Hungary, 1965, colour, 18 mins
Tucked 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 increasingly absorbed into the human world, subdued as beasts of burden or warfare and then slaughtered outright (in scenes reminiscent of Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes, though thankfully not as gruesomely prolonged – though the slaughter is clearly genuine) prior to being glorified in statues and paintings.
But it’s too easy to reduce this film to a simplistic finger-wagging tract, as its many pleasures lie elsewhere. János Tóth’s cinematography is stunningly beautiful, and the images (some still, some distorted) have been brilliantly stitched together in a series of pulsing rhythmic sequences by Mihály Morell to Zsolt Durkó’s haunting, Bartókian score. Questions about precise meaning rapidly become irrelevant as the pace quickens to a veritable frenzy, with some blindingly effective transitions – bare tree branches lit and cut in such a way as to suggest lightning, sudden freeze-frames of horses’ faces, their expressions open to infinite interpretation.
Here’s the IMDB link, though it offers pretty slim pickings – as with Szindbad (which I’ll be writing about in due course), this film seems to be practically unknown outside Hungary. Mokep’s DVD transfer is non-anamorphic 1.85:1, but I didn’t have any other problems with it – the source print is in surprisingly good condition for its age. And it doesn’t need subtitles, which I suspect is just as well as it probably wouldn’t have got them even if it did.