Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács ed. by Bill Nichols and Michael Renov (review)

In his contribution to Cinema’s Alchemist, Tyrus Miller notes that, in Hungarian, “the common noun ‘forgács’ refers to the shavings and turnings that fall from the lathe: an appropriate name for an artist who makes his own films out of montage bits and pieces of celluloid” (188). The only problem with that ingenious analogy is that shavings are normally swept up at the end of the day and thrown away. Fortunately for the Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács, thousands of feet of celluloid shavings have been saved and made available to him. They come from European home movies shot from the 1930s through the 1960s and have made their way into the archive of the Private Photo and Film Foundation established by Forgács in Budapest in 1983. He transfers the films to Beta SP video before practicing the “alchemy” that transforms them into new, finished works. He then releases them in television and video formats.¹

Forgács’s accomplishments receive their first extensive critical examination in Cinema’s Alchemist, a collection of essays and interviews edited by Bill Nichols and Michael Renov. His transformed home movies, in the words of Scott MacDonald, “allow us insights into dimensions of everyday experience and history that cannot have been possible during the era when the films he works with were made” (4). Forgács puts it this way: “[Home movies] reveal a level of history that is recorded in no other kind of cinema. . . . [They] show us a great many things about the realities and complexities of history as it is lived by real people” (12).

History in various guises—macro and micro, private and public, personal and political, narrative and thematic—figures importantly in many of the fourteen contributions to Cinema’s Alchemist, including two interviews with Forgács, who can be quite eloquent about the historical significance of his home movie sources: “These films are full of revelatory moments about how it was there, about how they felt, about what they felt the need to represent. If these revelations of self are then placed in a context where you can sense the whole culture, its history and background, and how particular personalities fit into it, the results become very dynamic” (13). Contributing to that dynamism is a narrative structure that allows the viewer to recognize and appreciate the relevance—biographical, chronological, historical, and political—of the films’ “bits and pieces of celluloid.” That recognition is frequently aided by inserted text, sound effects, and voice-over. But like history, narrative can be approached from many different directions. Consequently, we find Forgács’s films treated as “historical narrative,” “retrospective narrative,” “spatialized narrative,” “open narrative,” and (inevitably) “nonnarrative.” Forgács himself pins down the central creative and critical issue raised by his approach to narrative: “As in literature (see Umberto Eco), in cinematography, the open piece gives far more surface for the imagination than does the linear narrative. This accounts for the associative jumps in my work. . . . [The] discontinuities offer the viewer an opportunity to reconstruct a narrative from the ruins of a filmic memory” (17).

In his construction of discontinuous narrative, Forgács reveals a modernist sensibility that is also apparent in his manipulation of the original home movie footage through visual effects such as step printing, freeze-frames, and tinting as well as his inclusion of sparse sound effects and the quiet, minimalist music of his longtime collaborator Tibor Szemzö. These more obviously aesthetic effects combined with Forgács’s narrative strategies and his mining of home movies for their “revelatory moments” constitute the cinematic alchemy that is examined from a number of different viewpoints in this edited volume.

Part I, “Setting the Scene,” presents two interviews with Forgács, one by Scott MacDonald and the other by Bill Nichols. Although both interviews have previously appeared in print and were conducted roughly ten years before the publication of...