Farewell to Autumn

Admittedly, making fun of Polish people (or, more specifically, American Polacks) is an old favorite family pastime for me, so, in a sense it is kind of hard for me to take anything Polish seriously yet I cannot deny that the perennially changing Slavic nation has produced a couple obscure geniuses like novelist and poet Stanisław Feliks Przybyszewski, who was associated with both the decadent naturalistic school and Symbolism movement and who sired the classic occult text Die Synagoge des Satan (1897) aka The Synagogue of Satan. A comrade of Teutonic Satanic Renaissance man Hanns Heinz Ewers, who apparently moved around in the same occult circles, Przybyszewski mainly wrote in German since Poland was still part of Prussia at the time and he was certainly one of the most decadent literary figures of his time, but his literary perversity and innate ‘Polishness’ pales in comparison to the great Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (aka ‘Witkacy’), who was indubitably the most important artistic Renaissance man of his nation during the first half of the 20th-century and whose death via suicide upon the Soviet invasion was quite symbolic of the death of both aesthetic and individualistic freedom as a result of communist takeover. Although a decidedly debauched libertine dandy who loved devouring drugs and genitals from members of both sexes (though some scholars doubt his homoerotic excursions), Witkacy was a pan-Slavic nationalist and cultural pessimist of the quasi-Spenglerian sort who wisely feared that Mongol hordes would invade and colonize the Occident and turn it into a cultural wasteland plagued by collective slavery and aesthetic sterility. Indeed, such was the central theme of his third and arguably best novel, Insatiability (1930) aka Nienasycenie, which was adapted into the rather disappointing 2003 dystopian film of the same name directed by Wiktor Grodecki. Directed by a dubious dude who has dedicated his entire filmmaking career to creating hyper homoerotic films about underage teenage male prostitutes like Not Angels But Angels (1994) and Mandragora (1997), Grodecki’s pathetically politically correct Insatiability completely sanitizes Witkacy’s work by turning Mongol hordes into Aryan hordes and focusing almost entirely on the perverse sexual themes of the source novel despite the fact that they are more or less only incidental to the story. Luckily, at least one of Witkacy’s novels, Pożegnanie jesieni (1927) aka Farewell to Autumn, was adapted into one fairly worthwhile film (notably, some of his plays were also adapted into worthwhile works, including the bizarre arthouse horror flick W starym dworku czyli niepodleglosc trójkatów (1984) aka In an Old Manor House or The Independence of Triangles directed by Andrzej Kotkowski). Made not long after the long awaited death of communism, Pożegnanie jesieni (1990) aka Farewell to Autumn directed by Polish auteur and opera director Mariusz Trelinski (Lagodna aka A Gentle Woman, Egoisci aka The Egoists) is an insanely tragicomedic and innately iconoclastic indictment of the Polack aristocracy and the Catholic Church that depicts sexual degeneracy of the hetero and homo sort, drug addiction and alcoholism, racial and cultural deracination, and scheming seductive Jewesses, among other things, as the sort of vices that plagued the upper-classes and caused them to be destroyed with next to nil effort by the bolsheviks during the revolution. A delectably dystopian piece of culturally pessimistic philosophical celluloid disguised as a raunchy black comedy, Trelinski’s film is probably the most decidedly degenerate and aberrantly action-packed anti-communist flick ever made, thus making for a true enigma of celluloid history and a truly respectable tribute to Witkacy. 

 Opening with a tribute to its source writer Witkacy, which describes him as a “Philosopher and erotomaniac…Extravagant dandy, painter and writer” whose “works were compared to lunatic dreams,” Farewell to Autumn immediately sets a tone of absurdism that will ultimately help the viewer be able to more easily swallow all the senseless tragedy, misery, sexual dysfunction, cultural decay, nihilistic excess, and patent pessimism that will follow. As the film proudly reveals in regard to its firmly anti-commie stance, “It is a tongue-in-cheek analysis of society on the verge of destruction. It is the story about the chaos which brought to us 100 million inhabitants of Central Europe…the fate of being slaves of only one and “rightful” idea: The communism.” The lead protagonist of the film is a debauched bisexual aristocrat of sorts named Atanazy Bazakbal aka ‘Tazio’ (Jan Frycz) and he is torn between marrying a beauteous blonde Jewess who certainly does not look like a Jewess named Hela Bertz (Maria Pakulnis) and a somewhat banal blonde named Zofia Oslabedzka (Grazyna Trela). More than anything, Tazio seems to resent Zofia as reflected in his remarks to her, “…I hate you with pure, beautiful hate…And because of only that I want to marry you,” thus reflecting the protagonist's bizarre and seemingly sadomasochistic psyche. When Tazio goes to visit Hela at her yarmulke-sporting father’s large mansion, he finds her in bed with a candy-ass Persian prince named Prepudrech (Leszek Abrahamowicz), so he kicks the effeminate blueblood out and begins pounding at what is left of the Hebraic girl’s hymen (she claims to be a virgin, but that is dubious to say the least).  During the middle of sex, Tazio randomly stops, complains “I can’t read Proust,” and then reveals to Hela that he is engaged to Zofia even though he is already engaged to her. After revealing his love for Zofia, Tazio grabs Hela’s pussy and passionately says to her that she is a “A rich, coarse, Jewish she-boor” and she absurdly replies “I am a virgin” even though she just screwed two different men in one night. Meanwhile, high-strung pansy Prince Prepudrech watches the two having sex outside while standing in the rain and screams at Tazio, “I will kill with no regrets. Like a dog, I will kill you.” Indeed, the next day, the two decadent aristocrats will duel for Hela’s hand in marriage. Meanwhile, Hela decides that she is going to convert to Catholicism, though she also considers converting to communism after Tazio leaves her sexually frustrated after failing to give her an orgasm, thus hinting that, contrary to what whack-jobs like Wilhelm Reich and useful idiots like Bernardo Bertolucci think, Marxism is born out of sexual discontent. 

 Undoubtedly, Hela’s rich father Belzebub Bertz (Henryk Bista) is a classic penny-pinching and morally vacant Jew à la Jud Süß who wants to auction off his baby girl to the highest bidder. When Daddy Bertz finds his daughter in bed with Prepudrech and she reveals her intention to marry the pussy Persian Prince, the old Talmud scholar gets angry and tells her he has chosen “two great marquises…Italian fascists” for her to marry (contrary to popular opinion, many Jews were originally involved with Italian fascism). After telling her father that she plans to convert to Catholicism and marry Prepudrech if he is not killed in the duel, Hela also attempts to coerce her father into converting, hilariously arguing, “Papa should do the same if only for business.” In a scene symbolic of how effeminate the aristocracy had become, both Tazio and Prince Prepudrech are incapable of properly using their firearms, with the latter even pathetically fainting like a little girl during the fairly absurd duel. Ultimately, the Prince gets lucky and shoots his comrade in the neck, though he survives. Naturally, Prepudrech and Hela and Tazio and Zofia marry in a large double wedding that is raided by overtly moronic and cartoonish communist revolutionaries who are eventually pacified after a charlatan priest comes out and waves a crucifix at them like they are vampires and they immediately cower like the collectivist-minded slaves that they are. As Papa Bertz accurately prophesizes during the wedding regarding his daughter and her three friends, “A terrible fate awaits those four.” After the wedding, a huge Dionysian party occurs where men openly perform cunnilingus on women right in front of everyone, debauched dames dance around naked while having champagne poured on their unclad bodies, and the two brides dance with one another in a highly eroticized lesbo fashion while simultaneously making threats to kill one another due to their mutual love for Tazio. As a piano player states in a melancholy fashion during all the debauchery, “We’ve reached the endpoint of bourgeois culture, which didn’t produce anything but doubt…in everything.” 

 Undoubtedly, Tazio is in doubt as to whether or not he married the right woman, as he clearly loves fierce femme fatale Hela, who tells him that he will have to fight for her if he truly wants her. Just like with the wedding, the party is raided by bands of indiscriminately murderous bolsheviks, but things get way more violent than before, with people being burned alive, shot, and run over with cars, among other things, though this does not ruin the protagonist's big day. Luckily, Tazio manages to make a great escape with the help of a friend on a motorcycle that is ultimately killed after getting his friends to safety. Instead of consummating his marriage with some honeymoon sex, Tazio pulls a Fassbinder and has sex with his middle-aged queer bud Jedrek instead of his wife on his wedding night.  Before engaging in cross-generational sodomy, Tazio and Jedrek make reference to Nietzsche, most notably Beyond Good and Evil, which the two believe they are engaging in. Since the Bolsheviks have taken over, all the young aristocrats are forced into exile and decide to take a train to Switzerland, but Tazio is a no show at the train station because of his hard hedonistic homo night of cocaine, cognac, and cocks. Naturally, old queen Jedrek acts quite melodramatic about Tazio leaving and complains to him, “Tazio, I have only you and even this you want to take away from me,” to which the protagonist equally melodramatically replies, “Jedrek, don’t make a demoniac woman out of me.” Ultimately, Jedrek refuses to follow to Tazio to Switzerland, but later has a change of heart at the last minute. Upon arriving at the station, a self-righteous commie officer attempts to stop Tazio and Jedrek from getting on the train and ultimately the latter is gunned down like a dog by some rabid red comrades, thus leaving the protagonist irreperably shattered. Naturally, things only get worse from there. 

 Upon arriving in the snowy Swiss Alps, Tazio becomes so completely and utterly disillusioned that he absurdly remarks, “Maybe Jedrek’s one minute of life after five grams of coke had more meaning than my whole life.” To make matters worse, Hebraic whore Hela starts a fling with a Nordic ski instructor named Erick Tvardstrup (Waldemar Kownacki), who has no respect for pessimistic artists and describes the protagonist as being sick in both the mind and body. On top of the fact that Erick is screwing his beloved kosher cock-tease, Tazio absolutely hates sportsman and hatefully states to the Swiss ski champ during a heated argument that he firmly believes that sports are ruining the entire world, adding, “Your records are blocking the place in the newspapers for the serious art critics…In the literary journals and others.” During the same conversation, Tazio also reveals his hatred for both communism and democracy, wisely stating, “I’m am getting furious with the lies of contemporary democracy. Equal start for everyone…What moronic idea is this? Justice based on equality, hierarchy is the foundation of sound social life […] What is coming – it is a grey end with unpredictable consequences. A wave is engulfing us which will destroy all our values.” Of course, the protagonist is in denial that everything is lost, including the entire way of life he once knew, or as Hela states to Tazio, “What values? Don’t make me laugh! Do you still pretend to believe that we still have anything left?” Since he is full of rage and hatred as a result of his new sorry lot in life as a wealthy aristocratic artist turned homeless/jobless writer, Tazio has no problem brutally murdering Erick after challenging him to a duel by driving a sword straight through his thick sportsman neck. Of course, Tazio and Hela eventually begin having sex again and Zofia loses her mind as a result of her new husband's flagrant unfaithfulness. After catching Hela riding Tazio’s cock during an almost satanically salacious scene where the Jewess truly resembles an evil and lecherous demoness, Zofia drops a lantern while waving a pistol and sets the hotel they are staying at on fire. Completely heartbroken, Zofia runs away into the snow and Tazio attempts to chase her down while sadistically teasing her by begging her to shoot him. Instead of shooting her unfaithful lover though, Zofia turns the gun on herself, thus blowing off the side of her face and killing her instantly.  Of course, Zofia probably opted to kill herself right in front of her husband to spite him, as well as to leave him with an undying sense of guilt for the rest of his already miserable life. When Tazio goes to see his wife’s corpse in the morgue, he is so shocked by Zofia's mangled corpse that he collapses. 

 Now a totally broke widower and persona non grata in Switzerland as a result of the dubious circumstances regarding his wife’s death, Tazio hits rock bottom and is forced to go back to his now new and hardly  improved ‘proletarianized’ Polack homeland where he attempts to whore himself out to a communist government official, who ultimately offers him a a less than glamorous job as an official government snitch. After breaking down to the communist official by pathetically stating, “The Future is yours and I accept that,” Tazio is told by the Bolshevik bureaucrat, “So, you accept that we use you and then throw you away? So, you agree to be fertilizer? I am speaking with you that way as you’re intelligent.” Ultimately, Tazio refuses to be a bolshevik bitch and turns down the less than dignified snitch job. Meanwhile, Tazio begins a short-lived love affair with a 26-year-old girl that looks exactly like his dead wife Zofia, albeit with brunette hair. When his new girlfriend begs him to take her away from Poland, Tazio must admit to both her and himself that he is now a broke bum with no future, somberly stating, “But I have nothing anymore. I have no place to go. I have nothing.” In the end, Tazio does some drunken hiking while foolishly attempting to cross the Polish border, but he is ultimately caught by some faceless commie comrades that are hiding in the woods and is forced to quote poetry by Russian octoroon negro Alexander Pushkin to prove his devotion to the oh-so precious proletariat. After botching Pushkin, Tazio is reduced to groveling like the most pathetic of slaves and declares that he is, “only shit, I am not a man anymore. Do you understand?” and the Bolsheviks respond to him by putting a bullet in his brain and disposing of his corpse in a river. The film concludes with the following narration, “September 18th, 1939 when Poland was invaded by German and Soviet armies, Witkiewicz committed suicide. For sure, he had been aware that his prophecy was fulfilling. The witnesses testified that his face was calm and relieved.” 

 Undoubtedly, one of the most intriguing aspects of Farewell to Autumn is that, unlike the source novel, it depicts Poland under the anti-human hell of Marxist slavery, with protagonist Tazio’s experience acting as a sort of “what if” scenario of what Witkacy might have faced had he not killed himself during the Soviet invasion. Ultimately, the message of the film is that you’re better off killing yourself than living under communism, with Tazio dying in an uniquely undignified fashion and Witkacy’s suicide being glorified as a heroic act committed by a man who would rather be a rotting corpse than a living Slav(e). As a pan-Slavic nationalist who served as an officer in the Imperial army of the Russian Empire during World War I and lived through the so-called Russian Revolution in Russia and was eventually elected political commissar of his regiment, Witkacy experienced the rotten genocidal fruits of bolshevism firsthand and knew exactly what was awaiting his beloved Poland if the Soviets took over.  As Harold B. Segel wrote in his essay Polish Romantic Drama in Perspective regarding the ultimate importance and validity Witkacy's pessimistic worldview, “Witkiewicz's Bleak prophesies of the future, unrelieved by the promise of messianic deliverance or the hope of an East-West, Catholic-Orthodox, Russian-Polish pan-Slavic symbiosis as advocated by Miciński, were fulfilled beyond even his darkest imagination by the events of World War II and its aftermath in Poland. The reality of totalitarian power in the postwar period from the consolidation of a Soviet-backed communist regime in the last 1940s down to the suppression in December 1981 of the most recent expression of the Polish desire for true independence and democratic freedoms – the Solidarity movement – provided a new impetus to the continuation of the debate over the Romantic past.” By Hebraic Hollywood standards, Farewell to Autumn could certainly be described as ‘anti-Semitic’ as the superlatively seductive Jewess character Hela is the most predatory of femme fatales and she has no loyalty to no one or nothing, as a pathological social-climber without roots or traditions who switches religions like wardrobes and who gets a kick out of getting her two lovers to try to kill one another. Of course, Hela’s father is no less flattering of a Jewish caricature as a seemingly incestuous miser who is willing to whore his daughter out to an Italian fascist count because he feels that it would be a great monetary investment for his family. Ironically, despite featuring subject matter and themes that would never be tolerated in Hollywood, Farewell to Autumn is easily the most accessible Polish film I have ever seen as a work that routinely mocks Hollywood genre conventions and classic works by Hitchcock (e.g. Vertigo). Indeed, despite its innate (meta)political overtones and quasi-philosophical essence, the film can also be enjoyed on a more superficial philistine level due to its incessant debauchery and dark humor. Not surprisingly, director Mariusz Trelinski won a number of awards for Farewell to Autumn, including the Andrzej Munk Prize and the Award of the Minister of Culture and Art of the Republic of Poland for best debut of the year. Undoubtedly, Trelinski’s film is unequivocally evidence that cutting edge, artful, and downright unhinged nationalistic films can be made that make the neo-vaudevillian comedies of Hollywood seem like infantile Freudian filmic feces. Indeed, as the work of not only Witkacy and H.H. Ewers, but also Gottfried Benn, Stefan George, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Ernst Jünger, Gabriele D'Annunzio, George Sylvester Viereck, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Fidus, and Yukio Mishima, among countless others, certainly demonstrates, the so-called “right-wing” used to always be at the forefront of all things delectably decadent and Farewell to Autumn is certainly a revival of this timeless tradition. 

-Ty E

Windows (1980)

Despite the fact that it is no secret that a remarkably large number of violent female criminals and prison inmates are estrogen-deprived bull-dykes, politically organized carpet-munchers feel the need to go out of their way to obscure this unspoken fact that all crime statistics confirm, as if it will compromise the fact that a good number of prominent feminist leaders and theorists are also emotionally glacial clit-hoppers. Indeed, heterosexual murderesses typically use more inconspicuous and passive-aggressive means of murder as the countless female serial killers who utilized arsenic and other poisons on their unwitting victims demonstrates.  Notably, even as far as back as 1980 way before the release of Paul Verhoeven’s lesbo-inciting neo-noir Basic Instinct (1992), organized gusset-nuzzlers become quite pissy over the pseudo-artsy-fartsy thriller Windows (1980) directed by Gordon Willis because of its depiction of a stuttering socially retarded bourgeois broad becoming the love obsession of a lethally loony lesbo with a rather raspy voice who is murderously jealous of men and their members. Starring the somewhat strange guidette Talia Shire—the sister of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and ‘cinematic wife’ of Rocky Balboa of Rocky fame—as a sexual assault victim who also happens to be the object of insane infatuation of a deranged dyke who hired a sleazy taxi driver to molest her beloved ‘friend’ so she can use an audio recording of the molestation as an extra intimate masturbation aid, the film is also notable for being the first and last film directed by cinematographer turned one-time auteur Gordon Willis, who was responsible for the striking cinematography of such classics as Coppola's The Godfather trilogy (1972-1990), as well as Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), among various other notable works. Featuring a vaguely arthouse style that seems to attempt to blend Hitchcock with the La Nouvelle Vague, Windows was a five time nominee of the less than coveted Golden Raspberry Award (including Willis for ‘Worst Director,’ which Kubrick was also absurdly nominated for his as a consequence of his work on the now-classic film The Shining (1980)) and was later more or less disowned by the director, though not because he succumbed to Sapphic outrage as one would probably suspect, especially nowadays where everyone is afraid to offend the pink gestapo and gynocentric misandrists. While the closest thing to a dyke equivalent to William Friedkin’s killer cocksucker cult classic Cruising (1980) in terms of its themes and the controversy surrounding its release, Windows ultimately feels like a shallow celluloid tourist guide of late-1970s/early-1980s NYC and its landmark that had the potential to be great but hardly goes anywhere and never rewards the viewer in any way. Indeed, the film is just another example of how great cinematographers oftentimes make ludicrously lousy film directors, hence why Willis never directed another single film but instead wisely opted to spend the rest of his career shooting works for other directors. Like an aimlessly voyeuristic Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) meets the aesthetics of Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) meets a retarded smidgen of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and a weak impotent Maniac (1980), the film is basically a less than seamlessly synthesized hodgepodge of cinematic references with a misused score by maestro Ennio Morricone that ultimately adds up to nothing aside from an unfortunate wasted attempt to make a classic cult film about a crazed killer carpet-muncher. 

 Emily Hollander (Talia Shire) is a fiercely frigid and annoyingly soft-spoken introverted female who in the process of divorcing her pansy intellectual husband and unbeknownst to her, her raspy-voiced crypto-dyke friend and fellow assumed Jewess friend Andrea Glassen (Elizabeth Ashley) is completely infatuated with her to the point where she is willing to kill to send a sort of insanely eccentric esoteric message to her beloved in the form of sleazy sexual violence. In fact, Andrea is so decidedly deranged that she hires a ludicrously low-class white trash taxi driver to sexually assault Emily so she can have an audio masturbation aid source of sorts. Notably, Andrea has the unsavory molester use a tape recorder while he defiles Emily so that she can have an amorous audio gift that keeps on giving. Indeed, Andrea gets all hot and bothered listening to Emily moan in pain and distress, thereupon demonstrating she is a sadomasochistic Sappho. As a strange and introverted woman who stutters when she gets afraid and even owns an entire bookshelf worth of books on how to train yourself to stop stuttering, Emily certainly seems like a sort of mousy carpet-muncher and her seeming growing resentment for men only makes matters worse, so it is ultimately a sort of blessing in disguise in the end that she becomes the victim of a fierce fairy lady. In a most arrogant fashion, Andrea even attempts to coerce Emily into not telling a police offer about the circumstances of her attack and attacker by arguing, “You don’t have to tell him anything, you know…He’s never going to catch who did it.” Andrea also has the taxi driver come by Emily’s place again so that she can pretend to be the protagonist's savior by smashing the molester’s arm into door when he attempts to break in while acting as if she is as brave and as strong as a man or something absurd like that. Naturally, after being maliciously molested, Emily unsurprisingly decides to move to a new apartment on the other side of town and also soon starts a romance with an uncommonly empathetic and handsome police detective named Bob Luffrono (Joe Cortese), thus causing Andrea to become all the more insane with bloodlust and murderous jealously. Of course, Andrea decides to secretly rent a flat across a bridge from Emily’s new apartment and uses a telescope to spy on her every move in a creepily voyeuristic Rear Window-esque fashion. While Andrea regularly goes to a psychiatrist to get much needed psychological help, her shrink Dr. Marin (Michael Lipton) seems to make her all the more deranged and resentful.  Indeed, no amounting of talking and confessing can calm Andrea's rising rug-muncher rage.

 In a rather convenient instance of happenstance, Emily ends up taking a taxi that is driven by her attacker whose name is Leonard Obecny (Rick Petrucelli) and who only seems to subconsciously realize that he is driving around his victim, who he makes the mistake of being not so nice to thus exposing the same exact gutter-grade tone of voice that he used when assaulting the protagonist.  Ultimately, Emily begins to realize that the taxi driver is her attacker after he gets mad at her and violently screams at her for calling him ‘Leonard,’ rather rudely remarking to her, “Why do you keep calling me Larry? Lawrence is my name. Larry is bullshit.”  After coercing the taxi driver into pulling over she can use a payphone, Emily manages to get Leonard arrested and when he is in custody, he confesses that he has an accomplice but he absurdly tells the cops that he won’t tell them who his partner is unless they promise to let him go free. Needless to say, Andrea eventually begins to completely lose it due to Emily’s new relationship with cop Bob and begins murdering people, including her crush’s elderly Jewish neighbor Sam Marx (Michael Gorrin). Emily also gets quite the scare when she opens her freezer and finds her precious orange kitty cat frozen-to-death inside. When Andrea’s psychiatrist wisely attempts to have her committed, she violently slaughters him and heads to her secret loft so that she can plot to make Emily her sexual plaything. 

 Of course, Andrea eventually has Emily come to her apartment and it does not take the protagonist long after finding the crypto-carpet-muncher’s telescope to realize that she has spying on her and that she is the deranged stalker killer that killed her kitty cat and elderly friend. After Emily realizes that the telescope is pointed right at her apartment window, aberrosexual psycho-cunt Andrea appears out the darkness like a truly ghoulish gay gal and scares the shit out of the protagonist with her creepy lezzy lurker behavior. After scaring the hell out of Emily by smashing the telescope, Andrea becomes deleteriously delusional and cries “You can never love me…don’t lie to me. I couldn’t bear it if you lied to me,” so the protagonist lies and says she can learn to be a fairy lady. Ultimately, Emily ends up staying up all night with Andrea and the next morning the loony lesbo even admits to having hired taxi driver Leonard to molest her, bragging, “I could have hurt you but I didn’t. I kept it from happening.” Eventually, Andrea begins demanding that Emily take her shirt off just like Leonard did when he molested her while stating pathetic things like, “lift up the sweater” and “show me what you showed him.” When Emily continues to refuse to take off her sweater, Andrea suffers a violently pathetic and hysterical spastic attack as a result of feeling rejected, so the protagonist smacks her in the face and tells her to stop, thus causing the deranged dyke to cower and cry, “Don’t hurt me. Please, don’t hurt me,” as if she is an innocent victim and not a deadly sapphic she-bitch.  Of course, policeman Bob and his comrades eventually show up and arrest Andrea and assumedly send her to a prison where she will undoubtedly be able to cure her latent lesbianism. In the end, Emily states to Bob regarding Andrea, “She would have never done anything to me.” Indeed, although a mad murderess, Andrea is a prisoner of lady-lover love and would not dare to personnally physically hurt the object of her desire as she lacked the gall, hence why she hired a dirty half-retarded cabbie to do it for her. 

 While the idea of a film where an ambiguously Jewish and superlatively sexually repressed lesbo lunatic begins slaughtering people because she is too cowardly to confess her delusional love to her friend surely sounds intriguing, Windows is an absurdly aimless celluloid abortion that is as anti-climatic as pussy-on-pussy penetration. Notably, director Gordon Willis would later state about the film, “One of the mistakes I did in my life was to make that movie,” curiously adding, “The Germans and Swedes like it, though, for some reason,” thus indicating that the Germanic world might have a surplus population of sadomasochistic bean-flickers.  Apparently, Willis more regretted having to deal with the mental problems of high maintenance actors/actress than dealing with the theme of lunatic lesbos, or as he stated, “I've had a good relationship with actors…but I can do what I do and back off. I don't want that much romancing. I don't want them to call me up at two in the morning saying, ‘I don't know who I am.’” Ultimately, to appease his LGBT attackers, Willis would deny that the film was even actually about dykes, arguing, “WINDOWS is not about homosexuality – it’s about insanity,” as if the two things are always mutually exclusive.  Of course, the insanity depicted in the film is of the unequivocally deranged dyke sort, with the villainous fitting various carpet-muncher clichés in her perturbing mental pathologies, as she seems like some sort of frigid feminist leader who did not get her fair share of lecherous lady-loving. In the end, Windows seems like a botched cautionary tale that attempts to warn quasi-autistic and otherwise socially retarded women who have become disillusioned with men due to their own inadequacies about what might happen if the give up on heterosexuality and opt to convert to lily-licking. While Windows certainly demonstrates why Willis earned the nickname ‘The Prince Of Darkness’ due to the oftentimes dark and shadowy style of his cinematography, directing a film takes more effort than merely being able to immaculately frame a shot in appropriate lighting, which is something the cinematographer seemed to learn the hard way as the director of what is arguably the most banal lesbian thriller ever made. Indeed, Hungarian-German auteur Fred Kelemen is also a master of dimly lit cinematography yet the films he shot for Béla Tarr are far superior to anything he has ever directed himself. Additionally, Dutch cinematographer Jan de Bont managed help contribute to what is arguably the most strange and fiercely foreboding cinematic atmosphere of Dutch cinema history when he shot the Willem Frederik Hermans adaptation De blinde fotograaf (1973) aka The Blind Photographer directed by Adriaan Ditvoorst, but he ultimately sired one of the biggest and most horrendous Hollywood horror turds of the 1990s when he directed the The Haunting (1999). Admittedly, Windows is effective in one way in that it fills the viewer with a sense of revulsion for lesbians, especially those of the ostensibly cultivated NYC-bred Jewess sort, thus I can almost understand why gay groups would protest the film.  After all, at least William Friedkin's Cruising gives a certain dark romanticism to the S&M leather-fag realm, which certainly cannot be said of Willis' film, which makes dykes seem like the most bat-shit crazy yet paradoxically banal and lonely people around.

-Ty E

Euridice BA 2O37

For whatever reason, I have to respect a filmmaker who, despite directing various highly idiosyncratic feature films over the course of three decades (not to mention the fact that he spent over another decade directing shorts and working as an assistant director), felt that his very first full-length cinematic work was also his very best. Indeed, Greek auteur Nikos Nikolaidis (Glykia symmoria aka Sweet Bunch, Singapore Sling) considered his first feature Evridiki BA 2O37 (1975) aka Euridice BA 2O37—a superlatively subversive and uniquely uncompromising black-and-white avant-garde molestation of the classic Greek tragedy Orpheus and Eurydice that seems like it was made just in time for the Occidental apocalypse—to be the most solid and structured film of his totally singular filmmaking career. While I am not sure if I would described it as Nikolaidis’ single greatest work, it is surely one of the best and most impressive debut features I have ever seen from a director as a work comparable to Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou (1929) aka An Andalusian Dog, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), François Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) aka The 400 blows, and David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977), among various others. While I have not seen every single cinematic reworking of the Greek tragedy, I have no doubt in my mind that Nikolaidis’ film is the most aesthetically and thematically anarchistic, culturally pessimistic, darkly erotic and eclectically unhinged adaptation of Orpheus and Eurydice ever made as a work that makes Jean Cocteau’s masterpiece Orphée (1950) aka Orpheus seem like a dopey Disney variation and Sidney Lumet's The Fugitive Kind (1960) resemble a hokey hixploitation piece. Of course, what better than a real genuine Greek fellow to adapt the classic tragedy of his ancient ancestors and demonstrate how so utterly depraved and hopelessly lost the Occident is today. I must admit that the more films I see by Nikolaidis, the more I realize that he is the most important and underrated post-WWII Greek auteur, but of course Greece has always been generally lacking when it comes to filmmaking, even in comparison to small countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, with many important directors from the country like Nikos Papatakis (Les Abysses, Les Équilibristes aka Walking a Tightrope) and Costa-Gavras (Z, Amen.) spending most of their careers working abroad. What immediately stands out about Nikolaidis’ adaptation in comparison to all the over versions, aside from the fact that it is a demented dystopian chamber piece that relies heavily on dream logic, is that it focuses primarily on Eurydice (or ‘Euridice’) and her nightmarish psychological demise while waiting idly in the most banal of hells. Indeed, unlike the original story which depicts the Arcadian romance of the hero and heroine before the latter ends up in the depths of Hades and the former subsequently enters the dark otherworldly abyss to try and ultimately fail at saving her, Euridice BA 2O37 takes place entirely in a sort of metaphorical pandemonium where the eponymous ‘protagonist’ (or more like ‘anti-heroine’) Eurydice, who does not remember Orpheus, waits in vain while going insane to be released after she has already served her time. Indeed, Nikolaidis’ film is a histrionic psychodrama of the most haunting sort that demands much from the viewer and gives absolutely nothing away aside from nice shots of Russian-German star Vera Tschechowa's generous mammary glands. 

 Notably, star Vera Tschechowa appeared in what is oftentimes described as the very first New German Cinema feature, The Bread of Those Early Years (1962) aka Das Brot der frühen Jahre directed by Herbert Vesely, which is interesting considering that Euridice BA 2O37 is one of the first works of the so-called ‘New Greek Cinema’ movement as a work that completely revolutionized the medium in Greece and opened up cinematic possibilities that largely went unrealized. Indeed, despite being forty years old, the work is still as shocking, singular, and unclassifiable as film’s come as a clear expression of the artist’s obviously troubled and seemingly haunted psyche. In Nikolaidis’ film, love is dead and the protagonist is more or less a dead soul with amnesia who is simply referred to as “BA2037” by the people that have imprisoned her in a metaphoric hell that, not unintentionally, resembles a typical humdrum bourgeois apartment.  Set to the soothing, if not sometimes saddening, sounds of Chopin, Vivaldi, and Dinah Shore, Euridice BA 2O37 is a piece of schizo-cinema that somehow manages to be morbidly melancholic yet sometimes playfully humorous and jovial. The film begins with sounds of live ammunition and warfare juxtaposed with the credits sequence and then cuts to a small group of bratty young men and women tormenting protagonist Eurydice while she sleeps by dropping dirt and whatnot on her head from a window over her bed. Probably not coincidentally, these young delinquents resemble far-left student protestors or ‘bobos’ (aka bourgeois bohemians) of that time period. After fighting her youthful attackers with a makeshift pitchfork of sorts, Eurydice stares in a melancholic fashion at a bouquet of dead flowers wrapped in an old newspaper, which can be interpreted as being symbolic of the fact that love and romance are old news in the decidedly dead dystopian world of Nikolaidis’ film. After standing around and looking all moody and broody, Eurydice approaches a mustached man that is lying on her bed and goes to touch him but it seems like some unspeakable force is holding her back. Although never directly stated, the man is her lover Orpheus (British actor John Moore) and Eurydice has fragmented flashbacks of making love to him. Like virtually all the people that come to see Eurydice, it is dubious as to whether Orpheus is really in the apartment or merely a figment of the obviously mentally perturbed protagonist's seemingly loony and labyrinthine ‘imagination.’ Indeed, it could be argued that nothing in the film is real and is, instead, merely the product of the clearly crazed heroine's discernibly damaged mind. At one point, Orpheus attempts to apologize to Eurydice for something that is never made completely clear, but she stops him, changes the subject, and complains that she should have been freed from the apartment five days ago when her sentence ended, but then strangely remarks, “Who knows…Maybe I have already left,” as if she is speculating that she might have lost her mind. Naturally, at the end of the film, Eurydice will have a long-awaited romantic ‘showdown’ of sorts with Orpheus that will seal both his and her fate for eternity. 

 When a random stranger calls Eurydice on the telephone and says that he is trying to contact his lover who he has not seen or talked to in five years, the protagonist remarks, “It’s weird” as if she cannot fathom the idea of a man still being in love with a woman after such a long period of time without any contact. Eurydice tells the man that she does not know him or remember any of the stories or names he mentions, but she tells him that she would like to meet him and invites him to come to her apartment later that night. Of course, it is later revealed that the man on the phone is Orpheus. In between moving piles of junk around her house in a rather tedious and ultimately fruitless fashion as if she is trying in vain to live the life of a domestic housewife and failing miserably, Eurydice daydreams of bizarre things like discovering two naked corpses wrapped in plastic in a Lynchian fashion. Eurydice also calls the people that have imprisoned her and complains that she should have been released five days ago, so the man on the other line promises to send by a truck before noon to pick her up so she can be transferred but of course it never happens. After staring at the static on her TV screen like an autistic automaton for a couple minutes, Eurydice takes a shower and when she finishes she becomes rather alarmed and eventually completely petrified when a man in a military uniform rings her doorbell and then attempts to shove a envelope under the door, which the protagonist aggressively fights to push back under the door while completely naked (during all the commotion, Eurydice loses her towel and her mind), as if the piece of mail contains a bomb or anthrax and she is afraid for her life. Not long after the incident with the mailman, a beauteous young woman (Niki Triantafillidi) in a black plastic coat appears in the apartment out of nowhere and it is quite clear that she recently tried to commit suicide as indicated by the cut marks on both of her wrists, so Eurydice attempts to clean her wounds but the strange exotic young lady stops her. Out of all the people that Eurydice encounters during the film, she is the most empathetic and kind to the mysterious woman, who is probably not a real person but instead a possible alter-ego or younger version of the protagonist (who might be in hell because she killed herself). As the strange young woman says regarding her suicide attempt, “He will think I did it because of him. Why would I do it? I don’t love him anyway…but I think he knows it. He figured it out.” Undoubtedly, the young lady's sentiments of resentment for her beau seem to mirror how Eurydice feels about Orpheus, who will ultimately go to great lengths to attempt to get the protagonist to remember the love they once had for one another. Whether Eurydice has genuinely forgotten Orpheus and her former love for him or she is just pretending to as women oftentimes do is quite questionable. When the strange woman randomly disappears just as abruptly as she once appeared, Eurydice becomes completely petrified and begins slowly and carefully looking for her around her apartment, but the only thing she finds is herself in the bathroom (?!) showering just like she did only moments earlier just before the mailman came by and scared the shit out of her. 

 Like a scared child, Eurydice eventually decides to hide under the sheets on her bed where she is initially petrified but eventually begins masturbating and experiencing a series of extra ecstatic orgasms. When a silhouette of a man's hand appears over the sheet, Eurydice becomes all the more turned on and has some more orgasms, but when the curious hand begins caressing her she eventually suffers a sort of spasmodic panic attack where her large breasts giggle wildly. After her rather bizarre phantasmagoric masturbation session in the bed, Eurydice decides to play with talking baby-dolls and gets them to have ‘sex.’ Indeed, after one of the babydolls says, “Come, let’s do something naughty,” Eurydice takes the clothes of the dolls and forces them to engage in a rather childish game of coitus that more than hints at the protagonist's warped sexuality. As indicated by the fact that the male doll has an erect member, the toys are ‘anatomically correct’ and Eurydice seems to have another orgasm while playing with the toys, but eventually gets agitated for some reason and decides to viscerally bite the penis off of the male one, thus reflecting her undeniably hostile feelings towards the opposite gender. When Orpheus calls again, Eurydice, who has the baby-doll penis in between her teeth like a toothpick, once again reiterates how she has no idea who he is or what he is talking about. Orpheus brings up a mutual friend named Vera who was apparently killed at an amusement park while they were hanging out there, but Eurydice describes the story as “improbable.” Meanwhile, Eurydice falls further into a lapse of sanity as demonstrated by her violent mutilation of baby-dolls and visions of decapitated goat heads, among other things that only seem to make sense in her own mixed-up mind. 

 Eventually, a strange man randomly shows up at Eurydice's flat while it is storming heavily outside and offers to trade her two sardines that he has carefully wrapped in a piece of cloth for some jewelry, but the protagonist turns him down. The man apparently works for the hellish bureaucracy that has imprisoned Eurydice and he tells her that she has not been “transferred” yet simply because his employers are “just lazy.”  Of course, like the mysterious young woman, the man disappears just as abruptly as he once appeared.  After attempting to hunt down some imaginary figure with a butcher knife while sporting nothing but a turtleneck sweater and panties, as well as subsequently using fingernail polish to paint the wrists of the mysterious young suicidal woman that randomly showed up earlier in the film, Eurydice is eventually visited by the mysterious man that has been calling her on the telephone who naturally turns out to be Orpheus. When Orpheus walks in the apartment with a bouquet of flowers while sporting a military uniform and hardhat with a light on it, Eurydice acts less than friendly to him and demands that he turn the light off, which he gladly does. After Orpheus shows his concern that he hopes his uniform does not scare her and says that he can probably arrange to have her released from the apartment, Eurydice remarks that he is very nice and even strangely offers him a bath as if she is on intimate terms with him and/or wants to jump his bones. 

 After some small talk, the two lovers turned strangers sit at a kitchen table and Orpheus shows Eurydice old photographs and tells her a story about how he, her, and a woman named ‘Vera’ once went to an amusement park together and the latter suffered broken ribs when a ride malfunctioned and ultimately died on the way back after her already broken ribs were split open in a car wreck. While looking at Orpheus’ old photos, Eurydice notes that Vera looks remarkably like her and then remarks, “See what funny clothes we used to wear?” as if she somehow now remembers the past. Of course, there probably was never a ‘Vera’ (which is notably and probably not coincidentally the real-life first name of the actress that plays Eurydice), as the dead woman that Orpheus is speaking of is probably actually Eurydice and the only reason he is telling her the story is in the hope that his beloved will somehow remember. Undoubtedly, the scene where Orpheus attempts to get Eurydice to remember him is borderline heartbreaking and accented by the song “Till” by Dinah Shore. After an initially romantic flashback scene of Orpheus and Eurydice kissing in a lake in pouring down rain that ultimately erupts into violence, the protagonist is featured murdering her lover and subsequently running down the hallway of her apartment in a creepily jubilant fashion while carrying her murdered beau's internal organs in a triumphant fashion. The film concludes the same exact way it began with a group of young people attacking Eurydice from a window above her bed while she sleeps. Indeed, Eurydice is trapped in a perennial metaphysical prison where she is forced to relive the same events over and over again every single day for eternity like she is trapped in some grotesque Gothic Greek version of Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day (1993).  Of course, unlike Bill Murray's character in the Ramis flick, Eurydice seems unconscious of the fact that she is reliving the same day over and over again and thus acts the same exact way every single time.

 Although completed in 1975, Euridice BA 2O37 did not play in Greek theaters until six years later just after a major earthquake devastated the country, thus most likely adding to the assumedly already shaken audience’s viewing experience. To demonstrate director Nikos Nikolaidis’ lack of pretentiousness, especially in regard to his own work, it should be noted that the filmmaker once stated regarding his directorial debut, “Certain intellectual Italian critics asserted that "Euridice BA 2037" applies and finally proves Lyotard's cinematographic theories as well as the solution to many of the problems which puzzled Pasolini's for years. I am embarrassed because I didn't know then and I still don't know anything about Lyotard's theories or Pasolini's problems.” Like much of his work, it is also apparent while watching the film that the auteur is surely lacking when it comes to pomposity as demonstrated by the fact that Euridice BA 2O37 opens with a shot of a photograph of early classical Hollywood comedic philistine double act Laurel and Hardy. Not surprisingly considering it's dually off-putting combination of perversity and incessant discombobulating ambiguity, the wayward Orpheus and Eurydice (anti)adaptation, despite winning various coveted awards, was apparently severely criticized by both audiences and film critics alike when it debuted at Thessaloniki Film Festival, with those few individuals that actually enjoyed the film being a supposed “reckless” bunch, or as Nikolaidis stated himself, “I realized that the audience this film appealed to was a "reckless" one, made up of people who willingly huddled into the basement of the movie theater "Alkyonida". Driven cinephiles, which ignored the published critics (disregarding both good and bad reviews, because – we all know how the critics system works by now).” Of course, the film most certainly has the same audience today. 

 On top of describing it as his personal favorite of all his cinematic works, Nikolaidis rightly recognized his debut feature was too much for audiences when it was released as expressed in a remark he made while discussing his later dystopian masterpiece Morning Patrol (1987), “I believe that it is a film ahead of its time just like "Euridice BA 2037" was.”  Notably, Euridice BA 2O37 and Morning Patrol are the first two chapters of Nikolaidis’ post-apocalyptic ‘The Shape of the Coming Nightmare’ trilogy, which concluded with the filmmaker’s most fiercely impenetrable and perniciously perverted yet paradoxically humorous cinematic effort The Zero Years (2005), which was ultimately the last film the Greek auteur ever directed. What all three of these films have in common is they demonstrate a sort of great disconnect between the sexes that reflects a sort of death wish for the Occident where reproduction and family do not even enter the equation. Certainly Greece’s closest equivalent to Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece Persona (1966), Euridice BA 2O37 depicts a kind of erotically apocalyptic frigidness of the fairer sex via its hyper hysterical (anti)heroine, who not coincidentally kills her beloved Orpheus in an allegorical gesture that can be interpreted as the metaphysical hell of perennial loneliness and sexual deracination that has replaced love and romance in Europa. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Eurydice has amnesia in regard to her past love affair with Orpheus, for love has become, at best, a faded memory that seems completely intangible in the present late-stage of Occidental decay. I am certainly not exaggerating when I say that Nikolaidis’ film is easily one of the greatest adaptations of a classic work as it completely deconstructs, defiles, and reassembles Orpheus and Eurydice for contemporary times, not to mention the fact that it was directed by a filmmaker from the same devastatingly degenerated nation where the tale was originally sired. Ironically, aside from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly (1961) aka Såsom i en spegel, and to a lesser extent John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974), the only other film I can truly compare Euridice BA 2O37 to is the R-rated psychodramatic chamber thriller Deranged (1987) directed by pornographic auteur Chuck Vincent. Aside from taking place almost entirely in a messy apartment and centering around a mad woman who is suffering a major mental breakdown, both films manage to be simultaneously unflattering to the so-called fairer sex yet at the same time demonstrate an inordinate compassion to people with vaginas that no actual woman would dare express. The Eurydice of Nikolaidis’ film is not the all too delicate and perfect wood nymph of the original ancient Greek tragedy, but the rotting yet pulsating womb of the west that worships death and is allergic to all-things-love. Undoubtedly, to say one has to suffer from a certain amount of hopelessness in regard to love and the future of the Occident and humanity to fully appreciate Euridice BA 2O37 would be a major understatement. In other words, it was probably no fun being Nikos Nikolaidis, hence probably why the man seemed to love old mindless outmoded Hollywood classics that are nothing like the films he actually directed as they probably provided him with much needed escapism and, in turn, relief from his existential misery. 

-Ty E