Money, Fascism, and Some Sort of Acid (2020)

Put It On My Tab

I won’t pretend to be an expert in the dark corners of geopolitics and finance that Janek Ambros explores in Money, Fascism, and Some Sort of Acid. I’m more of a tourist. Fortunately, this 35-minute collection of abstract video essays did what the best guidebooks do: it steered me toward some (intellectually) exotic locations that will no doubt expand my horizons and invite me to think deeper about my familiar surroundings.

We begin in October 2008. A Wall Street wolf (Joe Riitano) surfs the thinnest membrane of the housing bubble while narrating its entire corrupt history. Like John Moschitta, Jr. reciting the Big Short screenplay in less than five minutes, facts and figures—numeric and political—fly by in a frenzy that will stir recognition in some and absolute bafflement in others (depending on how much attention they paid during the financial crisis).

Visually, the sequence plays like what Gordon Gecko might have seen passing through Kubrick’s stargate: a dizzying montage of microsecond images, archival footage, and stock tickers that would surely have led to mass seizures and vomiting had Ambros’ film received a theatrical release.

It’s beautiful, horrifying, and utterly ridiculous—a visual manifestation of the emotions one should rightfully feel when considering how many lives and livelihoods hung in the balance of lightning-fast calculations and back-room dealings between banks, corporations, and so-called regulators.

This mad Technicolor explosion leads into a comparatively leisurely visit to Paris, France, 8 years later. The black-and-white aesthetic complements the transition, as does the entirely French narration that explores Napoleon’s rise to power. Even more haunting than the merry-go-round symbolizing a doomed era’s childish revolutionary politics is the frequent cutting to citizens leisurely going about their day, absorbed in chit-chat, street art, and, of course, their phones.

Speaking of childish, the film’s most facile entry, “Red, Blue, and Purple”, might strike some as an over-simplification of the “Left and Right politics are just two sides of the same dented coin” meme. It is, essentially, but Ambros saves the piece through more imaginative editing. A man (Steven Molony) sits in a chair, flanked on the left and right by archival footage extolling the competing virtues of Capitalism and Socialism. The Socialist clips are tinted red. Capitalism is coded blue. As the narratives and images grow more intense, escalating from earnest vintage PSAs to film of soldiers marching in formation by the hundreds, the content and colors merge. Our watcher becomes overwhelmed, as do we.

This bleeds into the collection’s most straightforward short, “Son of Man”, inspired by Doestoyevsk’s The Brothers Karamazov. The setting is Dalmatia, Croatia in 1943. A soldier (also played by Steven Molony) collapses while stumbling through a rocky, barren wasteland. He awakens in the office of a Nazi interrogator (Alexey Diakov) who comes to represent the literal Devil to our anonymous fighter’s mid-century Messiah.

The return to black-and-white is striking. I instantly recalled Václav Marhoul’s 2019 film, The Painted Bird (though this sequence is much eerier and achieves more thematically than that entire movie). As the interrogator’s dialogue begins to transcend the mere heartlessness of a regime toady and strays into the metaphysical, his eyes become black pits accentuated by demonic pinpricks of white light. By contrast, the haggard soldier takes on a beatific aura even as his grim fate comes into focus.

Lasting less than ten minutes, the “Son of Man” vignette is one of the most dazzling and well-crafted slices of cinema I’ve watched all year. Ambros has a talent for casting great faces (also evidenced in his totally different but equally trippy feature, Mondo Hollywoodland), with performances and writing to match.

I found the movie’s final segment, “Brexit”, to be its murkiest. A Winston Churchill speech extolling the virtues of a potential “United States of Europe” plays over footage of nukes, Nazis, and everyday modern living. This was a post-War speech calling on Britain to seek unification with its neighbors as a critical guard against worldwide threats who might also join the ranks of atomic powers. Ambros makes a stirring presentation, superimposing ghost-mirror images of scenes sliding in and out of one another, perhaps symbolizing a 2016 Britain at war with itself. A callback to “Red, Blue, and Purple”’s blended-color motif closes out the film with vibrant lilac waves roiling in the Thames.

What’s the message here? Is the idea that, by breaking away from the European Union, Britain risked continental solidarity in the face of some unspeakable totalitarian threat? I know the media coverage at the time predicted Old Blighty’s certain demise—along with that of the United States, which had just elected Donald Trump as President. Most of that coverage zeroed in on the twin specters of nationalism and xenophobia without considering any of the other factors that might lead a nation to secede from a relatively new super-structure whose interests didn’t necessarily align with those of the governed. One wonders what Churchill would have made of the UK being micromanaged from Brussels.

Perhaps there’s meaning in those purple waves at the end of “Brexit”, an idea that the forces of human nature and politics will forever crash into each other, carrying everyone along on their unpredictable but queasily familiar tides. It’s strange to think that Money, Fascism, and Some Sort of Acid is at once timeless and quaint.

I don’t know when Ambros finished the film, but Brexit took effect on January 31, 2020—less than two months before the world was rocked by a pandemic that continues to decimate the public’s trust in media, governments, corporations, and their fellow man. Talk about an acid trip: the last half-decade has seen a reality TV star become President and the party of “My Body, My Choice” become the Vaccine Mandate Fan Club.

If Ambros is still making movies fifty years from now, I imagine his wild editing and bonkers color experiments will be insufficient in commenting on the sideshow dimension we are sure to inhabit.

Acid will be as passé as aspirin by then. Bath salts might do the trick.

Watch Ian’s September interview with Janek Ambros about Mondo Hollywoodland!