Dionysos

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.

The tormenting dilemmas of a man, forced to struggle his whole life with his dual "nature," balancing incompatible desires - the desire of God embodied by the church and the desire of homosexuality. The overall triadic structure (childhood - adulthood - old age; church - mother - libido) intersects the entire trilogy in its central theme, which is the protagonist's tormenting and touching reconciliation of the demands of the religious superego and the sexual id, between which a weakling is caught, condemned by his indecisiveness to a life of solitude. The tragedy of the protagonist’s life in this classical sense is further emphasized by the fact that it should be God who breathed his nature into his son, and it is the same God who, in the Bible and the acts of St. Peter, the founder of the church, embodied his Catholic law in all his little lambs as their true nature. The "film," even though it is composed of three short films, they are united by a uniform and, despite its minimalism, impressive form - the desolate black and white camera in static shots weighs on its protagonist just as much as his self-reproach and does not allow him to escape his inner turmoil even with camera movement. On the other hand, the soundtrack often exceeds its place in the corresponding scene and spills over into preceding/following scenes - thus brilliantly imitating (together with the arrangement of scenes not based on linear, but purely subjective relationships of human memory, which finds closeness between otherwise temporally and spatially alien events) the manner of human reminiscence, which the entire autobiographical film de facto is.

Bolt's hundred-meter time stretched from 9.58 to 960 seconds, chopped by the echo of a .45-70 caliber gunshot into a frenzied frenzy, pushing the traditional cadence of the film reel into the era of Winchesters. How does one prolong the experience of the moment with the knowledge that it always takes place in the blink of an eye, during which it arises and disappears? Tscherkassky's cinematographic method is unique: he’s not trying to slow down or even stop the moment, but instead to maximize every second (half a second, quarter of a second?) to the utmost extent, not multiplying the inner power of each shot by 24 times, but 24 to the power of x, smashing each shot a thousand times and each time letting it play against itself the game of the echo of the supersonic jet engine, trying to escape from itself from the grip of the canyon walls. And yet how, when Tscherkassky cannot draw that inner power from the (narrative) meaning of the sequence, but only from its visual impact? Simply put, he sets the most essential materials of each shot against each other, the image of the scene itself; in "Outer Space," he also tries to capture and prolong the moment, and this fact is taken to cinematographic ad absurdum when we see the contrasting play of the film reel itself.

A literal self-portrait - the subject of interest, which is the author, is captured by himself, thus becoming the subject of his own artistic process. Similarly, Godard, although he makes a film about himself, uses the style of his feature films to explore "himself." It is written in quotation marks, because Godard perceives himself more as a foreign (marketing, detached from the history of film, etc.) abbreviation, the depersonalized JLG, rather than a subject for a purely personal hour-long autobiographical documentary (this is not to say that there is a complete absence of a certain narcissism, which is similar to his own works). Nevertheless, Godard's persona, together with his work as a unique personality, becomes a general space in which the power of artistic work and the cinematic image (in Godard's conception) are shown. The author is a certain fading focal point of creative work; he creates a work that always eludes him; he imbues a unique meaning, which, after being expressed/filmed, it turns the generality of spoken words into a foreign one; he brings together words that are and are not his own. (Moments of narcissism in the film are associated with a part of the unique creative contribution, while moments of typical Godardian self-irony are when he reflects on the author's secondary nature). These thoughts are especially important for an author who bases his work on citing other works and whose theory of the cinematic image relies equally on the imagination of something as foreign as the viewer.

History revolves in a circle, only the scenery and slogans truly change, faith in salvation takes on both divine and earthly forms, but does the foundation remain the same? The search for an answer is undertaken not only by the audience but also by the authors themselves - in this alienating effect, in which Fassbinder, as a trans/historical figure, travels through both epochs, we can literally observe his (and the entire film's) relationship to revolutionary events. His inquisitive, gloomy, and reserved attitude is combined with an almost phlegmatic observation of the surrounding world, at the end of which comes an equally unexcited nod in support of the fight for a better future, while the contrast between this calm attitude and the revolutionary grandeur around the year 1968 in the West probably suggests how further subversive work towards the status quo should proceed: without unnecessary and hasty excesses, but with true personal commitment. /// Cinematically, this film still bears the significant influence of Godard in that a large part of the film resembles a harvest of Godard's Maoist films such as Weekend or East Wind. On the other hand, the theme of peasant revolt as a precursor to modern emancipatory struggle was also used at the same time by Schlöndorff in Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, and a short scene full of symbolism and declamation delivered by Montezuma echoes Schroeter's or Ottinger's films.

Delight from the text - on the movie screen?! In the main role is the word, but not in its usual role as a carrier of meaning, but as a character itself. Therefore, in the main role, the signifier, but without the signified (at least to the extent possible, as one cannot exist without the other in the final instance). Snow perfectly sealed the words in such a "film" that escaping towards the referents they should normally denote is impossible - in the absolutely abstract "world" of Snow's film, the materiality of the external world is completely abolished, replaced by the emergence of the full materiality of the word. The function of the word as a reference to external reality cannot be achieved in a film that did not turn on its own camera, and especially in a film that comments on nothing more than itself. Snow precisely understood that by telling a story, his words would begin to play a common role and the viewer's imagination would seek a safe haven in any other port than the awareness of the paradoxical nonsense of the word as a sign that can appear to design reality even though it means nothing in and of itself. The greatest humor (of which there is plenty in the film!) lies in the constant sarcasm of using demonstrative pronouns: in a film that disrupts the function of the word as a reference to reality and forces us to enjoy their form, composition, pace of emergence and disappearance, and the play of light and shadow!

Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are traveling on a train. Suddenly, the train stops. Stalin asks, "Why are we stopping?" The engineers ran out of coal. "Shoot the engineers!" The engineers were shot, and the train continues to be stationary. Khrushchev asks, "Why are we stopping?" "They shot the engineers." "Rehabilitate the engineers!" The engineers were rehabilitated, and the train continues to be stationary. Then Brezhnev stands up, pulls the curtains, and says, "What are you all doing? Let's pretend we're moving..." /// This film works great not only as a study of bullying in the military but also as – and it deserves applause precisely because it can do it through its main theme - a mirror of its time. The authors created a depressingly monotonous and isolated world of a military train, where time stopped and where endless movement towards an infinitely distant goal (the war will probably never end, the train will never reach the prison...) mirrors the motionless world outside, which long ago lost its utopian goal. And it is precisely through the views through the train window that the creators hid the main impressions of the transition between two epochs - the total decay of (not only ruling) values; apathy and rigidity, but which rather amounted to hypnotized waiting for the cataclysm, which nobody thought would come, but everyone knew that it would have to come; in extreme cases, an escape to new values (waiting for the apocalypse and a return of God, emphasizing the symbol of the cross, or nihilism in sex). The final passage says so much more than it could if we’d only stuck to the theme of bullying: there is no escape from the train. /// The chosen form perfectly corresponds to the content - the predominance of claustrophobic imitating details, a monochromatic image, and slow-paced transitions between shots, all giving birth to a feverish and unbearable timeless and surface rigidity, under which the catharsis of a new era is being born.

"What kind of actresses do you prefer?" - "Beautiful girls with bourgeois manners, inaccessible to the working class and with the authenticity of a prostitute." This is not a confession of the director's casting preferences, but rather Bonello's description of all European art films produced by artistic "auteurs" since the 1960s. Those who carefully watch the end credits will come across Pasolini's quote: "History is the passion of sons who want to understand their fathers." Bonello's The Pornographer is a sprawling confession by Bonello about his own profession - but it is not pornography, it is the creation of authorial films - which undergoes a similar crisis: revolutionary character, social influence, youth and energy, along with the older generation of classics and the May 1968 movement, have long disappeared from artistic production, leaving only nostalgic, sad, and tiresome contemplation about the meaningfulness of one's own work, which probably no longer interests anyone. The involvement of Léaud is doubly fitting in this sense - the effort to understand his role from the perspective of his film son also means us understanding Léaud himself, who was 24 years old during the May events and played in films by Godard, Pasolini, Truffaut... /// Bonello's biggest problem lies in the form and once again, we are largely confronted with bloodless linear storytelling.

For a Central European, it is certainly valuable as an insight into the functioning of a Japanese patriarchal family, otherwise an excellent geological exploration of all-time sediments within one Japanese personality. The viewer is confronted with the male character's thoroughly personal search for lost time, whose retrospections propel us towards the goal just like Shinkansens and ships on the present plane. It is touching to observe the patient's discourse - yes, the patient's, because the "narrative" recollection of the main protagonist speaks to us just like a patient from a psychoanalytic couch - constantly revolving around old traumas, in the depths of the past, constantly dissected and cut up into new segments and reanalyzed. Touching - always precisely at the moment when the character examines the past, the present eludes him. The passivity that begets paralysis by the past is permanent for the main character - he is always forced to exchange today's satisfaction for (at best) the satisfaction of some problem in the past. (Example: Masuo has the opportunity to obtain the object of his desire, Satsuko, but instead goes to resolve the will of his father, who has been dead for 10 years; subsequently, he has the opportunity to obtain the object of his love, Ritsuko, and instead he deals with his deceased mother.)