Images of Strangeness in András Jeles's Films
Images of Strangeness in András Jeles's Films

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the perpetuation of unconventional stylistic features of the modern film, as well as its possibilities of introducing a new, existential meaning in the Hungarian film production of the 1970s and 1980s. “New-narrative” films experimenting with narrative forms display an ambition of the filmic medium to join other, extraneous formations (such as music, literature, theatre), fulfilling thus the modernist ideal that the film as a “free indirect discourse” will demolish the monolithic unity of filmic narration. In a Hungarian perspective the experiments with narrative forms were similarly approached by three names as representative for the period: Miklós Erdély, Gábor Bódy, and András Jeles. Although film language experiments result in strongly medium conscious forms with all three directors, they are stylistically very different nonetheless. Experimentation in Erdély’s films leads to a minimalist form, in Bódy’s to an analytical construction, while in Jeles’s to a non-film-like form. The stylized world of Jeles’s films proves a particular concern with form, which, similarly to literature and theatre, must be able to transmit abstract (symbolic) meanings articulated at the same time in an existential experience.

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