Péter Forgács at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (review)

Ten minutes into his lecture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Hungarian filmmaker and archivist Péter Forgács asked the audience to take out their cameras. Cell phones and digital cameras came out of pockets and pocketbooks, and, on Forgács's count, everyone took a picture at once.

This move is typical of Forgács, who in person and in his films unites theatrics with wit. He was careful to synchronize the taking of the photograph and asked audience members to e-mail or text him their photographs. But before making this request, he suggested that it was the most important photograph the audience members had ever taken; or it could be worthless; or, even worse, it might be an "unforgivable mistake," adding to the already overwhelming number of digital images.

In producing, as he put it, a "fictional collective memory bay" of a talk that had scarcely begun, Forgács made it both sacramental and incidental, an event that could not be forgotten because its documentation was so extensive. Later in the talk, Forgács returned to his opening gambit by suggesting that the flood of digital imagery in the past decade threatened to wash away the carefully selected and archived images that were part of a family's private memory in the analog era. He suggested that the Private Film and Photo Archive, which he started in 1983, was a "Noah's Archive," saving memories that might otherwise be forgotten.

This commitment to the preservation and resurrection of private archives was confirmed by Forgács's use of his seven-part film Wittgenstein Tractatus to structure his talk. The film, using text from the philosopher's first work, published in Germany in 1921, makes sense of Wittgenstein's self-contained logical statements by turning the ideas into images of everyday life in Hungary in the 1920s and 1930s. Made in 1992, before the recent spate of interest in amateur film began, Forgács's film does not attempt to read or narrate its images, like his more recent Miss Universe of 1929 (2006), as much as it attempts to misread and reinterpret them. Like Wittgenstein, who insists that many philosophical problems are actually problems of language, and thus can be solved through linguistics, Forgács suggests that the troubles of history and memory can be addressed by examining the images they rely on. Taken in isolation, the footage from Wittgenstein Tractatus is ordinary: a horse pulls a plow through an empty field; a man exuberantly dances in a nondescript backyard; a woman walks down a narrow sidewalk. But the film uses Wittgenstein's text, spoken by Forgács, and an uncanny soundtrack by the Hungarian composer Tibor Szemző to make these images represent a totality of the lost world of the bourgeoisie that existed in Hungary before World War II. Each of the film's seven sections, loosely aligned with the parts of Wittgenstein's treatise, start with an image of text on a brown field. This slowly gives way, using a jigsaw puzzle–like transition, to one of the archival images. More words scroll horizontally across the screen, and Forgács's own voice comes in and out, turning Wittgenstein's already elliptical text into a mantra over the course of the thirty-five-minute film. By frustrating the viewer's expectation that these images will become legible, or part of a narrative, Forgács instead suggests that our own associations with these images matter as much as their material histories.

Forgács explained these sections as evidence of the frailty of memory, which is too often falsified or faulty, easy prey for biased and multiple perspectives. As an example, he cited a project he launched in New York last summer after finding the possessions of a woman he named "Tanya" on a street corner. Cataloging the material like a police...