Dionysos

In December 1968, Garrel completed this film about the young Anna/Anémone, who tries to free herself from her family environment and step into adulthood with her newly found love. In the same year, not only did the French youth attempt the same, but on a larger scale... Can Anémone escape from the clutches of her loving and tolerant father, only until the moment his daughter starts living her own life? /// This is early and somewhat more civil Garrel, and Anémone's main attraction lies in its ending (erasing the difference between private and public, the collision of the state/repression and freedom/ love, reminiscent of the director's debut feature Marie for Memory, filmed the year before. The decent meta-fiction elements are pleasing. /// French actress Anémone (born Anne Bourguignon) chose her pseudonym precisely based on the main role she played in this film.

Another one of the fundamental films of Brazilian cinema marginal from the late 60s and early 70s, overflowing with irony, dark humor, rawness, and uncompromising form and content, all against the backdrop of a brutal story about two heartless criminals fleeing across Brazil. Here, just like in the no less fundamental film of this rebellious "movement" - Sganzerla's The Red Light Bandit - we can only rejoice at the combination of the degraded crime genre with a serious (which does not exclude irony and disregard for good morals and conventional expectations, quite the opposite!) statement about the era and society. After all, the total nihilism of the heartless characters (let's not be deceived by visions of an angel - they only signify that heaven is already here on earth, unfortunately) merely doubles the nihilism of the real world. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is once again the formal side, which perfectly fits the label with ease and originality, characteristic of a young creator: the unpredictable uncompromising nature of impulsive characters corresponds to the surprise of the form, sometimes breaking down the wall between the real world and gangsters, sometimes reveling in the aesthetic self-sufficiency of the film camera (which again precisely corresponds to the labeled - the purposeless pleasure of breaking the law alongside the joy of purposelessly long shots).

Directors Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli made a film set in the Roman counterculture of the 1970s (so it is not about the everyday life of the middle class). The underground content - discussions with friends about politics, open sexual relationships, clashes with the police, demonstrations, and life in a semi-legal state, on the streets - intertwines with an equally independent underground form that blurs the line between fiction and reality. The central plot, revolving around a segment of the life of a sixteen-year-old (approximately) prostitute picked up from the street by an altruistic forty-year-old, is set within an overall framework that at times resembles not only Cinema vérité, but also the "revolutionary" European cinema à la the Dziga Vertov group, meaning the breaking down of the wall between the actor and the character, the film crew and the world being filmed, the application of collective decision-making, etc. The viewer, in fact, almost never knows whether they are watching a staged, improvised, spontaneous/"documentary" scene, whether they are following the character or the actor who is already "playing" themselves and dealing with their own personal matters with another "character." In this aspect, as well as in its focus on the character of the modern young woman, the film resembles (a much more independent hippie) a version of I Am Curious (Yellow), and I Am Curious (Blue) by Vilgot Sjöman.

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...

Neo-Baroque lost its neo and only baroque remained, whose weight of gilded encumbrance may have been another bead in the rosary of genre-ironic creations of cinéma du look, but the repetition of the prayer mantra reveals itself here as a doubly double-edged sword, which Carax cut himself with this time: by repeating the form, its true power was diluted, the power of negation through a convention-incompatible form, to such an extent that the negation of negation (= form) evoked simple mathematics - multiplying two minuses gives us a plus, which is nothing but the valorization of the content itself. And in the content, I saw nothing but convention, to which only a different narrative vector and occasionally a comedic tone could not suffice to break free from it. Symptomatically, here, the undermining and playing with genre forms (musical, melodrama, fairy tale, etc.) is nothing more than something we have already seen in other more commercial works because such "postmodernity" has long been privatized by Hollywood. Hollywood has finally caught up with and absorbed Carax like a depth that is truly dangerous to look into because, from this perspective, cinéma du look can turn into cinéma du don't look. Neo-baroque always started in apparent kitschy sweetness only to turn bitter, but this transition was (in the best works) caused precisely by the inversion of conventions of given forms, while when we want to repeat this Neo-baroque dramatic arc only on the level of content, we always end up with nothing but convention sneaking in through the back door. Perhaps the transformation of the puppet into a living being was supposed to be an interpretive indication of the author's mise en abyme, with which Carax wanted to convince the viewer at the last moment that his film is not just a bloodless marionette swallowing the budget, but a work containing life, yet even in this final attempt (which is nothing other than a replication of Hollywood desires), he failed.

The era of cangaceiros - the bandits of the sertao, the arid northeast of Brazil - has ended. It not ending because it has already ended: in the film, the characters move deliberately as if lifeless (the burned-out Antonio, whose raison d'être perished by his own hand; Coirana, who is merely a follower of a dead bandit tradition and in the film only literally dies from a certain point onwards; the blind old landowner, foolishly defending his property, a typical character of perverse dehumanizing greed against the green of life, etc.). Rocha can better build the brand of his work in this way: the intertwining of reality and myth, characters mythologizing themselves, the transformation of real misery into a mythical reflection, etc. Moreover, the intertwining of counterpoints is repeated in other narrative elements: in the mise-en-scène, for example, when Antonio and the bandit Coirana meet (a meeting so quick compared to Black God, White Devil..., where we waited for it the whole film), and in which the characters unexpectedly blend in one long shot, until suddenly they face each other, but also in the scenes when Antonio (dressed in early 20th-century clothing) stands amidst modern car traffic. Cars speeding by, indifferent to the characters of the movie. This is the main counterpoint and the main message of the film: the myth of cangaceiros is dead, times have changed; the myth of yesterday is not an inspiration, but precisely a juxtaposition with today. The struggle of today only comes when the last myth of yesterday dies and becomes just a memory, and only then can it strengthen those who are going in the same direction as he once did. This is the engaged message of the film, personified in the character of the "Professor": just like Antonio, he joins the side of the people only after Coirana's death. So, what does the awakening of the mercenary Antonio mean? In my opinion, it is a clear parallel to the situation in Brazil at that time and the rise and consolidation of the military junta in the late 1960s: Can't Antonio's awakening (the soldier) and his alignment with the Professor (Rocha's left-wing intellectual type) against the blind landowner serve as an appeal to the army to join the side of Brazilians and turn against the isolated bourgeois/landowning elite?

When postmodernism suddenly awakens from amnesia and realizes that surrealism has been forgotten. The film is situated on many interpretive edges - from farce to imaginative questioning about the nature of human memory, and from a game with genres to multi-layered references to the history of cinema. It should not be forgotten that it is a quite interesting criticism of war: the film deliberately adopts the expressions of the wartime propaganda of that time for its overall framework of space and events, which occasionally creates delightful contrasts - anti-German slogans fighting against Teutonic barbarians framing the time and space of the film and standing against the personal search for emotion, the death of loved ones, etc. However, it is primarily a surrealist anabasis to the end of the world, wrapped in the retro black and white garb of silent films of the time, more so those German films rather than war or Soviet films (where the most famous product of Soviet cinema of the 1920s in the form of the montage school automatically comes to mind). However, Maddin adds some more historical inspiration to the postmodern urn - the noir genre. After all, the lonely hero with amnesia, in a hostile environment of a mysterious city, tracking his femme fatale at night and commenting on this self-destructive pursuit of solving the mystery through voice-over, is a classic fulfillment of this genre.

The zero level of film: its decomposition into prime factors - crushing its DNA down to basic bases. In other words: a return to the original foundations of every film experience, which is the interplay of light and shadow, sound and silence. This means that the prejudices and comfort cultivated by decades (and now more than centuries) of conventional bourgeois cinema are painfully disintegrating in the viewer, with unpleasant struggles that mean only one thing: a return to the degenerated sensibility of the viewer to the true roots of their perception. As they say - to bounce off the bottom, we must first finish the bottle - Kubelka has truly brought us down to the very foundation of film.

"A person has no fate or privileged place in the universe. If they didn't exist, nature wouldn't miss them." Khouri's privileged theme: the disintegration of an individual from the whole world into the monad of a useless human being; Khouri's privileged place: a luxurious abandoned hacienda, in a broader sense territorialization of the privileged theme to the privileged class - the bourgeoisie (and secondarily Brazilian). The universe of this film created by Khouri's successful mise-en-scène: the contradiction between the individual and nature, the anxiety of life and being simultaneously attracted to it as someone who doesn't belong; an island of a functionalist villa amidst a flood of greenery; solitude against the backdrop of the city. But above all, this monadic poetics of alienation leaves its mark in the framing of the human face by the camera which, with frequent details filling the faces of the actors, creates a claustrophobic atmosphere and emphasizes the inner and outer separation much better than the sometimes insensitive and exaggerated use of "oppressive" non-diegetic music, which, in my opinion, has aged the most in the film. If during watching I pondered why there are so many allusions to the 1920s in the film, it is perhaps due to their unsurpassable and beautiful portrayal of the human face, as only silent film could do, and which Khouri also used quite successfully, although in this film it leads the actors to a certain - but characteristic - lifelessness not only in their facial expressions.

What does continuity speak of through a flood of discontinuous fragments from visual diary notes of one's own life, besides the author's own life? It is also one intertitle with a paradoxical message, being even more paradoxical as the film is at first glance, and according to the author's claim, purely personal - "This is a political film." This is a political film? Yes: the film presents the humanism of human life, adoration of the small everyday life not only in contrast to any great history but - and this is the second paradox - also in contrast to the author's own life. Humanism of the moment against any effort, always necessarily violent, to achieve greatness and the desire to leave a mark on the world and history, but above all resistance against the desire - equally violent - to ascribe any meaning to one's own life. Indeed, it is heroic to look back at oneself in old age and say: This means nothing. Everything that you see and that I see, is nothing. Everything is randomly composed, any statement regarding the interpretation of what you see and what is presented before my eyes in a cinematic memory, says nothing more. The more it tries to be objective, and even if it were the most objective (only place, date, time, context), it cannot provide anything at all, because it is about nothing because life has nothing to do with it. So says the author. For the author, there is only a feeling, a moment, the joy of the moment, which merges with the pure joy of filming whatever, because life does not have predetermined important or big events, but a moment of joy can arise from anything. That is why this film is the only film by Jonas Mekas that is worth seeing because it also provides an "interpretation grid" (if it makes "sense" to use this term...) for the author's other films.