Dionysos

The second part continues exactly where the previous part ended, after the main character's transformation from a white terrorist into a friend of the people. This transformation seemed very poorly managed to me throughout Hungarian Rhapsody: 1st moment = István is bred with the intolerant attitude of the aristocracy, and he cruelly fights on the side of counterrevolution; 2nd moment = István recommends allocating land to retail farmers, in order to "take the wind out of the sails of the reds," so it is clearly just an opportunistic calculating gesture; 3rd moment = István, dressed in peasant rags, sits at the table with the former aristocracy. Nothing happened between moments 2 and 3 that would coherently explain this transformation. Fortunately, this problem no longer exists in Allegro Barbaro (and it is therefore paradoxical that a story in which characters do not transform is better), and we can enjoy the eternal struggle of arrogance and brutality of wealth and power with the suffering and resistance of poverty in the background of passing history. There is no need to talk about the mastery of mise-en-scène, and the playful placement of individual characters is also very pleasing, which is not only the result of clever movement of actors on the stage but also of miraculous film editing.

Deleuze noticed that Ferreri mastered the "art of evoking original worlds amidst realistic environments..." (…) And "he places strange instincts here, such as the maternal instinct in males in La donna scimmia or the irresistible instinct to blow into a balloon in the film Break up." (Film 1, pp. 156-157) Instinct does not lead anywhere, it does not construct anything, it feeds on itself - it certainly does not construct a plot, a comprehensible arc for the average viewer, weaned on musty narrative forms already drained from their own Babička - which is just as incestuous or perverse as many of Ferreri's films. When a Man tells a Woman that he doesn't want her to be just another Friday to him, he means that he doesn't want their story to be just another conventional narrative of growth, education, upward direction, a civilizational fairy tale of progress, and a bourgeois fairy tale of progress in the storyline: Robinson's island remains uncultivated, the engine of civilization does not start, the end of the film is not pointed, and the course of the action is not heightened. In Ferreri's work, the process of externalizing the primal instinct (or scriptural intention, intelligible metaphor, etc.) merges with the staging of the entire film, which does not need to say anything more because there is nothing more to be found in it. "After all, it was just a dog" will undoubtedly be followed by "after all, it was just a woman" in the next step, and in the end, it was just love, it was just life, it was just a film...

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.

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.

Jordan Belson apparently regularly destroyed his previous works, which he retrospectively found inadequate during specific phases of his artistic development. At least until the late sixties, he also refused to screen many of his works. The gradual abstraction of the external world at the expense of the internally derived image penetrates the soul of the author. At the same time, the external world is not destroyed or closed off; in 1978, Belson stated, "The distinction between an external scene perceived in the usual way and the scene perceived with the inner eye is very slight to me." From the beginning, the author has been interested in Eastern religions, Buddhism, in which the unification of the internal and external worlds is to occur. American experimental art of the fifties and sixties is excellently depicted in its apparent contrasts in Belson: abstraction and structurality are not a sign of the displacement of the individual, but rather his higher self-realization in a newly perceived world that is abstracted to its most basic and most mysterious foundations through the camera, which resonates retrospectively with the observer and transforms them through this observation. It is only characteristic that it is necessary to proceed through destruction, which is a symptom of the fact that we can never be satisfied if we are seeking the higher foundations of anything: Belson destroys his older works, destroys the avant-garde with material representation, and remains with pure film enclosed in its mandala without reference to material reality.

Image, editing, and temporal loop as cinematographic means of the return of the repressed, suppressed not by the machinery of Hollywood, which would imply consciousness, but by Hollywood mimesis. In the film, Arnold's classic creative approach fittingly meets with the overwhelmingly psychoanalytic theme of the Oedipus complex. Arnold thus liberates the source material from his hidden and suppressed undercurrent, which would hardly find recognition in mass culture, here in the films produced by MGM. However, this also applies to all other films by Arnold explicitly not referring to this theme - moreover, in this film, we are flooded with subversive work with editing and repetition, which releases from the image what is not visible in the normal flow of film frames, but what is always contained in them as a repressed possibility that cannot be escaped without getting rid of the whole (or until we get rid of Martin Arnold).

A perfect nod and postmodern mockery of the film genre - this horror-giallo is a tribute to Argento and his essential overcoming: the film is above all clever and its formal aspect is refined to the edge of the best formal mastery, even leaning towards experimental pioneering. The entire de facto silent film is based on the creation of mental associations through visual shortcuts, establishing "short connections" between (contrasting images for the majority of people, not so much for giallo fans...) otherwise contrasting images - death, pleasure, young bodies in the throes of sexuality, wrinkled corpses; (genius!!!) the coquetry of naked skin with synthetic rubber and metal. In short: a constant reversibility of life and death, morbidity and pleasure, achieved through the frenzy of the camera and editing, fetishistic details (substituting for the viewer's touch), and the actual absence of words and a "plot," which forces us to rely on our most lascivious senses sight and touch. This is further proof that films can be told primarily through images! Another question is the reversibility of the victim and the killer, and above all the killer and the viewer, giving birth to perverse film pleasure.

When the Italians made Once Upon a Time in the West at the same time, they managed to create possibly the best western, thus winning in the exclusively American discipline. In this case too (and once again Morricone was involved), the Italians came close to scoring on the opponent's field, but in the end, it was more like a draw. The story of a lone wolf fighting against the mafia machinery is dangerously reminiscent of the machinery of big fish in the world economy (the mafia family's meetings and decision-making are equivalent to the general meetings of a company, and even the business area is more or less the same, only the means are more straightforward) or heavyweights in world politics. The insignificant McCain will be crushed just like a Central European country in the same year, as we read in the newspaper headlines. Yet this is not a film parable, but a gangster film with suspenseful scenes (also thanks to the brilliant camera work of Erico Menczer) and above all charismatic actors. Moreover, Cassavetes was able to observe the performance of his colleague Falk during filming, whom he then cast in his best films.

The experimental and highly atmospheric film by the acclaimed nonconformist filmmaker G. Bódy creates a sense of endings, futility, and transitions (both in life and history) in which time momentarily slows down. Hungarian soldiers fighting for the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49 and in subsequent decades of European national liberation conflicts eventually find themselves in the American Civil War, which itself is nearing its end. Europe and the world have partly fulfilled old ideals, and therefore they can be completely forgotten. Yesterday's outlaws and warriors can return home under amnesty; today it doesn't matter to anyone. The raison d'être of the main characters slowly fades away, and the twilight of wartime turns bullets into the buzzing of bees on a peaceful spring meadow, bees that no longer sting but will soon perish themselves. The characters flow into new directions, forced to choose in timelessness - emigrating back home, starting a new life in a new world as a railway engineer? Bódy divides the image using various masks, excelling in the use of the deliberate cross motif, symbolizing both the gaze of rifles under which the characters' lives unfolded and their possible future as professional surveyors - the work of railway engineers in peacetime, like death after the end of all wars. To appreciate this formal approach, I recommend watching the author's experimental structuralist exploration Four Bagatelles from the same period, which adds a new dimension to both this motif and the film.

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.