From its inception, animation art has, by nature, had a kinship with the fine arts and music but even with theatre and dance. The genre has followed a diverse and varied course spanning from the conception of the first black and white lines to visual constructions creating the perfect illusion of real and unreal worlds. Animation is also an exceptional area of creative art in that it has always retained its relevance in its simplest forms amidst all the major technological – and social – changes; in other words, an animation film of a few minutes can have the same relevance and impact as a gigantic feature film using cutting edge technology. The distinct presence of the filmmaker’s gesture, i.e. his/her personal signature is a crucial element of the genre and Hungarian animation art is uniquely rich in productions associated with exciting personalities, grand oeuvres and experiments on the borderline of art.
The Műcsarnok’s experiment VISION / GESTURE / EXPERIMENT specifically focuses on the genre of auteur animation, which has always played a solid and prominent role in the history of Hungarian animation film overall, while remaining the least known to audiences. Even lesser known are those works conceived on the borderline area of art that are difficult to categorise and even their optimal means of presentation is hard to determine.
At the heart of our selection are autonomous aspirations of Hungarian animation, with films made in Hungary being presented through three approaches in the three central halls of the Műcsarnok. In the first hall, titled VISION, visitors are welcomed by four great dreamers – Áron Gauder, József Gémes, Marcell Jankovics and Sándor Reisenbüchler – with an emblematic work by each, summarising their personal philosophies in animation. Sándor Reisenbüchler would have been 90 years old this year so a projection of his life’s work and panel discussions will be held during the time of the exhibition to celebrate his outstanding oeuvre.
Reisenbüchler was the one who used the term gesture film in an interview when talking about György Kovásznai’s astonishingly individual works defying conventions, but this description is applicable to most auteur films. Indeed, it is the artist’s individual gesture, the passion for artistic creation that ‘come across’ in these mostly short films conveying a single idea, and an important message inspired by the inner urge of their makers. Selected from the extraordinarily rich array of Hungarian auteur films, the works presented in the second hall, titled GESTURE, are personal messages, which their makers made immediately recognisable through their style as well as special technical or dramaturgical characteristics: they are films with a single frame, like a fingerprint, clearly identifying their masters. These films often challenge the boundaries of the genre albeit not with the same obvious intention as the masterpieces in the next hall, titled EXPERIMENT, with the most confounding and at the same time most groundbreaking films waiting to be ‘deciphered’. In this hall visitors can also see animation films that are by now regarded as rather ‘tame’, such as Ferenc Rófusz’s The Fly (1980), which is the only Oscar-winning Hungarian animation film made in Hungary to this day, and a production that was truly novel at the time of its making thanks to its “background animation” technique. Ferenc Cakó was also included among those crossing boundaries due to his use of a unique material: his sand animations, by now emblematic masterpieces, enchanted audiences in their day, and continue to do so.
Also presented in this hall are films made in the Béla Balázs Studio in which animation is intrinsically linked with – often avant-garde – music and fine arts, jointly creating a new quality. They include unique motion pictures that could only be called films at a push as they were not made for the big screen.
To sum up, works from the roaring sixties to the digital revolution and beyond, regardless of the trends they represent, are accommodated in this special exhibition in the Műcsarnok, which proclaims the freedom of art and thinking, addressing every generation.