draw the viewer into the film despite its overall lack of meaning. However, the film is not just a completely free sequence of fragments of the author's subconscious, suffering from total discontinuity (a problem of many surrealisms) - in Khamdamov's film, there are many recurring motifs that run throughout the entire film and allow not only for a certain basic reconstruction of the temporal and narrative axis (although this is only secondary), but mainly to truly enjoy the atmosphere of the film or rather the atmosphere of the fictional world in which it takes place. It is a world that is typically "supernatural," timeless, sometimes mysteriously empty (the empty subway - in Russia!), and sometimes populated by strange characters in unexpected places; it is truly an imaginary world where "real" scenes can be replaced by scenes from another film (supposedly Khamdamov's Nechayannye radosti, banned by authorities in the 1970s and 1980s) without everything ceasing to make "sense," which is missing anyway...

Neo-Baroque lost its neo and only baroque remained, whose weight of gilded encumbrance may have been another bead in the rosary of genre-ironic creations of cinéma du look, but the repetition of the prayer mantra reveals itself here as a doubly double-edged sword, which Carax cut himself with this time: by repeating the form, its true power was diluted, the power of negation through a convention-incompatible form, to such an extent that the negation of negation (= form) evoked simple mathematics - multiplying two minuses gives us a plus, which is nothing but the valorization of the content itself. And in the content, I saw nothing but convention, to which only a different narrative vector and occasionally a comedic tone could not suffice to break free from it. Symptomatically, here, the undermining and playing with genre forms (musical, melodrama, fairy tale, etc.) is nothing more than something we have already seen in other more commercial works because such "postmodernity" has long been privatized by Hollywood. Hollywood has finally caught up with and absorbed Carax like a depth that is truly dangerous to look into because, from this perspective, cinéma du look can turn into cinéma du don't look. Neo-baroque always started in apparent kitschy sweetness only to turn bitter, but this transition was (in the best works) caused precisely by the inversion of conventions of given forms, while when we want to repeat this Neo-baroque dramatic arc only on the level of content, we always end up with nothing but convention sneaking in through the back door. Perhaps the transformation of the puppet into a living being was supposed to be an interpretive indication of the author's mise en abyme, with which Carax wanted to convince the viewer at the last moment that his film is not just a bloodless marionette swallowing the budget, but a work containing life, yet even in this final attempt (which is nothing other than a replication of Hollywood desires), he failed.

The overall tone of the film is hinted at by the expressive opening captions and the first introduction to the main character through his distorted subconscious dreams. Impulsive, fervent, and unpredictable painter Franco Nero decides to retreat to an abandoned country estate in an attempt to immerse himself back into his work, where he fully descends into the depths of delusions, dreams, obsession, and inner conflict. The horror element of the film is manifested during the painter's obsessive exploration of the past life of a beautiful aristocrat who lived in the house before him during World War II and served as his inspiration. The film is particularly pleasing with its surreal visions, the materialized dreams of the artist, and the blurring of the boundary between reality and imagination, culminating in a tragicomic ending.

When postmodernism suddenly awakens from amnesia and realizes that surrealism has been forgotten. The film is situated on many interpretive edges - from farce to imaginative questioning about the nature of human memory, and from a game with genres to multi-layered references to the history of cinema. It should not be forgotten that it is a quite interesting criticism of war: the film deliberately adopts the expressions of the wartime propaganda of that time for its overall framework of space and events, which occasionally creates delightful contrasts - anti-German slogans fighting against Teutonic barbarians framing the time and space of the film and standing against the personal search for emotion, the death of loved ones, etc. However, it is primarily a surrealist anabasis to the end of the world, wrapped in the retro black and white garb of silent films of the time, more so those German films rather than war or Soviet films (where the most famous product of Soviet cinema of the 1920s in the form of the montage school automatically comes to mind). However, Maddin adds some more historical inspiration to the postmodern urn - the noir genre. After all, the lonely hero with amnesia, in a hostile environment of a mysterious city, tracking his femme fatale at night and commenting on this self-destructive pursuit of solving the mystery through voice-over, is a classic fulfillment of this genre.