The Experimentalism of Gábor Bódy

Abstract

This chapter frames the work of Gábor Bódy within Hungarian avantgarde cinema. It connects Bódy’s output to László Moholy-Nagy’s films via intersecting modes of formal experimentation and social critique, a duality that regularly appears in late socialist Hungarian experimental cinema. It then highlights linkages between the film cultural activities of Lajos Kassák, the editor of the interwar journal MA, and Bódy’s function as an overall organizer of interdisciplinary film culture at the Balázs Béla Studio some fifty years later. Finally, it turns to Bódy’s feature films American Postcard, Narcissus and Psyche, and Dog’s Night Song to consider how experimental, documentary, and fictional elements coalesced in these works and how the juncture of such filmic forms pervades Bódy’s film theory.