Picture House: On Esther Kinsky’s “Seeing Further”
Esther Kinsky | Seeing Further | New York Review Books | November 2024 | 224 Pages
During her travels through the Great Alföld, the lowlands of southeastern Hungary, Esther Kinsky arrives in an orphan town near the Romanian border, where she becomes enamored with and bids to restore a ramshackle mozi (the Hungarian term for “cinema”). As any film programmer could anticipate, this Sisyphean, yet well-intended undertaking is a disaster: projector parts are absent, brittle reels are strewn about the floors, the linoleum is blistered and the windows are clotted with fly droppings. Still, the building calls to Kinsky, with its angular signage and mustard-yellow seats—an irresistible movie house with good bones, if only it had the right administration. Seeing Further is an autoethnographic, deliberately difficult to describe account of Kinsky’s efforts, translated from German into English by Caroline Schmidt. An elegy for film exhibition, or, the social conditions in which film exhibition thrives, the book builds upon a failure to reproduce the cine-ecosystems of yore and an architecture for appraising the act of seeing.
As with her previous works River and Grove: A Field Novel—two stories about meditative promenades by the River Lea and through the Italian commune Olevano Romano respectively—Kinsky defies the label of psychogeography, portraying the flâneuse who, through memory and critique, reshapes her abode(s). Seeing Further, a blend of diaristic and fabulistic writing, is portioned into a prologue, two parts, an interlude, and an epilogue, each section signposted by quotes from creative luminaries like John Cassavetes, John Berger, Franz Kafka, and Attila József. With the exception of the interlude, the novel follows Kinsky in her travels—in an era unknown—through Norway, Warsaw, and Budapest, where she writes critically about binoculars, streaming platforms, the privatization of the cinema, and train windows (cinemas unto themselves), to her endeavors at film restoration, an inordinate task that is eased with the aid of local laborers and cinéastes.
The most absorbing section of the book however is the interlude, which reads as a roving anecdote that may or may not be a total fabrication or urban legend. Breaking from Kinsky’s memoir style, this interlude is a story set in the winter of 1927 about a European merchant and cinephile named Laci. Laci takes up post as a projectionist for a traveling cinema and then for Vörös Csillag, a renowned hotel and mozi in Budapest. Featuring shades of Victor Erice’s 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive, wherein a mobile cinema visits a secluded Castilian village, Kinsky’s dreamy descriptions of sweltering tents and “little images [roused] into moving scenes” cultivate an aesthetic vastness in cramped conditions. We learn here that Budapest previously had over a hundred cinemas, most eventually plundered during the implicit Siege of Budapest, a devastation which caused many Hungarians to declare the death of their national cinema.
But Laci resists such knells after fleeing the city, eventually opening a backyard shed theater outside of Budapest with bed linens for a screen, a single viewing bench, and jars of pickles for sale at an ad-hoc büfé (concession stand). Upon returning to Budapest to visit the razed Csillag, Laci discovers in its place a factory manufacturing a new type of house paint made from dissolved film strips. The paint was said to have a particular gloss and Laci wondered if in the brushstrokes one could find some semblance of the original images—extant stories lining houses as a reminder of cinema’s resilience in death, or wishful thinking on the part of this reader who likes to imagine the collision of cinema and painting as a site of possibility.
The textures of Kinsky’s novel, like the angled glint of the film-paint, are richly contradictory: a woman vows to revive a film monument lost to time, but does not pay heed to the films which might reinvigorate the space, instead remaking the bed with those she wants to see herself. Laci, knowing his audience, screens liberation films, while Kinsky briefly ponders the masters (Béla Tarr, Max Ophüls, Jean-Luc Godard, Yasujirō Ozu, and Terrence Malick) but ultimately chooses Ildikó Enyedi’s My Twentieth Century (1989) to inaugurate the revived space. By her own account, Kinsky does not grant the same thoughtfulness to film curation that she does to the conditions of filmgoing—as she writes early on, this is about how to look rather than what to see. In Kinsky’s writing, “seeing further” is both a proficiency one acquires and a right one inherits from the world; the cinema is both a tactile and poetic site, like an oil rig or an airport gate, one which cannot fully exist without an accumulation of gazes.
As with oft-cited psychoanalytic and apparatus theory from André Bazin and Jean-Louis Baudry, Kinsky maintains that film is a contact sport: not simply fingertips feeding celluloid through a projector (though this is detailed often and affectionately), but also eyes carrying images like palmfuls of water. Intellectualizing “the gaze” has always been a mechanism of taming it, of understanding the oblique parameters of our sight—an ocularcentric impulse nevertheless intimately realized here. Kinsky’s ardent prose also recalls Roland Barthes’ descriptions of the cinema: “the opaque cube,” “the dancing cone,” “the currency of a gleaming vibration.” [1]
Kinsky’s renderings of these particulars of the cinema are gorgeous, and didactically so, given the impending gut-punch that her mission of seeing further—images becoming communal memory, the spell of stretched particles, the restoration of vital aesthetic infrastructure—is truncated by disinterest. Placed throughout Seeing Further are dozens of photographs of the mozi and nature in Hungary; the final two, twin images of failed ecologies, upend the ways of seeing so cautiously cultivated in Kinsky’s language—a grim admission of something less gratifying than defeat. If cinema experiences constant death (and it does), the mozi is both its infirmary and casket; the trouble is we’ll never know which is which.
[1] Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” The Art of the Personal Essay, New York: Anchor Books, 1995.