Whose Angel is this? seems to me a better question than what is the Angel or what is the Angel about. As mentioned in the end credits, it is a suite of studies: creatures glimpsed ascending menacing stairs, man fencing a doll, Kafkaesque staircases ascending and sardonic creatures gaze back to us in ever clearer light, maid bringing cream in a jug to a man-without-hands, feverish camera spiraling the stairs, man in tub having fun and posing, unbalanced attic cross-section with man getting out of bed and house leaving motionless man behind, feverish activity in a library, band of men breaking into (attacking? liberating?) cube where woman resides, painter adjusting his model's reflection on a perspective machine, and finally the quasi-epic opening up of the ascension towards the light.
What should one make of this? As in his early short films, Bokanowski is embedded in imagery that refers to late 18th, early 19th century, that is the time of the French Revolution, and here is what I say: in the first minutes he proves the French Revolution Dziga Vertov - such invention is astounding, and mutates its confrontation of time, space and perspective in what I would call Bokanowski's variation on the Hegelian theme of Master and Slave, turned here into Master without hands and Maid; Bokanowski not only attacks cinematic piety with Jacobin ferocity but also makes palpable with the jug divided ad infinitum that Zeno with his paradoxes was ambassador of Terror. The director in this segment communicates extreme, theological menace. As a man with a camera he witnesses the extremities of time as they pass between Master and Slave, that is, according to Hegel, recognition and death.
So maybe it is time to relax a little with the gurgling with laughter man int the bathtub. But is this not a reverse image of happiness for the famous portrait by David of the assassinated Marat? In this sense, the postures after the bath, as if borrowed by caricatures of the era, also fall into the place of our uneasiness. Watching a home movie from the French Revolution time-frame must be this bizarre.
And next, the scene in the library, betters the sibling scene in Terry Gilliam's Brazil of frenetic, pointless activity for your bureaucratic eyes only. To counter the small scene in the attic which comically demonstrates the it-can-be-a-bad-dream effect with the man-stain in the room (a ghost? a presence?), I think Bokanowski proposes his most subtle effect in the black-and-white scene of the painter and his model: the black and white communicates the artificiality of the scene, yet on the same time demonstrates the dictum "your eye is on the picture, but you are in the picture". That this takes place in an arguably renaissance context allies civic appreciation with artistic politeness, spinning like hell of a fun as in the hands of the mixer of colors.
So when the final, almost epic scene comes, the fragmented manner colors the ascension with the divine bureaucracy of the light. There is an achieved anxiety throughout the film, that makes us suspicious of the rightly omitted from the end Angel, as when God helps people it usually is that they end in more trouble than before. So the question returns: whose Angel is this? Is this a Jacobin's dream gone bad? Is it Montesqieu thinking about climate change and ending up in light? Topor waking from his torpor? Is it a pamphlet in the guise of a film for the Angel of History? The Angel of the Directory? Or Guignol? The Angel of 18th Brumaire?
What should one make of this? As in his early short films, Bokanowski is embedded in imagery that refers to late 18th, early 19th century, that is the time of the French Revolution, and here is what I say: in the first minutes he proves the French Revolution Dziga Vertov - such invention is astounding, and mutates its confrontation of time, space and perspective in what I would call Bokanowski's variation on the Hegelian theme of Master and Slave, turned here into Master without hands and Maid; Bokanowski not only attacks cinematic piety with Jacobin ferocity but also makes palpable with the jug divided ad infinitum that Zeno with his paradoxes was ambassador of Terror. The director in this segment communicates extreme, theological menace. As a man with a camera he witnesses the extremities of time as they pass between Master and Slave, that is, according to Hegel, recognition and death.
So maybe it is time to relax a little with the gurgling with laughter man int the bathtub. But is this not a reverse image of happiness for the famous portrait by David of the assassinated Marat? In this sense, the postures after the bath, as if borrowed by caricatures of the era, also fall into the place of our uneasiness. Watching a home movie from the French Revolution time-frame must be this bizarre.
And next, the scene in the library, betters the sibling scene in Terry Gilliam's Brazil of frenetic, pointless activity for your bureaucratic eyes only. To counter the small scene in the attic which comically demonstrates the it-can-be-a-bad-dream effect with the man-stain in the room (a ghost? a presence?), I think Bokanowski proposes his most subtle effect in the black-and-white scene of the painter and his model: the black and white communicates the artificiality of the scene, yet on the same time demonstrates the dictum "your eye is on the picture, but you are in the picture". That this takes place in an arguably renaissance context allies civic appreciation with artistic politeness, spinning like hell of a fun as in the hands of the mixer of colors.
So when the final, almost epic scene comes, the fragmented manner colors the ascension with the divine bureaucracy of the light. There is an achieved anxiety throughout the film, that makes us suspicious of the rightly omitted from the end Angel, as when God helps people it usually is that they end in more trouble than before. So the question returns: whose Angel is this? Is this a Jacobin's dream gone bad? Is it Montesqieu thinking about climate change and ending up in light? Topor waking from his torpor? Is it a pamphlet in the guise of a film for the Angel of History? The Angel of the Directory? Or Guignol? The Angel of 18th Brumaire?