Dionysos

At least in the first hour, an almost brilliant mockery of all seemingly unquestionably valid claims of language on the objective construction of social life. Greenaway sets up a truly linguistic game in which the randomness of every linguistic system is perfectly demonstrated, in the sense that the meaning of things and therefore their naming is not given positively but is derived negatively by differentiation from all other names (from the word "table" itself, nothing is derived, but we gain the idea of a table by contrasting it with "chair," "wall," "child," "spaceship," etc...). The randomness of specific expressions is therefore obvious. The language we speak every day can be playfully disrupted, allowing the author to build a completely new system, which can form, for example, around a worldwide bird conspiracy, thanks to the aforementioned randomness/arbitrariness. Just as the stereotypical idea of language is shattered, so is our traditional expectation of film. It is a perfect work in this respect but it simply should have been shorter.

Many things could be written given the authors' excellent work with one feast and a few flashbacks: about the paradox that allowed the first socialist country (the most progressive of the era) to revive ancient Byzantine patrimonial practices in only 20 years of existence, practices in which the ruler is the sun – illuminating all with their greatness and to whom all the nation's views and hopes return. Or about how a Georgian terrorist became the ruler of Russia, etc… As a filmmaker and artistic paradox (but let’s be thankful for it), it personally seems to me that, given the mastery of the film's authors and the book source material, the character of Stalin transcends a simple Manichean division of absolute good and evil, day and night. The cruelty remains, but the ambiguity of his gestures, as well as the almost moving (fictionalized, of course) confession and testimony of Stalin's power, make this cruelty believable because it is human. That is because a human is always more of an enigma than an embodiment of a principle (be it evil or something else). The authors managed to create a very grateful paradox for the audience – they faithfully showed Stalin's worst sides but made him into a human being. The exact opposite is achieved in movies like The Fall of Berlin, and so on.

Just like in The Job (1961), we follow the relationship (but on a higher level) of two people and their conflict between the fulfillment of a person's emotional realization and the world of industry. The social theme does not serve only as a backdrop for love problems under any circumstances; the migration of factories and qualified personnel from the north to wild Sicily forms the other side of the same coin as the better-known migration of unskilled villagers to the wealthy north (depicted, for example, in Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). The film is captivating primarily in its formal aspects, through which we become acquainted not only with the painful decisions of the main protagonist through numerous flashbacks, but also with his current emotions through beautiful shots of the factory and Sicilian countryside. Because of this, the film was warmly received, particularly among the directors of the French New Wave at the time.

A human face fascinated by a piece of meat, which will soon transform into it. Will it be transformed by the hands of fascist butchers or by its own hand? We must admire how Fábri was able to capture this transformation with the claustrophobic grip of a dimly lit camera in the first part of the film. The question of how to properly handle meat is not as difficult as whether it is worse to become a piece of meat passively enduring its fate under the butcher's knife or to become an emotionless master of the world. The film shows that neither position is morally superior. The constant reversal of moral superiority shifts guilt and bliss of conscience from one character to another, only for the one who most consciously approaches the position of a slave with a clear conscience, unburdened by the weight of the world, to become the most despicable informant, and for the uninvolved cynic to become an unknowing supporter of the life force for others, which he had to deny at first glance in order to gain it. It is as if moral opposites were not different in anything, not even in the fact that "evil" lies in "consciousness."

This classic Ferreri film offers us many things from his traditional repertoire again - bizarre black humor (storks in the bedroom next to an open refrigerator in which there is... well, I won't reveal that, a tribute to the deceased beloved dog /in the picture/), symbolic behavior of characters, a slightly weaker aesthetic aspect, and surprising and accurate analogies. Of course, there is also the relationship, especially sexual, between a man and a woman, updated this time to the situation of the early 90s. Atheism and communism not only in Italy seem to have lost, so we are left with God again and, as always, a woman (love and sex), and both become the subject of the main character's twisted obsession. How can both be combined and preserved forever? (Spoiler alert!) As Christians show us in every mass, the answer is obvious - just kill and eat your God, and then He is with us forever.

With this film, Wenders was not yet able to grasp the aimlessness of the "existential" situation as he did in his later films from the 70s, although he (presumably) attempted to do so here. The main character, a soccer goalkeeper (do not be misled by the genre stated here on FilmBooster or on IMDB because this film is definitely not a "sports" film), appears to be involved in a criminal plot at first glance, and later the film exhibits certain signs of the detective genre. Yet all of this is merely an intentional game with the viewer - the built-up "tension" finds its release in a surprising ending, which retrospectively permeates and explains the entire film: In the absolute lack of explanation for the motivation behind the protagonist’s actions and even the mere indication of his future destiny, we witness a metaphor for the radical lack of anchoring of a person to the world, an infinite field of possibilities that unfold before him but that he can never comprehend and choose with certainty (the true dilemma of a goalkeeper facing a penalty shot), and above all, in the context of the behavior of the main character as a whole, the incomprehensibility and unbridgeable otherness of human actions towards the Second Person, which is the viewer in this case.

The story of a failed unequal (class) love, mediated by a little boy, who not only discovers the functioning of English aristocratic customs from the turn of the century but also finds answers to his own childhood questions. Although it is not a particularly innovative topic, it was soberly processed to my liking and without kitschy romantic schemes, which made the story seem believable to me.

My review contains a spoiler! The beginning of the 1960s and the golden years of the new wave still found Claude Chabrol in a phase where his films can be classified as "drama, in which someone (violently) dies," unlike later "thrilling murder thriller." Films about people vs. films about killers. The killer in this film appears more as a mysterious and dangerous agent of fate rather than the actual source of genre entertainment (thriller, crime) in the film. Moreover, he carries a metaphorical significance that adds value to the entire previous story. Although the story itself could stand on its own (if, like me, you love the overcrowded illuminated boulevards of Paris in the style of the nouvelle vague, and of course, also Parisians...), the death of the heroine tragically and cynically shows that there is no third alternative between superficial fleeting love (or longer-lasting love, but with a considerable amount of conformity) and true fateful love. And we have seen how the latter unfolds.

Bertolucci's debut bears clear influences from Pasolini's work - after all, Bertolucci was an assistant director on Pasolini's Accattone (1961), and Pasolini also provided the source material for The Grim Reaper. The Grim Reaper therefore necessarily carries Pasolini’s distinctive interest in the characters of Roman outsiders, lumpenproletarians, youths, and poseurs. It is precisely these types of people who become the main protagonists and about whom the film primarily speaks - the subtly portrayed criminal background serves no purpose other than allowing us, as the focal point of the plot, to get to know several such human types and take a glimpse into their typically spent night (culminating in an atypical event). Although the individual fragments describing the specific tales of the protagonists are unified and related to the moment of the nocturnal murder, it is not, unlike works like Rashomon, primarily about reconstructing the truth of the event from various perspectives (the plot hardly attempts this at all), but rather "only" about exploring the lives of the Roman golden youth of the street through testimonies given to the police. In his debut, Bertolucci already adopted a magnificent camera, similar to that of the then-emerging Elio Petri, and it is precisely in the sequences where the focus is primarily on the use of camera and music - and not words - that the film is at its best.

Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are traveling on a train. Suddenly, the train stops. Stalin asks, "Why are we stopping?" The engineers ran out of coal. "Shoot the engineers!" The engineers were shot, and the train continues to be stationary. Khrushchev asks, "Why are we stopping?" "They shot the engineers." "Rehabilitate the engineers!" The engineers were rehabilitated, and the train continues to be stationary. Then Brezhnev stands up, pulls the curtains, and says, "What are you all doing? Let's pretend we're moving..." /// This film works great not only as a study of bullying in the military but also as – and it deserves applause precisely because it can do it through its main theme - a mirror of its time. The authors created a depressingly monotonous and isolated world of a military train, where time stopped and where endless movement towards an infinitely distant goal (the war will probably never end, the train will never reach the prison...) mirrors the motionless world outside, which long ago lost its utopian goal. And it is precisely through the views through the train window that the creators hid the main impressions of the transition between two epochs - the total decay of (not only ruling) values; apathy and rigidity, but which rather amounted to hypnotized waiting for the cataclysm, which nobody thought would come, but everyone knew that it would have to come; in extreme cases, an escape to new values (waiting for the apocalypse and a return of God, emphasizing the symbol of the cross, or nihilism in sex). The final passage says so much more than it could if we’d only stuck to the theme of bullying: there is no escape from the train. /// The chosen form perfectly corresponds to the content - the predominance of claustrophobic imitating details, a monochromatic image, and slow-paced transitions between shots, all giving birth to a feverish and unbearable timeless and surface rigidity, under which the catharsis of a new era is being born.