Full Description
PÉter ForgÁcs, based in Budapest, is best known for his award-winning films built on home movies from the 1930s to the 1960s that document ordinary lives soon to intersect with offscreen historical events. Cinema's Alchemist offers a sustained exploration of the imagination and skill with which ForgÁcs reshapes such film footage, originally intended for private and personal viewing, into extraordinary films dedicated to remembering the past in ways that matter for our future.
Contributors: Whitney Davis, U of California, Berkeley; LÁszlÓ F. FÖldÉnyi, U of Theatre, Film and Television, Budapest; Marsha Kinder, U of Southern California; TamÁs KorÁnyi; Scott MacDonald, Hamilton College; Tyrus Miller, U of California, Santa Cruz; Roger Odin, U of Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle; Catherine Portuges, U of Massachusetts Amherst; Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan U; Kaja Silverman, U of Pennsylvania; Ernst van Alphen, Leiden U, the Netherlands; Malin Wahlberg, Stockholm U.
Contents
Contents
Introduction
Bill Nichols
Part I. Setting the Scene
1. PÉter ForgÁcs: An Interview
Scott MacDonald
2. The Memory of Loss: PÉter ForgÁcs's Saga of Family Life and Social Hell
Peter ForgÁcs and Bill Nichols, in dialogue
Part II. The Holocaust Films
3. Towards a New Historiography: The Aesthetics of Temporality
Ernst van Alphen
4. Ordinary Film: The Maelstrom
Michael S. Roth
5. Historical Discourses of the Unimaginable: The Maelstrom
Michael Renov
6. Waiting, Hoping, among the Ruins of All the Rest
Kaja Silverman
7. The Trace: Framing the Presence of the Past in Free Fall
Malin Wahlberg
Part III. Other Films/Other Contexts
8. How to Make History Perceptible: The Bartos Family and the Private Hungary series
Roger Odin
9. Found Images as Witness to Central European History: A BibÓ Reader and Miss Universe 1929
Catherine Portuges
10. Re-envisioning the Documentary Fact: On Saying and Showing in Wittgenstein Tractatus and Bourgeois Dictionaries
Tyrus Miller
11. The World Rewound: Wittgenstein Tractatus
Whitney Davis
12. Taking the Part for the Whole: Some Thoughts Inspired by the Film Music of Tibor SzemzÖ
TamÁs KorÁnyi
13. Analytical Spaces: The Installations of PÉter ForgÁcs
LÁszlÓ F. FÖldÉnyi
14. Reorchestrating History: Transforming The Danube Exodus into a Database Documentary
Marsha Kinder
Acknowledgments
Filmography
Contributors
Index
