25 Fireman's Street (Szabó, 1973): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm
This is the UK premiere of the new restoration and will be introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Close-Up introduction:
István Szabó's
agile camera is an uninvited guest peeking into the private and
collective memories of the residents of an apartment building in
Budapest that is due to be demolished the next day. In a Cocteauesque
quest into the inner life of a house (which also bears trace of early
surrealists in its splendid and puzzling juxtapositions) some 50 years
is remembered overnight. The breath-taking long takes that have the
fluidity of a dream reconstruct the recent history of nation through
bricks, windows, walls and wooden panels. Like Jacques Tati's Playtime,
architecture is both the starting point and what frames every movement –
it's a living organ. But here the building reflects people's desires
and traumas more than similar voyeuristic investigations of architecture
and film as it even bears the subtitle of a "Dream About a House". A milestone in film history for its intricate narrative and free-form imagery, 25 Fireman's Street was partly inspired by Szabó's discovery of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood.
Each image can be seen as a metaphor of something larger, but perhaps,
more rewardingly, as a photographic representation of a poetic probe
which, at first, seems impossible to decipher but gradually allows for a
pattern of thoughts to emerge in which history and personal memory of
Hungarians fully complement each other.
Ehsan Khoshbakht
Here (and above) is an extract.
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