Dionysos

The significance of this work cannot be overestimated - it is the symbolic beginning of the so-called direct cinema approach enabled by advancements in film technology (light cameras, improved options for synchronizing and recording sound on location), and it still influences the concept of documentary filmmaking today. In conjunction with cinema-vérité (which, however, direct cinema should not be completely mistaken for, as anyone who has seen representatives from both movements knows), it brought about a revolutionary change in capturing reality that did not end in the 1960s but must still be fought for again and again. Therefore, even Primary is not just a piece of history today. The utopian and inspiring core of direct cinema lies in the following: the attempt to dissolve the camera and the documentarian in the observed object through pure observation; capturing a pure and unrestricted presentation of individuals/society externally; capturing unfolding reality through transparent observation, but doing so gently, like catching a butterfly, without any external interventions that disrupt the smooth flow of unreflected reality. The author of the documentary only appears on the scene in the editing process - the camera and editing as the creators of the film. Handshakes, fake smiles, endless car rides, rows of people waiting for rehearsed jokes - these are the truths of politics that only direct cinema was able to discover.

The introductory spectacle: the police on stage beating people in order to protect them in reality, but whom?; a simulated revolt and virtual emancipation accepted as a gift from the outstretched hands of the consumer idol. The same gesture serves the same function, whether as a (marketing) symbol of rebellion calling for participation, or as a sign of mourning and return to humility/conformity = Watkins shows that the essence and meaning lie not so much in the content as in the form that people allow themselves to be led by (existentialism and the Moscow theater as a form for advertising walking apples; a rock & roll band playing for teenagers and the Lord himself; the relationship between the stage and the audience, the idol and the spectator, serves both fascism and late capitalism, etc.) /// Although the film was made based on someone else's work, Watkins, of course, couldn’t deny his alienating documentary style: even though the film is at its core a "normal" fiction, Watkins' genius is demonstrated in the perfectly alienating voice-over in the cathartic scene - at the moment when ordinary (consumer) films would celebrate the regained subjectivity and nature of the main character, Watkins ironically and coldly overlays it with external impersonal statements, thus relativizing her effort to break free from the clutches of the public from which she has become estranged. /// A critique of the film: Was it necessary to be so explicit and didactic at times?

“Renaissance collections aimed to show the connection between natural and artistic forms, the transitions between the wonders of nature and human creations. The Kunstkomora thus presented a vivid image of the world in its multiplicity and breadth, according to natural philosophy and magic principles, that "everything is contained in everything" (omnia ubique). (Description in Umprum) Greenaway's films are this kunstkomora, in which the microcosm of the author's artistic vision burdened by so many internal images through a dark room is projected into the macrocosm of baroque overflowing mise-en-scène, a kunstkomora that wants to say everything and indeed says everything: one film image is not enough, the superposition of images duplicates the leafing through of a book, which is the definitive inventory of all knowledge - in Greenaway's work, films need to be seen as a natural transition from book to film and vice versa, as writing and knowledge can be aestheticized at any moment and visuality can always be absorbed by the alchemy of words which "was at the beginning" of everything and from which the author's mannerism also arose, in which the sole essence of the divine demiurge - the director - manifests not only through the seven liberal arts but through all artistic forms within the reach of classical spirit.

Since I experienced Vyškov almost at the same time, albeit in a shortened form of a one-and-a-half-month basic training course for Active Reserves, instead of three months for future Voluntary Military Training, although 85% of the course content was the same, I can confirm that the documentary is, within its limits, very faithful. A time machine transported me a few years back and also to the 70s when the main part of the Vyškov complex was built. Of course, the film could have been more artistic, more critical, more contemplative, and it would have suited it better to be a sincere raw cinema vérité.

A story that demonstrates that sometimes fiction can be the truth of reality and that the night-time alcoholic retreat into the world of fiction can be a form of therapy for the soul and a way (or at least an attempt) to come to terms with one's own past mistakes. Reality offers the old man nothing but a false game of pretense, which we, as viewers, only fully see through thanks to our previous immersion into the old man's imagination. Within it, he can seek revenge on his (cold is a weak word) son (the great Bogarde) and attempt to reconcile with past traumas. Yet what surprises the viewer is often the rather humorous approach. Nevertheless, it is a depressing story about a man losing control over his body, his loved ones, and ultimately, his memory and imagination. The characters on the screen are largely presented as determined by an external power (the will of the story's old writer-narrator), reminiscent of Resnais' subsequent film My American Uncle, where the characters are determined physiologically or psychosocially.

Esthetic philosopher Boris Groys knew that the utopianism of communism lay in the attempt to replace the power of capital with the power of politics, which is nothing more than words - all power of discourse. This film is precisely the best dream of the performative power of speech: slogans are not templates, but a medium that brings events to life on the screen - it truly requires the viewer's attention to the moments when the characters' speeches generate a new, disjointed narrative sequence, symbolically connecting the jumpy editing with the inevitably unnatural/violent leap from immaterial word to material action. The true meaning of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" lies precisely here, and the Yugoslav hippie communists of the fourth way - the path between capitalism, Soviet state socialism, and Chinese Maoism of cultural revolution - try to find the mythical origin of phrases here, their real embodiment in existing political regimes has (?) profaned them forever. How else than to once again transform phrases into actions - but differently, newly, disjointedly: both in relation to previous attempts and to previous film art. Why couldn't Godard's Week-End become the basis for a new kind of film, just as Lenin's turn of the helm became the basis for a new concept of societies: that capitalism ultimately triumphed and suffocated the bad alongside the good that emerged in the field of real socialism and cinema Marxism, is nothing but a sad legacy of the present, which will make this film incomprehensible to many contemporary viewers. And this is characteristically true for a film that is so ironically critical of the former real socialism (albeit constructively!) that many anti-communists would envy: another example of how the baby is thrown out with the bathwater...

A Film excerpt from the life of nine-year-old Michael, who spends his childhood between school and home, where only his mother - a local prostitute - waits for him. The formal aspects of the film correspond to the monotonous life of the boy - long shots, minimization of time ellipses, slow pace, and repetitive shooting and arrangement of shots in the same recurring situations. We are confronted with the gloomy adolescence of a child, who nevertheless lives or tries to live a normal life of children's games and dreams. Personally, this film reminded me of a one-year older film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Akerman, in which there is an identical distribution of characters and their roles (although the director's focus on one of them differs) and, above all, a similar (although much more pronounced in Akerman’s film) formal process. Saless' film is very subtle and unspectacular, with meanings being casually presented - for example, the role of money in the lives of West German children, prostitutes, traders, and pensioners.

The ebb and flow in the marital relationship of two characters - supplemented by the overlooked third character, the Italian people - expressed in a rather non-plot concept through precisely sensed interactions between the two English spouses and Italian culture, people, and of course, between each other. The joint arrival in Italy, the early internal and external separation where each then follows a different but essentially similar path (the husband gets rid of his cynicism and "English" seriousness = coldness, while the wife gets rid of her numbing romanticism), until they finally reunite in an embrace amidst the lazy, etc., but lively Italian procession. This ending (which was supposed to be more ambiguous according to Rossellini, although I also perceive it more as a "happy ending") is preceded by a series of scenes in which this ending is naturally prepared for us. Unfortunately, due to the brevity of the film, these "explanatory" scenes quickly follow one after another, and therefore I didn't always have a subtle existential feeling from the film, as I felt that they "only" fit into the scheme. In this regard, Antonioni is a few years ahead.

The ability of some Japanese art masterpieces of that time to transition from subjective to societal, from intimate examination of oneself and personal relationships to universal and thus political, i.e., simply from existential to critical, is truly fascinating (Teshigahara - The Pitfall, Oshima - Death by Hanging). The first quarter: Antonioni in Japan, undoubtedly and flawlessly - a man lost to himself, his family, and characters wandering in a dehumanized world of geometric shapes of modern architecture in its perfectly smooth, rectangular structure, negating any natural place for humans. But Yoshida goes further - memory, the past, and the future transform the concrete stage of modern individual purification into the purification of the political individual, fighting for their ideals. A purgatory of convictions, dreams, and illusions in which heroes are trapped by the past, present, and future, and in which they can experience their own failure, weakness, unhappiness, and guilt - and lose their illusions, currently, almost seamlessly (flashbacks and flashforwards do it for them). A dead end of political choice, which is inevitably linked to the choice of life. /// Perfectly sharp and regular framing of shots often locks the characters in a central composition from which there is no escape, just like from an allegorical purgatory. All-consuming surfaces of black and white, steel and concrete, futile efforts.

The curtain rises, the frame anchors, the screen expands, the perspective focuses, the viewer looks - from an unchanging angle on matter that knows only transformation, as if the viewer of this present-day mental “Minecraft” saw digital Muratti 30s cigarettes marching by and pondered the dilemma of whether this thematic and constantly bending and newly rutting monism of audiovisual matter refers to the original code of the film god, whose every step has been written into all future since the beginning of experimental film, and every color, material, and sound transformation only follows a brilliant divine plan, or if we are watching the aleatorics of self-producing matter lost in the randomness of the universe, whose random generation of meaningless patterns duplicates the history of film and humanity as the interplay of absurdity and pure childish joy from moving senseless audiovisual pleasures - and nothing more. Nothing less.