Gábor Bódy

In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all.

A priest arrives in a village and give advice and comfort to different people. He meets a wheelchair-bound former representative of the Communist party, a woman who is dying of tuberculosis and an astronomer who sings in a punk band.

Narcisus and Psyche is based on a novel by Sandor Weores which was adapted by Vilmos Csaplar and director Gabor Body for a feature-length film. Borrowing the character of Psyche from mythology and placing her in Europe in the 19th century, the authors give her a "modern" life. She is an attractive young woman - and remains so throughout the film, in spite of one hardship after another. Psyche is libidinous, and her prurient interests shock her staid contemporaries.

Gera, a successful Romani painter rejects his token status by dramatically burning his own artwork. He returns to his marginalized community intending to implement social reforms and improve their lives. However, his modern ideas are rejected and misunderstood by his own people.

After the World War I, enthusiastic young people found the intellectual group of Hungarian Communist Party. Their aim is to propagate the communist ideology to the people and get the workers on their side. They have fierce discussions on the new ideas, though their movement is not very successful. They clash with their opposition, attempt to lead people to the Red Army, but without success.

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Experimental film by Gábor Bódy. A woman sings in German on the left as text flashes on a separate frame on the right-hand side of the screen.

This documentary feature film is set in a two-storey villa, where three generations live together representing four different scales of values and views of life.

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According to Peter Brook, all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged is for a man to walk across an empty space whilst someone else is watching him. Thus, an empty space becomes a bare stage. However, this raises countless questions about the relationship between reality, everyday presence and role-playing, something experimental filmmakers coming from the 1970s world of theatre dealt with in detail. Tibor Hajas explored the topic in a short experimental film made at BBS.

An attempt to visualize a secret knowledge about the nature of man —a philo-clip—, through the use of structures of dissociated geometry and laser beams, with direct references to the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci and the work of Agrippa von Nettesheim.

Set in the 18th century, this tragicomedy depicts the debauchery of aristocratic officers condemned to celibacy, in the fate of a bourgeois girl reduced to a street slum. Marie, the beautiful young daughter of the decorative arts merchant Wesener, already has a fiancé, the poster merchant Stolzius, but Desportes, an officer in the French army, has his eye on her. At first, Wesener does everything he can to keep the beauty away from his daughter. But Marie convinces her father that the Baron's intentions are honourable. The father thinks it's his chance to marry the girl above his station. But his calculations are wrong.

The classic Faustian tale transposed to the realm of the digital.

There is also dancing in this tape but this time it's about the lyric dance of youth and is depicted by Bódy in an unconventional way. Walzer is a poem written by Novalis, the German romantic poet (1772-1801) to mark the premature death of his fiancée Sophie von Kühn. The text of Walzer is recited and appears in a spiral - the spiral of life? Lyric-Clip reflects the transience of youth as borne out by the macabre, dancing skeleton that appears on screen.

Either/Or in Chinatown was commissioned by Video Inn and shot in part at the Western Front during Bódy’s 1984 residency. Based on Danish philosopher Søren Kierkega’s Diary of a Seducer, Either/Or in Chinatown speaks to the impossibility of choice as it follows the narrator’s through days spent in attempts to attain the love of ‘Cordelia’.

The first real video work of Gábor Bódy is about a highly exciting psychological situation from the 1970s, the era of the iron curtain. Bódy and Marcel Odenbach, his friend from Cologne, communicate silently in front of the camera by blowing soap bubbles. The mood is very dramatic, yet the dramaturgy is rather simple. It is a pioneering work in the new narrative direction Bódy initiated.

The black and white short Private History (1978) by Gábor Bódy is made up of amateur recordings. So what would the presumably well-off people owning their own cameras direct the lens at before the Second World War? On the one hand, their own families, and on the other, their everyday lives, their pride-and-joy cars, Lake Balaton holidays, happily smiling family members. History, which slowly washes away this idyllic world as the rain effaces paint from paper, initially only appears as ‘background noise’, parts of newsreels and an occasional speech by Hitler. The pictures become more sombre as the age also grows darker: marching soldiers and columns of civilians wearing the yellow star pass in front of the camera. Péter Tímár reconstructed the audio on the basis of lip-reading, noises and rattles reflective of the period. This film is the forerunner to Péter Forgács’s landmark series Private Hungary.

He Saw Her Burning, which is based on a 1983 performance, is a provocative narrative collage, a surreal juxtaposition of two narrated texts. A man and a woman begin their respective tales: He saw a woman burst into flames on the street; she saw an American soldier go berserk and drive a tank into a crowd. Produced while Jonas was living in Berlin on an artist's fellowship, the disjunctive narratives are pervaded with a sense of cultural dislocation and alienation. The man and woman occupy separate narrative spaces as they tell their stories, which are intercut with a pastiche of word games, narrative reenactments, filmed sequences, isolated gestures and objects. Memory — elusive and ephemeral, personal and collective — is the catalyst for this complex work.

A video that deals with perspectives; that of a hostage, and that of the hostage takers. The video ends with a philosophical analogy of the capabilities of seeing through video through 2 or more sources.

Bódy Gábor made his experimental film-language series Négy bagatell (Four bagatelles) between 1972 and 1975. Egy bagatell (One bagatelle) is the third part of this series which is a unique experiment to show the film frame's meaning-altering nature. The etude can be divided into two parts. In the first part, we see the dance of a drunk man. The second shows a sociologist's lecture.