Masseba

This heavyweight parable about human society and the monstrousness of power was made as a cryptic artistic project under totalitarianism, but it wasn’t released to cinemas until after the revolution, which was to its detriment. What under communism would have ended up being a mythical project by an artist suffering under the yoke of totalitarianism was suddenly transformed into a work that had nothing to offer viewers in the newly established democracy in which anyone could boldly say whatever they wanted. It thus became all the more clear that Masseba was essentially an exemplary case of being artsy-fartsy. From today’s perspective, the film is a curiosity of its time, but from the viewer’s perspective, it would have come off as didactic and naïve if it were a fifteen-minute short; as a feature-length film, it is mainly just unbearably tiresome. (2013-08-19)