Dionysos

The expression "spiritual incest" is accurate, but we can go further and ask ourselves - why, when we watch two half-naked men in a tight embrace, when we see their silent loving looks through detailed shots and reverse shots, why, when the whole film is bathed in soft sunlight and toned with warm colors like a Paraguayan soap opera, why, when lyrical music by the famous Russian homosexual Tchaikovsky plays (and Sokurov hits us directly over the head with this information), why are we not willing to imagine what we would automatically imagine in any other relationship? Why do we not perceive the relationship between these two characters as homosexual, even though they exist in a purely masculine world (the very few female characters are always symbolically and physically separated from the male characters - like the son's girlfriend/through a window, balcony/) and, not knowing the film's title or overhearing how they address each other, we would see them as members of a sexual minority? In the film, those who want to can perceive it as an intimate human drama or as a cinematic play with the cultural and social expectations of the audience, which, for civilizational reasons, prevent us from deducing an otherwise logical plot culmination and evoke unpleasant feelings with the return of suppressed psychological forces.

The greatest strength of the film is its greatest weakness: the counterpoint of matter and spirit, body and soul. The materiality of the body brilliantly intrudes into Sokurov’s otherwise typical slow flow and into lyrical classical/preromantic images. The repulsive bloated body of Mephisto amidst female purity in the beginning; Margarete’s beauty gradually ending in a shot of the vulva: the symbol of the gradual disturbance of the balance between soul and body, and the reduction of what is noble in a man (his disgust for God) to an animal (non)essence. Who introduced imbalance and Sin into the world of balance between soul and body? Who abandoned patient asceticism of knowledge, and who exchanged the promise of a constantly advancing future of science for one night with Margarete? The answer is also the answer to the question of why this typically religious interpretive framework is the film's greatest drawback: unlike Goethe's masterpiece, it completely flattens Faust's story into a Manichaean struggle between soul and matter - only Mephisto can come from the body, matter, and sex. Faust is no longer a self-destructive hero who has already achieved everything in knowledge and who joins forces with the devil to know even more, and thus he must also know what escapes science. Now he is just an impatient and defeated renegade of spiritual work, who succumbed to desire and ended up in a barren desert on his journey for bodily pleasures, which means the death of the body and the spirit. Sokurov's Days of Eclipse also took place in a desert, but the direction was the opposite: detachment from a filthy reality led upwards... here, falling away from God is inevitable. Therefore, the review must also be less.

Pier Paolo Pasolini vs. Federico Fellini. Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom vs. Fellini's Casanova: the score is one to nothing. What do both films have in common? It is the effort to go through allegory and analogy to the furthest extreme of the depicted topic, to explore the very limits of the matter through metaphor, and even to go just beyond those limits where the true nature of the matter is revealed. Both films portray the vanity and debauchery of seemingly noble life (of the higher classes, although this detail probably did not matter to Fellini), the hidden essence of human entertainment, which quickly turns into a sneer and depraved orgies, etc. Yet while Pasolini had the courage to undergo this cinematic game of searching for the ultimate extreme, where society and film can essentially reach to metaphorically depict all of this, Fellini stops somewhere halfway. Fellini's Casanova is not surprising in any way - in fact, Americans could have made it, they just would have to find a European who would package the film in pastels and tinsel a la Rococo. Well, it is no wonder that Fellini won several Oscars in his career, while Pasolini received a different honor the year before, which speaks much more about his art than Fellini's golden statue (and I am back to that tinsel, Mr. Fellini, where are your earlier films...).

According to Lyotard, the collapse of the "grand narratives" of modernity was accompanied by mourning - the mourning of the "postmodern" people at the end of the century over the certainties that those grand unifying stories of emancipation, freedom, and progress offered them. Here we can see the collapse of one of these grand narratives twice over - not only the collapse of the story of freedom and equality, the socialist ideal and a better society, but also the collapse of the linearly narrated film story, of a film unified by a certain principle (whether it is the bourgeois Hollywood dream of the main characters' crucial role, whose motivations unify the plot, or another weakened form of unification, such as a certain message, the chronology of events, logical causality of the story, etc.). If we return to the aforementioned mourning, it is clearly evident that it returns to us twice over. Not only within Godard's message, the lamentation over Europe's betrayal of its ideals, its effort to change and become better, but again purely within the framework of the film and its form - after all, what else but this mourning can "connect" (since I cannot use the word unify...) the individual fragments, caesuras, and singular fragments that the film is composed of other than this sad yet liberating human and film mourning?

Godard, by his standards, is completely accessible even for those who do not particularly appreciate his unique film language. Based on the screenplay by his long-time collaborator and partner Anne-Marie Miéville and (rather loosely) inspired by Mérimée/Bizet's original story, he creates not only a story about the passion of Carmen and her male "victims," but also connects it with a narrative line depicting smaller terrorist actions of a group of young people who try to obtain money for making their film and capture their other activities with its help. The one who is supposed to direct their film (though without knowing the above) is none other than Godard himself, playing himself (and also Carmen's uncle). The captivating visual and musical form of the destructive relationship between the young man and woman is complemented from the other side by the ironic self-reflection of the "aging and failed" director. However, in the end, he does not shoot the film (could it be a symbolic separation from his Maoist past of the 60s/70s, at least in terms of an explicit connection between film and ideology?).

For viewers unfamiliar with Russian history and realities, this film will primarily be a fictional documentary about a Soviet rocket to the moon; for others, it will be a highly original and subjective reflection of the Soviet 1930s. From this perspective, the film operates more on the level of fantasy, drama, and imagination. The illusion of being a documentary and period accuracy may not be as strong as it could have been, but that might only bother the first type of viewers - the rest will enjoy a plastically and only in the style of sci-fi/fantasy elaborate world of alternative Stalinism. When you watch closely, the film is perhaps even more about the overall space program than the rocket and, above all, about what surrounded it: human destinies against the backdrop of secret actions and NKVD espionage, as well as the tremendous tension and enthusiasm of the generation of that time. The 1930s are portrayed by Fedorchenko as both cruel and touching, with the typically Russian attention to the absurdity of human fate. Secret police officers burning documents of the supposed Russian moon landing that everyone believed did not happen, while it "actually" did occur - what could be more paradoxical? Fedorchenko uses fictional film psychotherapy to come to terms with the trauma of his nation, namely the fact that the immense efforts of the interwar generation were betrayed by the Stalinist system and forgotten.

A story following not only the fate of the poor village of Fontamara inhabited by rebellious mountaineers but also the life fate of Berardo Violi (Michele Placido), a landless man and the grandson of a famous bandit. Italy is already in the hands of the Blackshirts, who not only engulf the countryside and cities with their primitive machinery of violence and threats but also, together with the economic elites, take control of the economic life and catalyze the class division of the country. In addition to the slowly emerging resistance of Fontamara against the fascists, we can also see the disintegration of the previous traditional consciousness and closed self-identification of the Italian villagers on the example of Berardo's bravery and sacrifice (we, the villagers from the mountains against those foreigners down in the city, we from Fontamara have our own patron, etc.). It is replaced by a fight against the common fascist enemy, which not only finally unites the villagers with the city dwellers, but also carries the promise of continuing the struggle at a higher level. Naturally, this can only be an economic, class struggle (the film was made in the 70s in Italy by a left-wing artist) - not accidentally, as it might seem at first glance, the villagers name their rebellious letter "Che fare?" It is worth noting how Lizzani lets the key events (including the final climax of the almost two-hour film!) unfold off-camera, so we learn about them indirectly through supporting characters (which does not diminish the strength of the scenes). P.S. The film was based on the eponymous novel by Ignazio Tranquilli, a victim of fascism.

The car is an industry act and the film is an industry act. Both the car and the film grow from the soil of capitalism: after all, cars and films were already born in the advanced stage of industrial society, they are its children. In order for a product to grow, we need to water it: on the level of the base, with market mechanisms, and on the level of the superstructure, with ideologies. There is too much money in both cars and films for capital to give up its offspring. Why use the vocabulary of nature to describe human activity? The good old Barthes will answer: capitalist mythology delights in the naturalization of human relationships, making them something eternal. The film - the Hollywood one, the (so far?) only real one in its influence on humanity, yes, we have to admit it - as long as it remains the fruit of the capitalist film industry, it will forever repeat the same myth-making clichés (not to mention the myriad of already exhausted and repeatedly used narrative and visual clichés!). The wheels of industry, the racing car, and the film reel must never stop because it makes production more expensive. Everything must rotate smoothly and predictably so that profits can be predictable and reproducible. Films must be made to be watched and cars must be produced to be sold. The entire film is just the fulfillment of one myth, which Barthes just described directly in connection with the film: it shows us that greedy unscrupulous Management is bad, but it immediately negates this criticism by showing us that even under this cover of bourgeois power, one can live in accordance with their inner authenticity, preserving a healthy core. The result is that the individual remains a subject of the Company - they submit to its mechanism, but they live under the illusion that they have retained their freedom and achieved their own goals. No one stands up against the Company, capitalism continues to live on. We are in the perfect sphere of ideology: "I know well that a film or a car is just a product of industry, that its raison d'être is always primarily profit, but still...” And now, honestly, dear petrolheads like me, dear cinephiles like me: when you drive your Alfa Romeo like I do and when you watch a film that you enjoy like I do... How difficult is it to realize that your idea, that even though you drive an industry act, but in those moments, exceptional moments, when you forget about it and when you let yourself be convinced that your car was also created to fulfill the desire for speed, driving characteristics, etc... that... you are just giving in to self-delusion? It's difficult, I know, impossible - maybe. Perhaps not? Perhaps something needs to change so that it isn't like that...

A very "plot-driven" (and therefore more accessible to the majority of viewers) film by Godard. Formal techniques are not (unfortunately) utilized as an additional layer of meaning, but rather as a stylistic element - primarily the traditional disjunction of sound and image (an interesting aspect is the absence of classic intertitles). The contrast between the use of classical or classicist (beautiful/kitschy - according to each comrade's taste) beauty in Mozart's music and shots of the seaside, and the horrors of the Yugoslav war, is not as groundbreaking as one might expect. A similar, yet more interesting, juxtaposition can be seen on the content level, where several plot lines intertwine with reflections on the function of art. And art fails in the face of tanks and consumerist viewers, in the hands of the young and the old. Here, as is latent throughout the entire film, a certain painful nostalgia and pessimism are most strongly felt - the young die radically and bravely, but unnecessarily, unable to create anything truly new (in fact, they only reproduce de Musset and Camus), while the elderly director continues to create but cannot reach the superficial external world, which watches the new Terminator in theaters against the backdrop of artillery shells. I am not sure if it's just a correlation or a real causality, but the director's films, in which the aging, unsuccessful, and mocked director is played by Godard himself, playing himself through his own eyes, are better than this one, where he allowed himself to be replaced by an actor.

Impressions of the world, or rather the awakening world of youth, protest, liberated sexuality, rock music, and drugs of the late 60s. Matsumoto mocks the established idea of visual perception of the world with the film’s name and subsequent contradictory processing - two healthy eyes can see an object from two different perspectives, but in the end, the brain merges them into a single image. On the other hand, when one eye is broken and non-functional, we only see the object from one perspective, followed by a change of place and a new single perspective. So, what does Matsumoto have to say about it? We see the film as if it were divided by the view of two eyes, but in fact, it is two one-eyed perspectives placed side by side. While in a healthy view, the synthesis of two points of view is automatically carried out in the brain, the synthesis of a number of separate points of view must be carried out by the viewer through his or her activity, whether rationally or emotionally conceived. It depends on the viewer and what kind of synthesis/single image he/she creates on the retina in the end.