Dionysos

A parable of the functioning of the world, reflected in the human consciousness, which is unable to accept the essential absurdity and injustice of the world other than by fictionalizing the unbearable reality: a fiction that paradoxically draws its images from the depths of its unconscious, from the depths where fairy tales, like those of Cocteau, become the embodiment of the principle that reality has the structure of fiction. While the fiction of the powerful of this world, kings and doctors, can pass for reality following Voltaire's saying that "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets," because then medals, orders, and medical diplomas are handed out - while for the lonely individual, prison, a madhouse, or as here both at once await. The imprisoned mind then begins to create its own world for defense against the world, which can only reflect what it has experienced: insults and absurdity will catch up with us everywhere. The film may not reach the surreal coloring of Case for a Rookie Hangman, but not only does it remind them of the absurdity of their common fairy-tale rotten kingdom (and also the physical resemblance of the actors in the leading roles), but above all by this approach, when an unfree society must give birth to a parable of itself and live only through these parables in order to survive. The film The Matrix is ​​only a commercial derivative of this idea. The pace of the beginning will please mainly with the brilliant scenography and film architecture, which elevate the otherwise slightly sluggish pace of the film.

Although the Kafkaesque-existential central motif known from Blow-Up may evoke the appearance of the depth of human existence, drowned four meters from the beach, this film is rather a sharp Ionesco-like parallel, which with its light-footed absurdity much better captures the tragicomic nature of modern Europe, which has rid itself of the shackles of dictatorships to dissolve in the sea of ​​advertising, virtual, political-media simulacra. It is crucial that the film was made in 1974, the year when Greece rid itself of the right-wing military dictatorship - this film is not a pathetic lament over the remnants of the past, but from the first minute of the new era, it does not hesitate to attack the new social regime, where there are no clearly defined enemies, where the hostile "power" (whoever it may be!) no longer needs to steal the object tangible as in Blow-Up because a disc with recorded material of a person's disappearance is worthless in itself: the only important thing is its context, manipulation of public opinion, which shapes reality. It is fascinating that such an "artistic comedy" was created in 1974, which does not hesitate to attack the living without any sentiment. The state and the police as a department of the advertising company Helas Ltd. ("Greece Inc."), whose privatized share was received by every citizen in the coupon privatization...

The ship's siren reminiscent of one from a stereotype factory and the roar of a horn announcing the everyday private apocalypse evokes a paradoxical feeling of stagnant harbor water, with the ship stuck in place and yet inevitably drifting towards its end. The farewell balances on the border between life and death in the anxious timelessness of a black and white camera, when the viewer, as tense as the main character, awaits the gust of wind that would finally move the ship aground - in any direction. This perhaps slightly worn-out theme, but always relevant, is elevated by superb direction, especially by the beautiful cinematography.

The circular structure of the film, which in its second half mirrors the first one in the form of developing variations, inherent to the original arrangement, not only reminds one of Robbe-Grillet's games with Deleuzian incompossible worlds but also ideally fits the actual theme: what if a Japanese Aryan from the Far East could repeat his own life in a different form, as a member of a subordinate Korean ethnicity? The tragicomic nature of this film stems from this circularity, which only refers to the cycle of human history: the compulsive repetition of the superiority of some over others. Nagisa Ōshima's experimental sandbox, which incidentally in the film diegetically emerges from the beach, draws its strength precisely from the subversive self-contradiction, in which nothing can happen to anyone, because they are just a puppet/character in the cycle of the film reel, that can be revived at will, and the fact that from this sandbox a person quickly steps into the real world just as the monkey (a racist figure par excellence) ends after drunkenness: the end of the film merges with the bullet to the head, after which nothing follows.

Sartre's cliché that hell is other people is fully valid - hell is indeed not a place, just as death has no topos: it is in music, words, looks, and the objective of the camera. And death is in the soul instead of the "sun in the soul," the sun of beauty, the Brazilian sun, the sun of the Tropic of Capricorn, the state of Minas Gerais. There is something mythological about the theme, in which a family of decaying former aristocracy or high bourgeoisie closes itself in its isolated, nostalgically wallpapered Petri dish and is observed from the outside with an artistic microscope, just as it is threatened from the outside by the draft of modernity. The biggest contribution of this film lies in two things: firstly, this draft does not represent any simplified agitational symbol, but a character equally hysterical and in its defiant energy almost equally feeble-minded, which means that senseless conjectures, accusations, jealousies, envies, illusions, and chimeras do not sound out, as if there were a simple way out in the right direction. Therefore, secondly, the film is at its strongest when it leaves that external appearance and dives inside its Petri dish - death as a depth permeates the whole mise-en-scène, framing, and a dramatically sweet neo-romantic musical underscore.

Chess with good with evil and light with darkness or until the painterly twilight of a unique film noir bathed in the darkness of the Latin American sun. Which of the pawns is good and which is bad is structurally blurred, and the contrastingly refined black and white camera gives no more clues than a story based on ignorance: there remains the joy of the process, eternal preparation for an invasion, and eternal repetition of the struggle - a children's game of cops and robbers, Indians and cowboys, Germans and partisans, when roles are redistributed after the death of all players and a new round begins - tough men succumbing to their childish pleasures (movie theater, guns, seduction, alcohol, sentimental sense of duty) at the expense of the principle of reality. White stripes at the dances of Russo-Soviet invasions, white stripes on the US flag during invasions of Grenada, Panama, Iraq... But even the blacks are not without guilt, guilt in this film cannot be established: it's not about people, it's about the city; the city as a mere playing field, a chessboard on the table of the parallel army general staff, which fights its battles regardless of the real world beyond the touchlines of children's battles: outside the battlefield, where the standard audience moves, and therefore it is the saddest that this film, which was almost destroyed by the Argentine right-wing pro-American bloody junta, is destroyed for today by the lack of interest of the consumer audience.

A psychological pastiche on the theme of the split of an individual between his repressed desires and the external mask itself suffers from a split between pseudo-Giallo clichés and artistic seizures. The strong moments of formalistic sequences, during which strangely in the final "dream" passage the breakdown of the false human ego shines through a frantic film cut and op-art attack on the human face, also show the limit of this film - in the tradition of conventional cinema, this 3.5-minute magnificent sequence is framed as a mere distinct diegetic insert: delirium of a fictional character... And not - as demonstrated for example by one of the most famous confessed sadistic fetishists of the French artistic scene of the 2nd half of the 20th century, Alain Robbe-Grillet - to transfer sadomasochistic impulses from the bodies of characters directly into the body of the film itself - generalized depersonalizing cut and transformation of characters into mere puppets in the sadistic hands of the artist are in strong contrast to Clouzot's retreat back to mere depiction of traditional psychologizing dilemmas of characters, to whom we are supposed to believe in their credibility with the "effect of reality" of conventional artistic codes. The partially original arthouse in the best sense of the word thus suffers from occasional gusts of stereotypes from better European sexploitation, and in the end, the viewer is left with a taste of almost pulp realism.

A film from the times when it still made sense to fight for something and people still read newspapers - the world of newspapers, and their aesthetics, their modus operandi, are assumed by the director for his film, which then gains a sometimes formally experimental approach comparable to other leading filmmakers of the "third world" at that time, such as Glauber Rocha and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: a newspaper press spewing out an unrelenting succession of headlines, thereby imitating the cold relentlessness of history before which the main protagonist is forced to act, is doubled by the powerlessness of every newspaper reader against events they cannot influence. Similarly, the main character is effectively immobilized within the confines of a conspiratorial apartment and compelled to observe how the course of history unfolds outside his window, his prison - a prison of his own making? Because Mrinal Sen is an already seasoned director of that "third world," one who has clearly taken inspiration from European artistic productions of the time (not only), not just in terms of formal avant-garde techniques (sharp cuts combining seemingly unrelated realities reminiscent not only of the logic of often illogical juxtaposition of newspaper articles but also of the Eisensteinian-Godardian school), but also in tone, which was shaped by the disillusionments of European intellectuals and their films following their unsuccessful revolutions: thus, the inspiration from the disillusionment of European intellectuals and their films, who, starting from the 70s, detached themselves from political rebellion and allowed their characters to wander through an existential labyrinth of the world and history, which progress at a different tempo and in a different direction than the characters themselves (e.g. Bellocchio, Bertolucci). The Guerilla Fighter is still deeply rooted in the reality of the country, which, in a typically late 60s approach, allows fiction to be estranged through documentary methods, presenting the magnificent and rarely seen genre of political existentialism.

If the well-known cliché that painting is the art of addition and photography is the art of reduction holds true, then this film proves that cinematography is the art of unifying opposites: the layering of unnatural makeup on both female and male faces and thus their symbolic hypocrisy is perfectly supported by a natural yet "artificially" composed, meaningful and essential camera, which, with its zooms, allows the characters' faces to emerge against a reduced, often monochromatic background. In fact, an empty background... The synthesis of a swollen dream of an unrecognized drag queen - who passes dreams off as reality - with a "new wave" intermezzo of a dream of one of the characters, which is entirely shot in detail on an empty background of one's destiny, gradually engulfing all the others. And the viewer. But there is not only pessimism here, as this film seems to be growing and surpassing its background: a small illusory world of the stage of the drag show - a small town and its little people - a small French-speaking province in the flood of the big world. A big world that, however, encloses us in brackets and allows us to glimpse through a truly feminized and bittersweet sympathetic eye into the great little histories of ordinary and less ordinary lives.

The slow birth of civil surrealism or a woman's body as a landscape, in which streams of antidepressants flow as contrasting as the wild landscape of Canada shared by an Indian and a nun at the same time. A subtle counterpoint absorbed throughout the film between prevailing realism and hints of magical realism, which suggests, hints, prepares, and possibly symbolizes through various misplaced objects (rats, parts of figurines, a magician) - the dissected body of a modern human being is composed in the process of perfectionization into an artificial doppelgänger, in the process of indirect proportionality, the inverse product of which is the implosion of the mind and the life of a real person: it is possible to partly agree with the character of the sculptor claiming that the only beauty is in stiffness, immobility (hence death), but at the same time not forgetting that the film itself equals movement and here the movement was captured very aptly: slow movement from healthy to insane, from real to surreal.