JFL

On a literal level, Birdman offers an exhibitionist treatise on an aging actor and his effort to gain recognition. However, this film provides a much more interesting view as an audio-visual illustration of inner confusion, when the mind of an egocentric tries in vain to overcome its own self-centredness, touchiness and conceitedness, as well as the fear of being insignificant, the need for gratification and all kinds of doubts, which are countered only by eruptions of the ego. The narrative correspondingly reaches for a parallel with the theatre stage as well as the offstage space, because this inner strife is ultimately nothing more than an ostentatious performance of self-exploration, surfing on the waves between angry hurt and an exaggerated sense of self-importance. The film brilliantly depicts these fluctuations as a frenetic concertina book of tense scenes ranging from bombastic acting showcases to literal metaphors that reveal their interconnectedness with multimedia images of socio-cultural stereotypes. The film thus superbly illustrates how every person sees themselves as the hero of their own spectacularly melodramatic ego-narrative constructed on the basis of internalised impressions of pop culture. Birdman is superficial, bombastic and shallow, but not necessarily meaningless. Kitsch, stereotypes, affectation and quirks are its water of life, in which it not only swims, but – like a synchronised swimmer – provides a grandiose spectacle. Iñárritu did not create just an overly sophisticated yet otherwise shallow story about the road to fame. He created a meta-midcult film that illustrates the illusory and egocentric nature of the stories that society feeds to us and that we figuratively create for ourselves. The uplifting nature to which the narrative aspires is as false and self-delusional as the subtitle “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”. As a formalistic construct created intentionally for the purpose of eliciting reactions from viewers, the film itself is a denial of ignorance – just as the ego does not rise above everything and itself, but only elevates itself above others.

A good film doesn’t need any added carnival attractions like 4DX. The Visitors is so powerful in its excessive vulgarity and physicality that viewers feel that they smell the farts, hear the burps and experience the other bodily functions of the characters.

The vision of a film as a Gesamtkunstwerk, i.e. a complete work of art, an uncompromising vision that’s ruthless, unreasonable, disjointed, skewed and thus total, absorbing and fascinating. This film combines the aesthetics and techniques of modern theatre, music videos and the entire historical tradition of expressive symbolist cinema from Fellini to Kusturica and many others in a deluge of saturated colours with contemporary dynamics and a brilliant analogue rendering of metaphors, while works of art and installations are transformed into props and symbols pulsing with life. The only relatively recent domestic film that comes to mind for comparison is the more ponderous Menandros & Thaïs from 2016 (though I’m not an authority and I’d be happy to be proven wrong). Unlike that film’s poetic ambition to be an innovative retelling of an old myth, Amerikánka puts forth a heartfelt effort to touch viewers with an amalgam of life stories and their attendant emotions, hopes, disappointments, struggles, rage and fleeting illusions. With an open mind and fresh eyes, it works fantastically. I am thankful that we can have such films that tenaciously take their own path and that are such a joy to fall in love with.

For Kubrick, this wasn’t about making a standard horror movie with causally plotted fantastical elements. On the contrary, he presents to viewers a devastating metaphor for a pathological toxic relationship resembling and shrouded in the classic forms of the genre. Of course this adaptation irritated Stephen King, since he had drawn the story in his novel (and in a number of others) from his own demons, or rather from his own essence. He unsurprisingly wanted Jack Torrance, as his alter ego, to gain the reader’s sympathy due to the fact that Jack suffers and struggles with those demons. In this case, such an “inner demons” comparison is fundamentally meaningful in its inherent buck-passing. And that is where King and Kubrick differ. Whereas the author has the protagonist struggle with the external forces of evil, Kubrick seemingly uses the supernatural elements as a metaphor for the personalities of the characters and the dynamics of their relationship. The motif of stifling chauvinism and a toxic yet outwardly orderly relationship in The Shining is also wonderfully incorporated into Kubrick’s characteristic image compositions. While the frequently heard mythology of the great directors requires highlighting filmmakers working with a widescreen format, Kubrick preferred the 1.66:1 format starting with A Clockwork Orange. On the one hand, he was led to that by his desire to protect his compositions from lateral cuts in video releases, but mainly the narrower screen in combination with the right lens enabled him to create aesthetically imposing symmetrical compositions centred in the middle of the screen. In The Shining, the perfectly framed images in combination with the precise production design and the tense acting of the central couple create their own unnaturalness and the omnipresence of an almost terrifyingly oppressive atmosphere, which brings out the inner tension from behind the tidy façade. Over the course of the narrative, the camerawork maintains an identical approach; only the characters’ façade gradually crumbles. Kubrick thus expresses that the rising madness is not coming from the outside, but rather that it has always been present on the inside. After all, the film’s most unsettling moments include one of the first scenes, when Wendy is speaking with the doctor and unconsciously reveals more about the dynamics of her relationship with Jack than she would have wanted.

As in the case of the other genres in which Kubrick has worked, his “war movie” ignores the usual techniques, formulas and motifs of the given category and focuses instead on the inner basic principles at their core. Other war and anti-war films put forth glorified or, conversely, disturbing scenes that adhere to the usual imperatives of “War turns boys into men and men into heroes” or “War is hell, or downright evil”. In Kubrick’s view, however, these are overly banal simplifications. Though the narrative of Full Metal Jacket is set in the environment of the Vietnam War, it addresses timeless themes. Kubrick is not interested in the individual soldiers, but in the war and its most destructive weapons, which, however, do not have any triggers or magazines. He explores the military indoctrination machine, depicts it as institutionalised radicalisation and exposes vocabulary and vulgarity as its most powerful tools. It has famously been said that the pen is mightier than the sword, but as R. Lee Ermey demonstrates to us with devastating effect, that statement cannot stand up to the verbal machine gun fired by a drill sergeant. Those who say that military service and war strip people of their personalities and transforms individuals into killing machines may be right, but only on the surface. With chilling dreadfulness, Kubrick makes it clear that the aim of basic training is not to erase a soldier’s personality, but to reprogramme it with extreme macho values, which make such a powerful impression on young men because they draw attention and radiate an impression of strength and self-confidence. The two halves of the film are not only connected, but also absolutely integral to each other. In fact, they do not show any simple “hard in training, easy on the battlefield” attitude, but rather the process by which soldiers adopt and amplify implemented patterns of behaviour as their own. During training, the soldiers do not learn only how to handle their weapons, but also how to project masculinity in its most extreme form. The subsequent episodic scenes set in Vietnam have a common denominator in the macho peacocking, when it all comes down to not losing face in front of one’s adversary, which means one-upping each other with the greatest excess possible. Fittingly (until the end), the adversary is no one in particular from the other side of the conflict, but just more Americans indoctrinated into the ideology of machismo. Feathers are initially ruffled only with vulgarities, but that soon becomes insufficient and the need to demonstrate dominance leads to real excesses, cruelties and atrocities. By pointing out the connection between indoctrination and the performance of machismo with its verbal manifestations, Kubrick created a disturbing and unfortunately timeless work. Though Full Metal Jacket is set in a training camp and war zone, the same tools are being used today in the macho indoctrination and radicalisation of young men on social media.

A journey through the countryside in a car as the representation of a notional map of a mind tormented by the issue of suicide in a culture that forbids it. And a minimalistic film that is disarmingly poetic and reaches far beyond the simple summation of the previous sentence not only because it knows that it is just a film.

A film about absolutely nothing, yet it contains everything, including an extraordinarily complicated mythology that clearly not even its creator understands. Spirit Riser is the product of unlimited creative freedom; an audio-visual work like a lanced boil from which gushes bits of genius, irrationality, coarseness, incompetence, progressivism, boorishness, iconoclasm, derision, foolishness and dreaming. If the classic Hollywood style strived to ensure that the form drew as little attention to itself as possible, here we find ourselves in an evil parallel universe, where everything in the film elicits incredulous amazement. If you have enough willing friends who don’t doubt your vision/illusion for even a second, you won’t bother to take into account such useless little things like logic and continuity. What does it matter if the shot and counter-shot of the dialogue scenes are in different places and at different times of day, or if one of the actors shaves off his beard in the course of filming? You still have Michael Madsen’s voiceover, the demon-possessed Statue of Liberty and God played by queer icon Kate Bornstein. After all, the title of her book Queer and Pleasant Danger could have been an ideal subtitle for Spirit Riser with its fresh fluidity and openness to absolutely anything that goes far beyond the boundaries of all conventions.

Among other things, Dead Mail elicits a feeling of fondness in how it conscientiously uses an image filter and framing in an attempt to conceal its modest roots, which it never fully accomplishes because of its poor production resources. But that only adds more points in favour of this magnificent indie thriller, which serves to confirm the axiom that the basis of a good film is a meticulous screenplay. The makers of Dead Mail get by with a few characters and settings, around which they build an ingeniously layered narrative in which every small detail is put to good use. And that includes the whole fetishistic synthesiser storyline, which is superbly incorporated into the narrative and the building of the atmosphere and suspense, while also serving to present the characters. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s best subtle thrillers, Dead Mail is entertaining in the way it tells its story, superbly presents various perspectives on a particular situation and, mainly, precisely yet unpretentiously lays the groundwork for suspenseful sequences in which viewers hold their breath along with the investigators, victims and perpetrators.

A film of another time and style than that to which viewers are accustomed today – punk, rough, provocative and unrestrained, which also refers to its creative grasp, formalistic approach and themes. It is certainly great that today’s queer films don’t have to be so uncompromising and nonconformist as the works of the New Queer Cinema, because the barricades in the struggle for recognition and presence in the public space and discourse have been shifted significantly. This also inevitably gives rise to the fact that My Own Private Idaho has by now lost something of what made it noteworthy. At the same time, however, it thus rather steps outside the framework of the duality of hypocritical expediency and chaotic impulsive randomness and comes across as a sequence of atypically rendered scenes and narratives heading in unpredictable directions. The Falstaff storyline is intertwined with a treatise on inner turmoil, rootlessness, apathy and hidden painful emotions. Though My Own Private Idaho is essentially a road movie, it is rarely in motion, which is indicative of its low-budget roots, but also reflects its theme of aimlessness and searching for oneself.

Whereas CGI spectacles have long since lost the ability to amaze us, here a green screen in combination with a group of friends in plush-toy costumes again and again becomes a field of limitless possibilities. The hyperactive genius Ryland Tews and his up-for-anything partner Mike Cheslik revive the tradition of both live-action and animated slapstick by means of RPG narrative formulas, DIY creativity and their own trademark mix of deadpan absurdity and frantic physicality. I tremendously enjoyed the way in which this film’s narrative established individual elements and is built on simple gags that subsequently vary, intensify and multiply with video-game combinatorics. Hundreds of Beavers is a loose, unrestrained work that deliberately avoids compromises in relation to current narrative, style and production norms. It thus also provides tremendous and unflagging pleasure both as a series of gags and as a creative, production and aesthetic challenge in which one enjoys particular madcap ideas and the fact that someone came up with them at all, as well as the way they are rendered using a full range of both sophisticated and primitive techniques (from camera angles and editing, through various forms and combinations of live-action scenes, animation and post-production tricks, to the actual physical placement of the actors). _____ Hundreds of Beavers was a case of love at first sight that grew from intense infatuation into a serious union. It was perhaps inevitable that one day I would lose my mind and fall so madly in love with a film that if my effort to persuade my acquaintances among the established distributors failed, then I would push it into Czech cinemas myself, i.e. with the funds of the Aero cinema in Prague and with the help of many particular people, as well as with the tremendous cooperation of the aforementioned established distributors. I can’t imagine a better film for such an undertaking, because in this case the only windmill at which it was necessary to tilt was the mere conviction of what kind of films work in Czech distribution and how they should be promoted and distributed. Though Hundreds of Beavers is not a film for everyone, it still easily wins the hearts of a large subset of film enthusiasts. Its charm, weirdness and distinctiveness are the strengths on which it was possible to undertake atypical distribution. We intentionally did not do standard promotion and instead relied on word-of-mouth, because this kind of film lives an all the more intense life when viewers are allowed to discover it for themselves and shower it with their enthusiasm. That’s exactly what happened when reports from abroad and the first enthusiastic responses resulted in a sold-out premiere at The Shockproof Film Festival and brought hundreds of viewers to additional screenings at Aero. In the following weeks, viewers’ interest was sustained by exclusive screening at Aero and Bio Oko, whereupon Aerofilms put the film in broad distribution. Then came the second wave with outdoor summer cinemas, at which Beavers became a firm fixture, and interest surged further with Tews’s presence at the Summer Film School festival. This summarisation of the film’s journey to Czech viewers is meant to highlight the fantastic potential and unique quality of Hundreds of Beavers, as well as to pay tribute to its viewers. I want to thank all of you for making this obsessive thought and crazy idea into a great, joyful experience.