Mónika Dánél

Keywords: artistic re-enactment; docufiction; plastic arts; Szabolcs KissPál; video Summary/Abstract: Szabolcs KissPál’s docu-fiction video is part of his 2015–2016 project entitled “From Fake Mountains to Faith (Hungarian Trilogy)”. The exhibition project consists of two docu-fiction videos (Amorous Geography, The Rise of the Fallen Feather) and an installation of a fictitious museum setting (The Chasm Records). According to Bernhard Siegert, “there is no space independent from cultural techniques of ruling spaces”. Szabolcs KissPál’s docu-fiction reflects on the cultural, ideological techniques and media conditions of historical and contemporary representations of space. His project focuses on the 1909–1912 rebuilding of the Transylvanian Great Rock (Egyes-kõ/Piatra Singuraticã) mountain in the Budapest Zoo. According to Zoltán Kékesi, this rebuilding situates “the architecture and the ethnographic space of the Budapest Zoo, as well as the Transylvania- discourse after Trianon within the long European (colonial) history of the objectification of the Other”. The video can be interpreted as a visual archaeology of the layered visions projected onto the geographical space. Reflecting on the mediatedness and the ideological background of the projections, the video becomes a surrogate (common) place for contradictory, non-interlocking projections, for conflicting ideological discourses, for archive footages and fictive repre-sentations. This results in an artwork oscillating between historical and poetic truth. In my article I focus on media transformations, as well as on the way the video redraws and maps the emotional and atmospheric space constituted of conscious and unconscious layers and imaginations related to the Trianondiscourse. I argue that this work can be seen as an artistic re-enactment because it enables the reflexive and emotional immersion of the viewer, and instead of an accurate reconstruction, it creates an emotional and somatic place for experiencing history.

Abstract. In the theoretical part of my article, based primarily on the works of Gernot Böhme, Peter Zumthor, Mădălina Diaconu, Juhani Pallasmaa, I define the atmosphere as a complex phenomenon in which the aesthetic, social and geocultural potentials are simultaneously present. It equally depends on the represented environment, on medial representation as well as on the receiver’s (cultural, social and emotional) education. Analysing Gábor Ferenczi’s adaptation of short stories of Ádám Bodor, The Possibilities of Making Friends (2007), I investigate the creation and effect of atmosphere. The film employs narrative intermissions, but connects them into a (detective story-like) linearity, that closes with a punchline and applies the duality of optic and haptic visuality, keeps its viewers curious while also bodily involving them. This mode of cultural translation draws the viewers, hopefully not only Eastern Europeans socialised in the atmosphere of communism, into the community atmosphere of a dual dictatorial world of interwoven codes of observation and intimacy.

Abstract: Slitfilm (Résfilm, 2005) and The Gravedigger (A sírásó, 2010) are two Hungarian experimental films made using a slit camera. The director/photographer Sándor Kardos’s adaptations of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story “The Handkerchief” and of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Gravedigger” expose a particular “physiognomy” of the filmic medium through the use of this technique. Likewise, the face as the privileged medial surface for emotion becomes an uncanny, stretched painting with grotesque associations, similar to Francis Bacon’s paintings. The sharp, clear narrator’s voice, layering the literary texts “onto” the moving image further emphasises the colour-stained plasticity of the visible. Both films attempt to articulate a liminal experience: the cultural differences between the East and the West that are inherent in expressing and concealing emotions (Slitfilm) or the questions relating to life and death, the speakable/conceivable and the unspeakable/inconceivable (The Gravedigger) that are embedded in the communicative modalities of social interaction. Through the elastic flow of images, the face and the hand become two uncovered, visible, corporeal surfaces engaged in a rhythmic, chromatic relationship (due to the similar skin tones of face and hand), and thus gradually uncover the medium of the film as a palpable skin surface or violated, wounded flesh. The article approaches the fluid, sensuous imagery that displaces the human towards the inhuman uncanny of the unrecognisable flesh through Deleuzian concepts of fold and inflection.

The article examines a group of films which take place in Romania, in Transylvania: stories of murders, incest, self-jurisdiction are implanted into the geographically and culturally localised nature and they are represented as the nature of the respective culture. From the wiewpoint of postcolonial theory, I examine the stereotypical image that these films transmit about the represented culture. From the angle of the chronotopes of geographical culture, postcolonialism itself becomes a problematic term, in this way I identify here a specific local version of the colonising logic. The colonial relationship between the own and the other is transformed into the foreignness, the otherness of the own, thus the Balkans are represented as Europe’s inner colony, its Wild East. The arriving white man does not conquer a foreign virgin land, on the contrary, the homecoming male heroes make attempts to recapture the mother earth. However, the mothers, women are surrogate ones, raped or voluntary whores. If the female protagonist becomes a traveller, then this means transport: they are transported to the West, where their homeland becomes their stigma, and this empowers the Western males to hire them. I regard the term surrogate borrowed from Jacques Derrida – simultaneously bearing the duality of the organic and the foreign – as being suitable for grasping a special version of colonialism, proliferating nowadays, in which nature, culture and women respectively, localised in Romania, are represented as surrogates of foreign (male)conceptions.