‘Hungary’ Archives
The Life of an Agent
The Life of an Agent Az ügynök élete 2006, black and white, 82 mins Director: Gábor Zsigmond Papp Writer: Gábor Zsigmond Papp Script Editor: Miklós Tamási Camera: Balázs Dobóczi Editor: Szilárd Nagy Music: Szabolcs Molnár Narrators: János Kulka, Zoltán Rátóti Producer: Gábor Zsigmond Papp Production Company: Bologna [...]
Sparrows Are Birds Too
Sparrows Are Birds Too A veréb is madár Hungary, 1968, colour, 79 minsIf I had to recommend one 1960s Hungarian comedy, it would almost certainly be Péter Bacsó's brilliant The Witness (A tanú, 1969), one of only two films that were singled out by Tibor Fischer's notoriously splenetic rant (in The Guardian, 7 October 2006) as exceptions to [...]
Hungarian horrors
To say that the films of the young (b. 1974) Hungarian director György Pálfi are an acquired taste is no more than a statement of the obvious, but it's already clear from Hukkle (2002) and Taxidermia (2006) that he's potentially one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from European cinema in a great many years. I was lucky enough to see [...]
Update
Apologies for the lack of updates - things have been insanely busy over the past fortnight, what with the Ken Russell retrospective at BFI Southbank (for which I contributed a 75-minute illustrated talk and met the man himself a few days later) and various other work-related things - including an interview about Jan Švankmajer for MovieMail's [...]
Latcho Drom
Technically a French film, but you'd never know, Tony Gatlif's 1993 film Latcho Drom (which translates as 'Safe Journey') is an enthralling Cinemascope panorama tracing the thousand-year passage of the gypsies from India to Western Europe via Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. There's no dialogue or conventional narrative: everything [...]
Elégia
Hungary, 1965, colour, 18 minsTucked away amongst the extras of Mokep's DVD of Zoltán Huszárik's extraordinary Szindbad (1971) is his first short film, the dialogue and narrative-free Elégia (1965), or Elegy.It's an 18-minute cine-poem about horses, first shown running carefree across a wide, grassy puszta, or Hungarian plain, before becoming [...]