Dionysos

According to Lyotard, the collapse of the "grand narratives" of modernity was accompanied by mourning - the mourning of the "postmodern" people at the end of the century over the certainties that those grand unifying stories of emancipation, freedom, and progress offered them. Here we can see the collapse of one of these grand narratives twice over - not only the collapse of the story of freedom and equality, the socialist ideal and a better society, but also the collapse of the linearly narrated film story, of a film unified by a certain principle (whether it is the bourgeois Hollywood dream of the main characters' crucial role, whose motivations unify the plot, or another weakened form of unification, such as a certain message, the chronology of events, logical causality of the story, etc.). If we return to the aforementioned mourning, it is clearly evident that it returns to us twice over. Not only within Godard's message, the lamentation over Europe's betrayal of its ideals, its effort to change and become better, but again purely within the framework of the film and its form - after all, what else but this mourning can "connect" (since I cannot use the word unify...) the individual fragments, caesuras, and singular fragments that the film is composed of other than this sad yet liberating human and film mourning?

(If you do not appreciate or cannot handle European art, do not enter!) In the middle of the Californian desert, a group of three women, under the dominance of a despotic high priestess of the cult of human (female?) pain, decides to enter voluntary isolation, hermetically sealed off from the outside world, and men especially. We do not know whether they were led here by purely personal trauma or a human (woman's?) inexplicable obsession with addiction as Schroeter himself supposedly said. With the arrival of a sensitive outsider, the story eventually turns into a classical tragedy - and from it, it takes its character and form, or is complemented by it. Opera music, costumes, and some visual compositions are almost kitschy Baroque – what kind of juxtaposition did Schroeter intend with that? If we add purely film finesse, such as the long shots often taken in large units, we get an enigmatic affair filled with content and formal challenges for the viewer. There are several suggestions to ponder: is the desire to emancipate oneself from the (male?) world and surrender to pain, and torment in the form of a tyrannical ruler - notice that it is a woman - a warning that it is premature or unworthy because death or pain will come anyway (the desert will come to us anyway, so why seek refuge in it during life)? Is the film a pessimistic realization of the impossibility of escaping addiction, both in the past (the classics) and in the present (the demented song "Rum and Coca Cola"), whether by the masters of the world being men (the past) or its potential (female) future embodied in a reduced scale by the desert female community?

Sociology as an alienating effect? A documentary in a drama, or fiction within a documentary? In any case, it is one of the culminations of the 60s as a social and film movement. The initial Brechtian alienation establishing a film within a film quickly changes into a cinema-verité style, bringing the viewer closer to the social atmosphere and especially its traumatic moments, followed by a fictional personal story of two lovers. The brilliance lies in the fact that thanks to the merging of the Brechtian alienated characters with the story they portray, the sociology of that time (the identity of women and men in the Western world during the sexual revolution, post-industrial transformation, questions surrounding the welfare state, the leftist agitation of the young/student movement, etc.) intertwines directly with the story, which is no longer just a sterile documentary demonstration of sociological facts or a fictional metaphor concocted by the director. The actors from the story are themselves part of the society in which they act/live, but at the same time, they investigate it with objectifying methods! Who is the subject and who is the object? Who is the director and the actor, and who is the viewer, the creator of the interview, and the one being interviewed? Everyone is both in any of these pairs.

In one aspect, this is a non-traditional Ferreri film: the maestro of the cinematic metaphor, in the sense that the stories and characters of his films usually function "only" as an embodiment of a metaphor, through which Ferreri builds an analogy between the film world and the real world. He went a step further here. In the opening scene, he let the chosen metaphor for this film resonate directly. The viewer does not have to "only" extract Ferreri's chosen metaphor (the principle by which the plot unfolds and carries a message) from the observed actions of the characters but can contemplate to what extent it corresponds to the outlined "program" in the beginning. Here, in my opinion, two possibilities present themselves – the first is that we note that the main character truly experiences a radical rejection of the alienated world, an escape from it through a rebellious gesture. The second option, which is more interesting, is that we note that he has just completely merged that alienated image with himself. If the "outer world transitions into the inner being of a person," then violence (industrial and military machinery, where he is employed) and the romantic escape from the mundane life on a luxurious sailboat (a promotional phantasm), etc. will indeed seem like internalized fulfillments of the "qualities" of the (post)industrial society, to which a specific individual has decided to commit.

This review contains a spoiler. The only two people he truly loved were Mieze and Reinhold. As has been written elsewhere, Franz is a character that is broken, not only in time, but absolutely – he is constantly torn apart by the world, forced to always rebuild, to find himself again and forget what came before (first his right hand, eventually his soul, but he could not find that again). The greatness of this character lies in his love for Reinhold because that is the world - death - life itself, who has broken free from its commonality and stood in front of our protagonist personally - Reinhold is the embodiment of the world, one that is cruel and treacherous. The experienced Franz, who loves life and the world despite its endless injustices, embraces Reinhold in a gesture of a futile fight against the Unbeatable, which can be tricked exactly by not losing ourselves in love and the fight against it, not losing the will to love those close to us but also the World that enables us all this, even though it takes everything from us. That is precisely why the culmination is the ending of the 13th episode - Franz's laughter at the loss of Mieze is not cynicism, but the highest understanding - Mieze could not defeat Reinhold/Death, but she could lose herself because by denying Franz or leaving him, Reinhold would truly triumph. In the (one-armed) gesture of the embrace of Love and Death, the whole epilogue unfolds, which is an unprecedentedly perfect dialectical play of Death and Life, the guilt of the World before its own cruelty and the guilt of the Human-Franz before from own complicity. /// Without a doubt, Fassbinder created one of his best films, notable even within his filmography, primarily through the multi-layered content and form. The combination of the narrator, intertitles, and "poisonously sweet" music turns the epic of the story into an ironic and stinging poetry of sadness, life’s mistakes, turbulent times, and life itself.

Akerman said about this film: "I want the viewer to feel a physical experience through the time used in each shot. Such a physical experience, in which time unfolds within you, in which the time of the film enters you." It is not just time, space, and subtle gestures of unknown and unrecognized protagonists that the viewer is more sensitive to thanks to the absence of any narrative attention. Even one's own imagination, experience, or empathy must come into play and not every viewer is capable of that due to conventional films that "think" for us, "feel" for us, and "live" for us. A nearly perfect synthesis of the general and the specific - and we do not have to be Hegelians to see this as the culmination of (film) history. Unfortunately, history, and the history of film, never ends, so someone may have already surpassed or will surpass Akerman, but until then, for me at least, the film is brilliant in that it contains everything and nothing - each specific story is at the same time a fragment of a unique relationship between two unknown individuals and a fulfillment of the general human experience. It encompasses everything that can be said about the experience called "love," yet it cannot say anything specific about any particular love of any couple. Yet at the same time, we feel that every general statement and abstract description of love would shatter against the specificity and inevitability of any specific piece of this film mosaic.

A glimpse into the studio of Playboy magazine, where a certain type of celebrity is currently being photographed. The director - the well-known Harun Farocki - observes the process of creating something that will become the object of desire for male readers: "Ein Bild" = "Image." With a high-quality "non-documentary" film camera, he lets us peek into the process where a well-known truth is reinforced = a copy is better than the original... Or is there something normal about a pair of sweaty stagehands, suave photographers with cigarettes in their mouths, and talkative makeup artists creating an arrangement of sexual satisfaction using their tricks?

The equivalent of the collective work Germany in Autumn, in which a wide group of creators under the coordination of A. Kluge focused on the social analysis of post-war Germany, this time with a clear aim - to prevent the election of Franz Josef Strauss (chairman of the Bavarian conservative CSU) as Reich Chancellor. For this reason, the film focuses on the career of the said person, including his corrupt affairs and abuses of power (the famous Spiegel affair of 1962), which may not mean as much to today's viewer, but in the context of the work itself, it makes absolute sense. Fortunately, the film is also composed of brilliantly captured metaphors about the nature of power in a capitalist state and the psychology of the masters of this system, balancing artistic license and documentary accuracy. The authors once again demonstrate their sense for detail (both in meaning and visually), with which they are able to create a compelling narrative about specific events and general topics from impersonal documentary material. Given the unwillingness, in the tense atmosphere of the pre-election period, to provide space for leftist creators, the authors could not get close to Strauss or attend CSU meetings, so they had to rely on archival and weekly records, which they ultimately combined with their own footage. The film, playing out in an ironic spirit, is also a painful testimony to the unfulfilled chances of post-war Germany: "The ideals of 1945, revoked in 1949, returned in 1968 and from that moment on, they will continue to return until they are fulfilled."

In this film, Rivette drifted towards the shallows of the tendency he already demonstrated in Celine and Julie Go Boating and Noroît. The essence of the problem lies in the fact that his Duelle is trapped by the plot, but it is not about the plot. Duelle is undoubtedly a European independent art film, but it retains (or tries to, because Rivette never made conventional films and could not "retain" their principles) a "Hollywood" focus on the plot. Antonioni (Blow-Up) or Wenders (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) served to us an internally coherent plot, only to purposefully (thanks to the open, unexplained ending) demonstrate its existential absurdity; in the films of the 80s and early 20th century (which are the only ones that can be compared here) Godard also retained the plot, but to such a reduced extent that the film can do without it and finally, while other art filmmakers either directly show the senselessness/impossibility of any plot (Robbe-Grillet, Lynch's Mulholland Dr.) or do without it altogether (Akerman in the 1970s, of the ones I know and now come to mind, but there are many, even infinitely, if we look at the genre of experimental film). Rivette presents to the viewer a film in which nothing can be followed other than the plot (the camera, editing, form - mostly nothing, and if so, then nothing revealing), which is boring, meaningless, but nevertheless, is somehow explained at the end (the openness of the ending is lost; there is no reflection on the essence of the story as such, which we have access to when the author shows us a particular story as meaningless, etc.). The viewer is caught in a plot that he cannot leave, but which does not want to say anything. That is why this film also does not say anything.

A film's influence on the delirious soul of a disturbed character, a representative of women as a gender. The film is a raw depiction of the situation of the female psyche after she resigns from the cultural role that society imposes on her. More precisely, after her own identity, specifically her female identity, disintegrates both externally and internally, when she is no longer capable of internally identifying with all (or at least the prevailing majority, as is usually the case in reality) components of femininity that her personality was supposed to adopt. A succession of hallucinatory sequences and symbolic scenes staging the other hiding places of the asylum allegorically accompany us with this disintegration, from the protagonist’s youth to her present. We can speculate: if the protagonist's diagnosis is indeed schizophrenia, it can be said that her problem lies precisely in the fact that she was unable to incorporate into her own identity both herself - her unique self - and the imperatives of proper femininity. She is therefore condemned to the fragmentation of herself. However, this avant-garde film is not straightforward feminist agitation (it is quite experimental, so it cannot be straightforward...). The creators' political and ideological anchoring, in my opinion, is shown in a scene towards the end of the film, where we witness some kind of outdoor celebration, from which the adoration of concepts of anti-society or free communities detached from the oppressive repressive society out there can be clearly felt. Furthermore, as is shown to us, even sex is focused on satisfying your partner...