Dionysos

Perfect forethought in both the representation of the subject and, above all, in the completely conscious approach to the techniques of its representation. Metafictional methods and games with the functions of time and narration are not arbitrary allusions in Robbe-Grillet's works but rather a deliberate and inseparable part of the story itself, which irreversibly changes its essence. Example: when, during the opening credits, a voice-over utters a series of abstract words and verbal metaphors, we automatically begin to piece together these fragments into more coherent ideas, seeking connections between them and their meaning, etc. Throughout the film, these abstract words transform into actual events of the story, and verbal metaphors are replaced by visual metaphors and psychoanalytic/surrealistic symbols. In this way, the director has already provided us with the main components of the plot and their explanation in the introduction. However, this does not mean that we have been given the key to understanding the film - because, a) we only understand this during the course of the film, b) in the meantime, we are compelled to constantly contemplate the relationship between these inadequate pieces of information and the current plot, and finally c) we may reflect on the relationship between verbal representation and visual representation. There is certainly also a d), and e) – therein lies the beauty of it). Another example: symbolic compositions simultaneously split into general statements about the nature of desire and violence, comment on, or even anticipate the progression of the plot (when we see a blindfolded woman locked in a cage, it is both a reference to blinding and enslaving human desire and a foreshadowing of the future of the main character, who shortly thereafter ends up imprisoned with her eyes bound...). The main point is that the viewer never knows whether they are witnessing the course of the plot, a flashforward, a general symbol, a mere editing trick, or a character's imagination (which may later turn out to be the character's past and future). This could go on indefinitely…

There is nothing easier than living with the idea of ​​taking everything around you for granted. So, what if a person starts thinking about all of this? What if the automated processes start to falter, what if the everyday reproduction of our social (and production) relationships starts to stumble? Well, nothing, I'll light a cigarette. Or I'll watch TV - thanks to modernization, everyone can afford it (even those who can't afford LSD). Advertising dreams are also dreams, and it's easy to forget things when you have them. Then a person doesn't even notice that their house is just another box of laundry detergent... The traditionally Godard-like sociological/ethnographic view of the film's protagonists, determined by the environment in which they live (on a lower level, Parisian suburbs, on a higher level, capitalist social formation), is enriched by a revolutionary approach to the relationship between the author-artist and their work. Thanks to the unique incorporation of voice-overs into the film, the artist establishes new connections and questions between themselves and the viewer, making conventional approaches unthinkable. Or, reflexive film sociology, in which Jean-Luc Godard examines the subject captured by artistic representation as if it were of scientific interest, and through this process, himself as the creator of the work - the artist, immersed in his time, just like Marina Vlady. /// The creativity with form and mise-en-scène is then taken to perfection - consider the famous example with the detail of coffee foam symbolizing the transience of human consciousness or M. Vlady's morning awakening, when the flag of France is unfolded from her pillow and blanket - indicating that what the film showed us in the case of the Parisian housing estate definitely does not apply to it alone.

This film serves as a warning for those who have forgotten how to live after May in the same way they lived during May. At the same time, it is a challenge for those who want to live according to May, even after it, even though they do not yet know what it means. It is because May 1968 was never meant to be the end, but the beginning (similarly to how the events of The Chinese were only the first steps for students discovering revolutionary ideas). Similarly, the story of Him and Her is a movement from the "revolutionary" spring to the gray reality of 1972, where May mainly serves to make one realize what it was all about. It showed the willingness of some to fight for something new, and the willingness of others to maintain the status quo. The disillusionment with the failure of the labor unions, the communist party, and the uncertainty about one's own ideals from May are thus at the beginning of what everyone (in this case, left-wing intellectuals) should realize - it's about finding new content and new forms, outside the framework of the capitalist consumerist system. P.S. The greater responsibility for this film lies more with Gorin than with Godard.

What or who did Antonioni actually alienate? The characters from each other - and thereby only doubled their actual alienation in the world? Is it, therefore, "artistic criticism of morals performed from within the bourgeois world: there is nothing in it that could interest us Marxists," as Galvano Della Volpe said? Certainly yes. But not only that. As he unveiled the mask of modern individualism, Antonioni suddenly brought into the world of film the power of image and aesthetics that existed only in the 1920s. Antonioni removes words and the intrusiveness of conventional film music and puts us in front of images that are as captivating and binding as an overly beautiful woman. Antonioni, therefore, alienated both the images and the sound from the viewer - the barren emptiness of Rome thus signifies not only the emptiness of interpersonal relationships but also evokes in the viewer a tremor with the otherness of something too perfect to identify with: empty streets captured in perfect black-and-white compositions; the silence of the deserted city and the silence in the middle of the crowd... At an exhibition or in a magazine reproduction, one often comes across photographs from films - and whenever I came across Monica Vitti, it was, of course, within the framework of the tetralogy of feelings. A coincidence? Hardly: even such a beautiful actress was elevated by Antonioni's camera to such an extent that merging with her image is impossible, and this impossibility is unsettling (it is not by chance that she appears in one of “Exposures” by B. Probst). Antonioni, therefore, managed to and had to alienate the viewer and the object of their gaze and their hearing as he liberated modern film narration (from the "classic" merging of narration and meaning, subordination of expressive means to the articulation of the plot, etc.), thereby placing the viewer in front of an otherness that calls for a new understanding. By doing so, he opened the doors to a new visual language.

When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. And when you spend eight hours a day looking at a machine, the machine becomes a part of you. Petri, especially in the first half, outlines a brilliant study of the mutual interaction between the worker and 'his' machine. Lulu takes seriously the time when it is no longer enough to be just an appendage of the machine, but you also have to love it - the machine and its rhythm become a place where he lets out his frustrations, realizes his desires, and becomes the best among others. Without thinking, he was able to concentrate on the monotony of the machine and didn't notice that its rhythm had directly transferred to him. And Lulu, portrayed by Volonté, just like in Petri's previous film, is a character on the edge of madness. The necessity to adapt to the regularity of the factory world is the same as adapting to life in a mental institution, with the difference being that the insane person sees the wall separating them from the world, but the worker does not, only building it brick by brick around his assembly line and eventually within himself. What about when he tries to resist the rhythm, to not keep up? As long as you give everything to the machine, it also gives you something in return, but when you only give it a little of yourself, it takes everything from you. The worker has a finger to sacrifice at any time, while the “padrone” has a finger to show you where your place is.

To be able to capture things beautifully, originally, and suggestively is an art, but discovering new, previously unsuspected, or unnoticed relationships among things is mastery. Eisenstein was able not only to capture the motionless beauty of things, nature, and masculine faces (otherwise terrifying...), but he was also able to capture the relationships between them. It is in the relationship between two or more things that tension and movement arise, which he was able to not only breathe life into but also capture with his dexterity. That is why there are both beautiful details and the dynamism of scenes in such situations, which would bore a different filmmaker capturing the construction of an agricultural cooperative in two silent hours. The analogy with humor and seriousness, the ability to create a visually breathtaking experience from the most ordinary scenes of haymaking or the operation of a milk centrifuge, is simply mastery, in my opinion. There is no choice but to agree with another master of the silent era, Griffith: "What the modern movie lacks is beauty – the beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful blowing on the blossoms in the trees. That they have forgotten entirely. In my arrogant belief, we have lost beauty." Considering the historical context of the film in the context of Russian history and the betrayal of the author's commitment to Stalinism, it is a tragic beauty.

The film is a post-modern mix of various narrative and formal techniques, broken down into a myriad of individual building blocks that can stand and function on their own. However (and this is the main advantage of the entire film), they can work together as part of a truly singular film, with the story of Leni Peickert as its backbone. The best thing about the film is precisely its seemingly fragmented form of "building blocks" - the individual blocks: a) are made up of various artistic and non-artistic media (fragments from literary works, reproductions of paintings, metafictional techniques, and archival and documentary shots); b) have variable length and role in the overall structure (from short meditations, for example, on freedom and the end of Nazism expressed by elephants (!), to longer micro-stories of characters seemingly unrelated to the plot, but indirectly playing an important role, such as the profile of moral inspector Korti, who is a symbol of the final subjugation of Leni Peickert's "utopianism," but we are told many irrelevant things about him). There are endless examples, but it is important that these blocks trigger a free chain of associations and possibilities in the viewer to create different and new meanings and forms, always connected by the main narrative thread, which makes the film very audience-friendly. There is also more technical and formal playfulness, overall perspective, references to other films, the strong influence of Godard's work (such as the intertitles), and a story that, in a positive sense, reflects the time period of its creation - the rejection of the West and the East, the 19th century, Nazism, and the present as places that not only deprive us of illusions but also of utopia in its positive sense of a desire to change an unjust present.

Without a doubt, this film is a masterpiece that has been overlooked. Furthermore, in my opinion, it reflects the time of its creation better than most documentaries. 1) Let's start with the visual aspect, which is a mixture of a series of provocative and unconventional techniques (such as sharply interrupted tempo of shots, their multiple repetitions, the psychologically provocative arrangement of different film images, as well as the inclusion of authentic historical and contemporary footage, and so on.). It is important that the author is credited not only as a director but also as an editor – Don Levy was primarily an experimenter with editing, and this film is one of his mere (unfortunately!!!) two feature-length films. The final editing of Herostratus took the author a lot of work to achieve the optimal intended length of shots and their composition. However, the camera cannot be overlooked either, as it complements the dynamic created by the editing itself. 2) The plot itself is, in my opinion, a perfect reflection of the atmosphere before the turning point (? – that's the question, isn't it?) of 1968 (in the West). It is a futile rebellion of a young man against self-centeredness and pervasive repression of the modern, seemingly democratic society, symbolically embodied by the character of an old manipulative director of an advertising company mass-producing the emptiness of contemporary man. Max's (M. Gothard) desperate attempt to transition from the pole of personal isolation to the radical and discontinuous pole of establishing a better society through a daring gesture (which would fulfill both the recognition of the individual/later also various minorities/and the betterment of all of society) faces the same result as the deed of the hero's ancient predecessor. The film is visionary even in the way it anticipates the fall of the entire movement around 1968 and all the elements that emerged from it – just as Max's deed is controlled from the beginning by a representative of the establishment against which he stands, the entire historical movement of 1968 was assimilated by a consumerist and thus only differently colored original repressive capitalist society, even though it will be called "post-industrial" from around this time. The main female protagonist plays a similar role as in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point – the realization of the necessity for change is replaced by understanding one's own helplessness.

When the cinematic image and the entire situation depicted by the camera break their immediate merging with the so-called natural course of events and actions, Arnold's Pièce touchée arrives. In the total fragmentation of the situation and its movements, Arnold distances characters and objects from themselves, from the "only correct" course of events (which is manifested in ordinary cinema by naturalizing (ideological) uncompromising linearity of shot sequences). Pièce touchée is at the beginning of Arnold's trilogy (along with Passage à l'acte and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hard, in which the methods of experimental film psychoanalysis precisely revealed the unconsciousness = the apparent non-existence of the displaced possibility of simulating external reality. /// The author of the book "The Logic of Sense" could observe the formal principles of Aion, the time of the "eternal" truth of events, in which Alice becomes smaller as she grows... /// The film analyzes several levels, which become apparent only thanks to this repetitive decomposition of motion and image, and above all which establish new relationships between characters and events, thus breaking the "natural" (Hollywood) flow of events: 1) the husband's hand synchronized with the wife's head - which bourgeois lady dances as the husband whistles?; 2) Where the repetitive image gives the characters only minimal will, they become, in our perception, just puppets in the hands of the master of the film image. /// However, the main thing is what Arnold creates by including the vertical axis, splitting the image in two and at the same time turning it over; 3) Doors opening from right to left in one viewer experience "change" (they really are!) to doors closing from right to left; 4) A character is moving away and approaching at the same time in "one" motion, their distance simultaneously increasing and decreasing, depending only on the correct composition of the repeated motion and the axis reversal; 5) The axis reversal creates completely new movements - or rather, more complete movements. The hand draws a perfect circle where it previously only made a semi-circle. = The characters thus find their development and completion only in the mirrored reversal. /// Arnold introduces freedom into the visual perception of the course of reality through his work with image and time and thus disrupts reality without having to physically change anything about it.

A tragic image of war, destroying everything not only physically but forever destroying even those who were not directly affected at first sight. The expression on the main protagonist's face speaks for itself - attempting to squeeze such horror and inhumanity, which he witnessed, into ordinary (not only cinematic) phrases is simply impossible. Just like it is impossible to truly comprehend the fact of more than 20,000,000 killed inhabitants of the Soviet Union, truly enormous, yet still only one single country. The final scene is thus an example of the genius of the film, and of cinema itself.