Dionysos

Sparse dialogues, dialogues ending with a question, missing answers - a film almost without words, yet about human communication in which intersubjectivity is manifested. Alienation of the modern human being manifested in the disrupted ability to share words, to share with one another - language cannot function between isolated individuals, and therefore Bartas' next film will be The Corridor, in which there is no talking at all. But there is also a difference compared to, for example, Antonioni, who is one of the great initiators of European cinema of alienation (of course, there are countless differences from a film perspective but here we are only concerned with the theme of modern human alienation) - geographical and temporal: Antonioni's alienation of heroes, amidst the Western prosperous golden sixties. In contrast, Bartas' world of the East at the border, disintegrating, moving from one mire to another. Here, we can relate the problem of communication to its biotope: the disintegration of the USSR, the fall of communism, the arrival of a different reality, or the end of one entire social language and the arrival of another (silent, wandering inhabitants of Kaliningrad gather on an emptying square where celebrations of the Great October Socialist Revolution, May 1, etc., probably took place a few years ago). However, it is surprising that Bartas does not directly examine current history, and therefore, his films can also be read as timeless probes into human life.

Finally, a consistent Angelopoulos film. Otherwise, films very similar in their approach such as Voyage to Cythera and The Beekeeper had one flaw amidst their otherwise meticulously crafted beauty: the use of long shots á la Tarr or Tarkovsky along with minimalist character expression certainly created the effect of human and intellectual depth, but from my perspective, it was at the cost of a paradoxical dehumanization of the same characters. The slow camera movements, classical music, a mournful or probing gaze with a face frozen by emotional tension staring into the distance - all of this turned the characters in the director's films, especially in their most powerful moments, into mere fulfillments of artistic figures. They ceased to be flesh and bone characters and transformed into silent embodiments of general human principles, precisely when the viewer should try to understand them in the most human way possible. The situation here is almost identical, with one difference: here, Theo occasionally admits the rhetorical nature of his characters and the artistic constructiveness of the situations they find themselves in (the scene with falling snow and police officers is symptomatic in this regard). This is facilitated by the use of the road movie genre, which allows for a sequence of disparate scenes and characters, where it doesn't matter that they are just pawns/figures in the hands of the author (e.g., the ensemble cast). It also allows for the little that is truly human and spontaneous in the characters to be truly appreciated by the viewer.

The entire film fluctuates between opening and closing title sequences, between two Tokyo bars, between life and death - and between Enter and the Void. In the average middle position between these almost three-hour amplitudes lies (although not in the middle of the runtime) the central sentence of the film, which states that drug XY (I don't remember the name) has the same effect as death. Noé therefore embarks on a deep drug trip, but here a problem arises - three hours need to be filled with some type of material and content on the basis of which the trip can take place. We must not be fooled: although the trip is in its visual effects a pure form and abstraction, in a drug-induced frenzy the "content," the "meaning," and what "was so beautiful" is always somewhat present and inevitably attached itself to the hallucinogenic audiovisual experience without being “just” it. In other words, a (film) trip also requires a screenplay that enables the trip, and here Noé falls short - banal thoughts about reincarnation (legitimizing camera techniques and the plot of the film), pathetic parallels between children and death, etc. Oh, how the film would benefit if it could rid itself of these literalities and story crutches as much as possible, if it let itself be carried away by its own greatest advantage, i.e., the smooth pulsating atmosphere of a psychedelically mad city, captured in an experimental film form, precisely fulfilling the thesis of the unity of content and form. In short, if the whole film were like its opening title sequences, in which the original content is injected into the viewer's veins in such a way that in the newly created psychotropic form, all forms of readability are distorted to such an extent that they become unreadable in exchange for pure enjoyment of colors, movement, and sound.

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...

One of the peaks of the silent era, but above all a connection between it and film modernism. The introduction, still using slow dissolves, which formally underline the metaphorical closeness/collision of melancholic images, reminds us of the poetic symbolism of the turn of the century (which the modern restorers of the film emphasized by choosing music from the impressionist C. Debussy). But let's not be deceived: the subsequent scenes belong primarily to the avant-garde, "artistic" tendency in modern film, in which the narrative is minimized, and in the space it has emptied, there is room for the autonomy of the film image and its unique language, through which the film primarily speaks. Sequences liberated from the weight of the narrative (although probably somewhat less so in the original because the original intertitles have mostly not survived) allow everything captured by the camera to unfold its own poetics - details of things, details of characters, the montage game, the unpredictability of the camera, and abstraction and references of the work to its medium.

The frontier of dawn, like the boundary of a fleeting moment and eternity - photography. The pressing of the camera shutter precisely at that boundary, where the photographer's gaze meets the frozen eternity, locked in the future photograph - in that same moment, love can be born, and the film poses the question: can love ever cross that moment? Can a moment be transformed into eternity? What to choose - "le petit bonheur bourgeois" (Garrel + Poidatz), or the true depth of the moment (Garrel + Smet)? In response, the film offers us a second boundary: the boundary of the mirror, in which eternity is present on one side (Garrel contemplating choosing bourgeois happiness with the childish Poidatz), and on the other side, a spontaneous moment of gaze, in which love is born "at first sight" (Smet). The resolution of the film and the main character is only an answer to the dilemma of how to reconcile the moment with eternity. /// The final literal metaphor (Satan) fills me with concern that Philippe Garrel has turned to genuine devotion and abandoned the legacy of the radicalism of the 60s, but perhaps it was just irony. Otherwise, the film is a dignified culmination of W. Lubtchansky's career, although somewhat precarious, as the film reproduces a photographic vision of the world, and the framing of scenes is often almost static and enclosed in a tight composition.

This is undoubtedly a unique tribute to the genre of urban symphony from the very first dance shots, moving away from the effort to capture the city in its real form, not wanting to present just the lyricism of the mundane, but wanting to transform the whole city into lyrics. A kaleidoscope of colors and music mixing with the shapes of architecture in the waves of jazz music notes gradually distills and ferments the real shapes of the metropolis to the level of an animated cartoon rather than surrealistic canvases because, despite the similarity to Dalí's images of incredibly breaking and twisted thousand-ton concrete monsters, the images from N.Y., N.Y. always maintain dynamism and movement (unique to the city that never sleeps), even though they are closer to strongly tempered animation with their abstraction, contours, and colorfulness.

Theatrum mundi speaking from behind iron bars, the disturbing force of ideas and actions of characters who, with their consistent uncompromising nature, always shake the world of half-hearted conformists who try to lock them up in asylums or history. One can focus on the expressed difference between the central pair, but it is more interesting to seek their unspoken identities - their dual hatred and submission to nature, nature understood through the eyes of the 18th century, in which the laws and natural rights were supposed to be found, on which every future free and happy world was supposed to stand. Sade is the one who hates nature for its indifferent omnipotence, and precisely because of its power, before which there is no escape, he submits to it in search of its greatest certainty: the pleasure of the body. Conversely, Marat, who decided to implement the laws of natural equality and freedom even by using violence and means that contradict the asceticism, strictness, and austerity that deny nature itself - he thus tries to escape nature in order to confirm it: in both cases, nature and its destructive force triumph over the immobility of the world on the "right" side of the bars, which doesn't even realize its own bars in life, society, and politics. /// I don't know what some viewers expect from a filmed theater performance, but here the script of the play and the performances of the actors are excellent, and the film is also complemented by a high-quality camera, giving it a cinematographic value that cannot be achieved in the theater.

It is only characteristic that one of the members of the large family of documentary films was created for a purpose that does not align with the task that prevailing common sense imposed on it yesterday and today - to neutrally reflect reality and objectively retell history. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, the father of the montage documentary, inherited a clear socio-political motivation from its dual mother, Esfir Shub,and the October Revolution. The description of facts overlaps with a particular interpretation that denies universal objectivity and - let us add to it with folk wisdom - "criminally distorts reality." If this naïve opinion, which stubbornly denies that every interpretation is a crime committed against "reality," but with the caveat that interpretation can never be avoided and is a necessary addition to every event, every text, and in this case, archival material can be easily refuted, it is possible by pointing to this film. Since the montage documentary, which, with its structure, was most suitable for a documentary film about more recent history in general and has therefore become its most common prototype to this day (with minor modifications: intertitles replaced by voice-overs and supplemented with talking heads), it found its first portrait in a film with a clear ideological function. It is up to each modern viewer to understand that the ideological content of the documentary (ideological in the sense of worldview, ideas, etc.) can change, but that the ideological-interpretive function is and will remain irreducible. After all, in the indifferent face of Nicholas II Romanov, there will always only be what we or the time period want to see in it and what the montage composition, connecting it once with "bloodiness" and another time with "holiness," will embed into it.

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.