Arise, despised of the world...

Writer and film critic Aleksandar Bečanović has selected for you five films that illustrate some of the dimensions of the leftist spirit and enthusiasm - in the author's range from King Vidor to Godard and the young Bertolucci

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"Before the Revolution", 1964, Bernardo Bertolucci, Photo: Youtube/Screenshot
"Before the Revolution", 1964, Bernardo Bertolucci, Photo: Youtube/Screenshot
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

Our Daily Bread (1934) - King Vidor

Ideological changes in Vidorov opus, which, however, did not make his work contradictory but plausibly polyvalent, are perhaps the most clearly visible - although they were most radically promoted in The Fountainhead (Rebel, 1949) - in the transition that the hero of the same name, John Sims, made from The Crowd (Heap, 1928) in Our Daily Bread: the ideals of Americana (who understand populism not as depersonalization, but as the glorification of the 'man from the crowd') have been transformed so that they are given through open socialist engagement.

In that sense, Our Daily Bread is one of the most unexpected left-wing films ever to come out of Hollywood: Vidor financed this production himself, which, with an enthusiasm only a few Bolshevik projects reached, propagated the collectivization of the country in the face of an all-out depression after the economic collapse of the late twenties. At the urging of The Sims (Tom Keene), a group of former farmers and various craftsmen come together to form a utopian community in which everyone has their own function, from farmers to violin teachers.

The culmination of this epic, however, proves with pure visual dynamics that Vidor's direction is always above politics, even though it is largely based on it: the collective effort to bring water to the dry cornfields has as much ideological as religious intonation.

Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964) - Bernardo Bertolucci

While his debut The dry commare (Hair of Death, 1962) was realized on Pasolini's terrain, Prima della rivoluzione but rather denotes essential marking Bertolucci's obsessive left-wing themes and fundamental stylistic preferences. If the director's intractable 'schizophrenia' is between 'extreme', status quo and revolution, then the author's second film gives that dichotomy the necessary discursive grounding, as well as the numerous implications of such a state of affairs are emphasized with convincing dramatic ideological power and visual sophistication.

Prima della rivoluzione strikingly depicted the fundamental hiatus in the director's oeuvre, which sometimes appeared as a temporary contradiction, a deadlock that could be overcome, and sometimes as a metaphysical impasse. Bertolucci's opus is thus thematically most deeply determined by conflict, division, the structural impossibility of synthesis: the opposing forces in the conflict prevent reaching an acceptable solution that would resolve the political-sexual knot.

The desire for change, even more so for a revolutionary redescription of the subject, the aspiration for the radicalization of a worldview position that would be manifested in practice, meet and intersect with equally strong feelings of concern and fear before the potential of a reversal, a different social position. Bertolucci's hero is torn between ideological conviction and concrete application of abstract principles.

Csillagosok, katonák (Red and White, 1967) - Miklós Jancsó

The situation in Russia in 1919 is more than confused: the confrontation between the "whites" and the "reds" looks more like an unreasonable eruption of violence than a war in which the opposing sides have clearly drawn the front line. For the director in Csillagosok, katonák war is chaos, a senseless sequence of events where even the occasional episode that may seem like evidence of the still existing order (when white soldiers kill their comrade because he tried to rape a woman) is very quickly denied either by a new escalation of evil or by a descent into absurdity (as in the scene where the nurses are humiliated by being changed into aristocratic dresses and made to dance the waltz).

Naturalism is denied in order to introduce ideology, politics, mythology: even though it is excessively nature-oriented, Jancsó's long shot is too discursive to (and) attempt a mimetic reconstruction.

Everyone must obey the rhythm of the camera's dance: horizontal orientation and orientation Jancsov the frame - metapoetically, it is the embodiment of the director's leftist agenda, a movement that has no vertical foothold - cannot provide the third dimension opened by the metaphysical focus, but in turn his figures in the landscape create a geometric arrangement and arrangement of space that provide an abstract systematization and a mathematical understanding of the movement that makes History in textonic disorders.

Koshikei (Death by hanging, 1968) - Oshima Nagisa

Left-wing reconstruction from Nihon no yoru to kiri (Night and fog in Japan, 1960) u Koshikei turns into re-creation, which not only changes the author's rhetorical position (serious intonation inevitably turns into humorous), but also redefines the quality Oshima critical engagements: the resignation from the first achievement becomes a furious realization of the absurdity in the second.

It is about 'improved' allegoricality, about the director's new resoluteness mise-en-scène which notes the disproportion between Law (its literal application) and life. That sudden disproportion in Koshikei means that the fundamental laws are disturbed, so it remains to mark the effects of that slippage, which are as dark as they are comic and vice versa: after the execution of the Korean R (Do-yun Yu) survives but suffers from amnesia, so police and court officials are forced to restore his memory so that the execution can be carried out once more.

The fact that the representatives of the Law begin to play (negative) roles from R's life and thus take upon themselves both his desires and guilt is not only a means for the director to establish the complicity of the system and the criminal individual, but also to highlight his discursive treatment in the foreground : for Oshima, the ultimate degree of realistic interpellation is reflected in the process that leads from reconstruction to deconstruction.

If Kieślowski's sentence of death penalty in Short film about driving (Short film about killing, 1988) is reflected in the heightened 'weight' of the element of reality (the equal shock of both 'bad' and 'good' murder), then Oshima's insightful denunciation consists in aggressively demolishing the entire system: the trajectory in Koshikei which goes from documentary to black comedy to 'melodrama' is an expression of the director's ideologization of the film form.

Le Vent d'est (The Wind from the East, 1970) - Dziga Vertov Group (Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin)

Regardless of his numerous 'distractions' when he is with Gorin radio in the frame Dziga Vertov Group, even in that period movies Godard can be considered as part of a violent dialectic that tries to deal with internal contradictions in the very distrust of the distinguishing power of the film image, in the imaginary space created by it (and which in principle 'falsifies' a class-antagonized society by offering comforting syntheses, comforting 'seams' '). All of this can be additionally interpreted by the director's Calvinist origin, that is, radical Protestant iconoclasm motivated by faith in the word, in a logocentric description of the world.

So in 'agitprop' Le Vent d'est - for whom he is always favorable towards Godard, but still confused Moravia said that 'an endless Marxist-baroque sermon is enclosed between quotation marks of frenzied didacticism' - the image becomes static, it only generally 'illustrates' what is 'taking place' on the soundtrack, the expression is 'flat' and approaches the zero point: the negation of cinematography is such that in what remains, there is nothing to see.

It is interesting that the recovery path is (unconsciously) elaborated in All is well (Everything is fine, 1972) which is postulated as a love film, while the construction of the couple takes place precisely in terms of bourgeois emotional alienation, with the help of two big (leftist-oriented) stars, Jane Fonda i Yves Montand.

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