In a time when body dysmorphic disorder fuelled by online pornography, strict Western fashion trends, and specific perceptions of beauty…
“If I am unexpectedly questioned: “what is experimental film?” – my first reaction is defense. I take the question as…
With its cryptic atmosphere, sci-fi like images and unearthly music, Bácskai Lauró’s 1963 short piece is a truly playful representative…
At first Kazimierz Bendkowski’s 1973 work Centre (Centrum) seems to offer a straightforward reading. With flickering images of neon signs…
Even though Hungary has got a rich and diverse avant-garde film culture, it seems to have almost no abstract film…
Preserving the Film’s Body – Analogue Practices For decades film studies, therefore experimental film studies as well have been dealing…
In his 2013 book The Subterranean River of Cinema (Ponorná řeka kinematografie) Martin Čihák experiments with an approach quite unique…
According to a few sinister newspaper headlines film has been dead for almost sixty years. Yet the debate on the…
In some sense scientists, specifically cell biologists were the first experimental filmmakers. Their stunning movies of cells, tissues and embryos…
Female nudity is a frequently used device in avant-garde film. Both male and female filmmakers have experimented with several different…
„I will not watch a horse-centered film. I want you to know, comrade Huszárik, I only watch person-centered films.”[1] This…
In response to the current popularity of generative design processes in which designers use algorithms to create a variety of…
Painters have long known that certain chemicals resist wet paint and can be used to create textural surface patterns. One…
The departure from accurate representation and the disappearance of the identifiable object in art started with impressionism. It favored the…
“Is the invisible visible?” – was the first question addressed to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in the only interview the German…
Melting pot Avant-garde film has always been interrelated with fine art, music and literature. Contemporary Hungarian experimental film is no…
Following the elimination of creative workshops and the restructuring of film theaters, museums and galleries became the primary forums for…
The work of the Somogyvári-Feszt duo is an experimental documentary film-mail which even among avant-garde films counts as rare hybrid.…
Alexandr Hackenschmied’s city symphonies deliberately challenge the promotional attitude represented by Svatopluk Innemann in Prague at Night (1928). By turning…
Expired celluloid, deliberate imperfection, ten years of shooting with a handful of people – this is the making of Lost…
In A Soldier’s Story silent film narrative meets avant-garde film experimentation. Čeněk Zahradníček and Vladimír Šmejkal’s joint project A Soldier’s…
Light Sleep proposes several slippery subjects such as pornography, the interpretation of dreams and the theory of child sexuality. The…
Sensitively selected moving photo(copie)s are the base of the narrative and technical structure of Milan Balog’s 1.35. The award-winning (Oberhausen) short…
Paulína Mačáková’s 2008 work could easily be labeled as a “documentary” of avant-garde film history. Random Thought gently connects several…
Somewhat Hungarian, somewhat not, somewhat contemporary, somewhat not. In 2009 the American photographer and independent filmmaker Bruce Checefsky created an…
Zuzana Žabková’s experimental (contemporary) dance films compound the features of the avant-garde imagist films with the attributes of the Eastern-Central-European…
By changing the intensity of the emotional and sensual impact Mira Gáberová manages to smuggle several intellectual references in her…
Miklós Falvay, a former student and current teacher at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, created Run (Futta) in 2005 as a…
Martin Baran’s flings are attempts to create an „active film”. In his videos he plays with different signs which –…
Whether deliberately or not, Drahoslav Páluš follows Warhol’s footsteps by recycling the images of mass culture. In his short found…
A handful of volunteers sewn into a huge bag are trying escape a forest to the nearest asphalt road in…
Tibor Nagy Grosso’s one minute shorts are mostly „society-flips”, a kind of experimental conversation starters, brief but suggestive reflections of…
Although theoreticians refer to Vladimir Havrilla as an iconic figure of Czechoslovak experimental film, few people are familiar with his moving…
Although Martin Slivka produced numerous moving pictures which are famous of their innovative use of film language, this national treasure…
Péter Lichter is one of the few active contemporary experimental filmmakers in Hungary. This short documentary, shot on super 8…
Ctibor Kovač belongs to those „hobby-experimental-film makers” who, in between two more traditional documentaries or fiction movies, get a bit…
There was a long and complex argument on the 10th Kecskemét Animation Filmfestival (2011) when the critics and the jury tried to…