HUNGARIAN SOUND

With one exception, the films in this section have all been recently restored. All wereconceived in the joyous outburst of freedom as against the sluggishness and grey reality of Kádárism. Their filmmakers were not stratified into the ‘backed’ phalanstery of the magicaltriangle of cultural policy, but instead they voiced an opinion on the world at best in the‘tolerated’, or even forbidden zone. Contemporary music of the film Current (Sodrásban) by István Gaál, and applying sets by Vivaldi and Frescobaldi, gave a timeless perspective to thework with explosive new visuality, conversing about topics typical of the 1960s through thelandscape. These composers continued the endeavours of eight experimental films illustratingthe fertile cooperation between New Music Studio and Balázs Béla Studio, in a majorundertaking of Hungarian film history, such as Psyche. The censor rejected the first in a series– Punitive Expedition (Büntetőexpedíció), the masterpiece by Dezső Magyar intended to becreated from the six Brandenburg Concertos – because of its characteristic, 1968-likecrosstalk. The fictional documentary Photography (Fotográfia) by Pál Zolnay has music byFerenc Sebő that draws an abstract shell around the interviewees, the photographer and theretoucher… The film becomes an entity diverging from the actual reality, with wonderfultension, not unlike The Rock Convert (Rock-térítő) by János Xantus, which originally started as a documentary about the band Neurotic and ended up recording the conversion of Pajor into the Hit Gyülekezet religious movement. Stephen the King (István, a Király), Time Stands Still (Megáll az idő) and Bald-Dog-Rock (Kopaszkutya) examine in various genres relations protesting against rock music and the constantly transforming social environment, in order thatunderground music and visuality could appear in its most striking forms in János Xantus’swork Eskimo Woman Feels Cold (Eszkimó asszony fázik).