The popularity of film almanacs in the 1960s can be explained by national traditions, if you pay attention to their particular prevalence in Italy and France. Of course, it is necessary to recall the novelistic form, which always gravitated to a cycle and a book like Decameron. The popularity of novelistic literature in Romance countries seems to shed light on another subject of influence or rather echo of literature in the synthetic art of the 20th century.
But it's not that simple. Let us now look not at genre principles, but at the cultural situation of the 1960s. Poststructuralist theory blossoms violently, declaring distrust of metanarratives, that is, universal explanatory systems, the duty of the present. Indeed, these years are a time of both victories and defeats for the society of the spectacle; they require a reading procedure that cannot be associated with rigorism and ethical unambiguity. Therefore, it is tempting to turn to the historically through ethical register and undermine its principles from the inside, and assert it as a kind of extrahistorical inevitability, conceivable, however, culturally, without any transcendental references.
Indeed, the sins of death are obsessively written in this almanac. It is the ordinary, no more, no less. She is no longer an illustration of the eternal theme, but rather herbalizes this technique itself, as in one of the novels, voluptuousness is frankly associated with the ambiguity of the voyeur, who, comparing Bosch’s paintings with live scenes in the city cafe, as if attesting to their unified nature. It turns out that the ancient artist, taking examples from “nature”, turned them into a sinister semiotics of the transcendent. But now the exact opposite situation triumphs: eschatology becomes worldly and harmless, it is as difficult to believe in as in the logic of the absurdist novella about anger, where the fly in the soup is the first link in the chain leading the world to atomic war.
All the directors did not agree (or conspire?) and literally did this. Not really trying too hard. It seems to be such a fertile material, but its transcription is made in most cases for a tick. Out of the general series stands only Godard, who shot an unusually elegant, sarcastically funny and easy story for him, which distinguishes him from the Italian part of this project, yet in a Catholic pathos straying into some quite straightforward satire on the origins of consumerism. The fact is that neither morale nor satire is simply necessary. And it is so clear that the routine of the modern petty-bourgeois world is utterly incomplementary, even when criticism of it may be a strange compliment. After all, then we have to argue that such a world is something beyond the theory of value. But this world is a world of empty likenesses, “Seven deadly sins” it was timely reflected, only here no film revelation and did not become, despite its tempting sign.
6 out of 10