Dionysos

The head, which transforms into a skull, is already empty beforehand. Madness says: death is already here.* War says: madness comes with me. Madness anticipates while the soldier's head remembers - from this aporia arises the second deadly effect of war: it never ends. For the survivor, for the "witness," it forever returns with their memory - film as retrospection, telling the story of one soldier's past and as a medium of collective repressed memory (repressed because The Human Bullet unmasks, back then the times had not yet ended when film could have a social function other than economic-operational); but also film as an image of anticipation - war as a bridge between the past and the future because the absurdity of the world connected by the bridge of memory has not disappeared. The hero's war began at the moment when the war had already ended: how can one not judge from this that war never ends? Just like in "Catch-22," it brilliantly touches one's emotions to see how the hero is caught in the trap of the absurdity of time, from which there is no escape either forward or backward because his fate was always sealed in the logic of war. *) "History of Madness," 1961.

Multiple alienation, for which new examples of separation between the author and the world can be found with increasing runtime, captures without grasping, reflects without transforming it. It is pleasing that alienation works in the field of the work's statement and not between the author and the work itself: here, on the contrary, the absence of the subject in the visual field finds a perfect complement in the subjectivity of the sound track and the author's voice-over wanders the image like the soul of the eternal Jew throughout the world, with whom it will never merge anywhere or anytime. The merger is found only in death, which should not be postponed - on the contrary, it may sometimes need assistance. A personal structural diary, describing the past and predicting the future. Suicide, suicide, liberation.

Formally, even with Jost's victorious reiteration of Euro-Atlantic liberalism at the turn of the 80s and 90s, there was a prevailing backward movement towards an even more classical narration than what we knew from films of previous decades: the experimental intellectual guerrilla warfare of American social relations with post-structuralist leftist discursive and socio-political critics gradually disappears and what remains is the best of the long-gone promise of reasonable, moderate, intelligent democratic liberalism that was also dreamed of in Czech fields and woods after the end of state socialist dictatorship, and that, as we later discovered, never existed. While watching the film, not only because of the shots of Vermeer and at one moment also of Rembrandt, I remembered Joseph Heller and his "Picture This" from 1988, in which Rembrandt looks down at humanity and its history from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The film gives off the same feeling as that old good Jewish liberal Heller in all its grandeur: the sensitive irony towards the vanities of everyday life's afflictions and the focus on what is important, even though what is important may not even exist, and even if it did exist, we may never achieve it. And yet, there is no choice but to try. This sentiment is felt much more in this film than in Jost's Rembrandt Laughing from 1988 (Yes! That cannot be a coincidence.). For Jost, just like with Godard, his former inspiration, from whom, however, his work will fundamentally diverge from this moment on, there seems to have been, briefly, a predominance of the desire for something enduring after the disappointment of iconoclasm, something that hides behind the disillusionment of the world and the disillusionment of its effective criticism and transformation, which both authors hoped for but did not come true... Just like in Godard's The Detective (1985), perhaps the only way out of the confusion of life appears to be love, which is eternal.

The cut between shots disappears, taking with it the barriers between classes - from now on, the world is once again what it has always been: the only social field, the only stage without internal boundaries, the only stage of history and film, in which the constant rearrangement of elements through the medium of power and the camera moves the movement of the plot forward regardless of individual consciousness, but only according to the logic of purely relational pushing by historical actors for hegemony within the political space. The actors are collective subjects of classes, the driving force behind the struggle for power and emancipation, the method of exposition: mise-en-scène. When the proletariat and the bourgeoisie confront each other face to face, there will be no more artificial power-ideological boundaries to separate them - the violence arising from the desire of oppressors to guard their place and determine the place of the oppressed will be revealed in all its undisguised repugnance. It is at this very moment that a new medium arrives: the camera, to elevate the movement stemming from this violence into a movement usable for dance and capture this revolutionary Csárdás, given by the utopia of the non-place. The dance of the masses must be accompanied by music, and it is in this collective ancient ritual that the historical actors find strength for action.

Young Luzia sets off from the poor northeast of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro to find her fiancé Jasão and thereby a better life with him. Lost in the unfamiliar metropolis, she accepts help from the carefree Calunga, unbroken by life, who becomes a witness to the dramatic story of the two lovers. Unlike his friends, who come from the same disadvantaged circumstances, Jasão is determined to seek revenge with a gun in hand against the injustices and inequalities of contemporary Brazil. /// The opening short sequence, combining elements of cinéma-vérité and the typical Brazilian exuberance of the indirect narrator Calunga, prepares the audience for the expectation of a socially critical and intellectually deeper cinema-novo, partially reflected in the postmodern ironic long subtitle ("As Aventuras e Desventuras de Luzia e Seus 3 Amigos Chegados de Longe") literally meaning "The Tales and Sorrows of Luzia and Her 3 Friends from afar." However, there is no Glauber Rocha. Nevertheless, the film firmly stands in line with the progressive current of Brazilian cinema at the time. Gradually, it transforms into a more melodramatic, Italian-style edited socially poetic novel that does not alienate or document but rather tries (not always successfully) to captivate the viewer. The possibility of an ambiguous interpretation of the final message of the protagonists' destiny saves the overall tone of the film from becoming a guide for the viewer on how to draw lessons regarding their own active stance towards the reality outside the film after the screening.

One moment conceals both madness and triumph of reason and destroys the cliché that separates a genius from a lunatic by an infinitely small distance. On the other hand, the only moment compressing clarity and confusion, colorful image, and the attack of black and white insanity leads us to resolution, victory, and gain - at the cost of loss. The protagonist passes through the gate toward victory, but this victorious arch stands on two pillars... the moment of victory is the moment of the protagonist's defeat. We always achieve our goals, and there is only one path that leads to it. Bogart experienced something similar in Ray's In a Lonely Place, but here the protagonist's actions justified him and destroyed him at the same time, although the merger was only temporary and contingent. Fuller is on a higher level; he shows that the victorious gesture itself leads to defeat, and vice versa. It is a shame that Shock Corridor and its cinéma-direct realistic counterpart Titicut Follies stand in the shadow of something similar in many ways, but much less subversive, even though it may not seem so at first glance, i.e., One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (it’s no coincidence that it was, of course, filmed entirely in "color"...).

A hundred heads are looking at me, I have a hundred heads instead of my own – and still, they see nothing: in the mirror, they only see my body without a head. I borrowed a hundred pairs of eyes from others, and yet I am blind to myself. Who, then, is that neighbor, those neighbors from whom I borrowed the gaze that remains blind? "What then is our neighbor? Something within us, some modifications of ourselves that have become conscious: an image, this is what our neighbor is. What are we ourselves? Are we not also nothing but an image? A something within us, modifications of ourselves that have become conscious? Our Self of which we are conscious: is it not an image as well, something outside of us, something external, on the outside? We never touch anything but an image, and not ourselves, not our Self. Are we not strangers to ourselves and also as close to ourselves as our neighbor?" (Nietzsche, The Complete Works, In: Klossowski, Vicious Circle) The eternal path of oneiric surrealism toward oneself through a detour that tempts to keep going further and further away from the path towards the goal, which is the subject of dream thoughts ... that is with every image of film consciousness further and further away ... And that is why new Duviviers, Jordans, and VanDerBeeks can always arise: the film image is never exhausted, but it also never gets closer, even if it uses the most surprising and seemingly most individualized visual language. Borrowed images from our neighbors or their apparent subjectivity (engraving our signature into an old etching is not enough for it to become ours) will not bring us closer to ourselves, and the surrealist Ernst is no less persistent in emptiness than the apparent films without a narrator, for example, the aforementioned Jordan.

The saying that all roads lead to Rome is just a self-deception of humanity believing in fate, through which it removes responsibility for its own tragicomical wretchedness - in fact, Cassavetes showed that there is only one way, leading to countless different goals. Similarly, Cassavetes can use the same cinematic language, the same artistic approach, and the same general relationship to life and the world, no matter what subject he films: he just needs to change the accent, emphasize a certain detail at the expense of another, add a touch of slapstick, and suddenly we have a comedy out of a drama. The viewer can momentarily forget that, on the contrary, his dramas have in the description of human dignified wretchedness their colossally ironic and funny dimension. No human journey ever leaves the dual tragicomedy of its one life path: staggering between the two poles of Kantian unfriendly sociability; denying the fact that a person can find happiness only in the bosom of others, which they continue to destroy and then can't help but wonder why they are alone among people and people are in the middle of them in their isolation... the path of words, the only path of words, which are constantly launched harpoons, with which we try to defeat the other person like a whale in a single gesture, while at the same time attaching them to ourselves. Words, always the same words, which are tragic once when Cassavetes lets a lonely character utter them in a filthy dump, and comical another time when, like here, he lets them scream at each other as characters of fateful lovers.

Can the space of a movie theater for watching cinema be replaced with something else? Not at all - otherwise the viewer would be deprived of the trailer for another film before the start of the actual film: in this case, an advertisement for the film La belle époque, in which pensioners create an experiential agency in a film studio set in the 1970s, so they can relive their first love there... It has also been proven that Alzheimer's disease is best stopped in older people by placing them in period settings, with original furniture from their youth, exposing them to their memories, etc... Although Bellocchio, in his age as an author, logically lost many of his artistic iconoclasm and formal inventions, he is not only still above the level of ordinary conventional cinema, to which this film belongs in terms of its category but also functions as Bellocchio's historical tribute to the Italian film belle époque: a blend of poliziotteschi and Italian politically-engaged police thrillers, within which Bellocchio created one of his famous films, Slap the Monster on Page One from 1972. Italians to this day prove that they are the best in Europe at making American films.

Diving into a world that we lost, without ever existing - the fantasy of the past revived in its distorted form thanks to the artist's imagination in the present; actually, now also in the past, but not because of the date of creation in 1969, but because Larry Jordan's work was never truly "modern," and it is just an eternally outdated song. It is commendable that it presents to the common human and viewer's expectation a perversely distorted mirror of surreal visions of this seemingly normal world, but the main problem is that, like most Anglo-Saxon authors, it cannot truly reject such a world and thus create a truly new world - it always returns to the need to create a form of the world as we know it, even though it is an imaginary world that reveals a deeper, invisible, or transcendental plane in every moment of projection of the world we are familiar with. Hence the fondness of many American experimental filmmakers of that time for Zen-Buddhist mysticism, and this film was also supposed to be inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Martin Čihák unconsciously captured it precisely when he wrote that Jordan's films "do not work centrifugally, but uniformly. (...) ...Jordan creates a new space." Exactly. Like the seamlessness of Hollywood, here too we tend to create a new example of a world, space, and film without seams, absence, and fractures: film allows us to immerse ourselves in a dream reality that only enriches our everyday world with a new level, but it does not offer a means to truly build a new world: for that, Jordan would have to start from precisely opposite premises, namely to first reveal the nonexistence in the heart of the current world rather than a deeper level of existence.