The translator and novelist meditates on Hungarian cinema and its demise
For German translator and novelist Esther Kinsky, the cinema was a social space in which ‘seeing was a collective experience, where wit, terror, dismay and relief found a communal expression’. Her book, part meditation on cinema and its demise, part travelogue, takes us through the lowlands of southeastern Hungary and the nation’s capital, Budapest, formerly the author’s home.
Cinemas were once the centre of people’s daily life: ‘market, cinema, cemetery: these were the three points of orientation in the places where I went’, the author writes. During the 1920s Budapest had over 100 cinemas, and practically every Eastern European town Kinsky visited had one up until the Soviet Union disintegrated during the early 1990s. Even train stations had cinemas attached to their waiting rooms, while ‘theatres on wheels’ would travel to the most distant villages. Today, cinema-going as a regular activity is in decline, as film has become – due to the economics of the industry and the abundance of personal screens – a private matter and a luxury good. An act of seeing that’s ‘withdrawn from the public, estranged from subversion’ as it retreats to isolated realms.
According to Kinsky, cinema was a place of refuge, ‘a shelter with a view’ where one could see further than one’s immediate surroundings and into a vast ‘scope of possibilities’. She links this view to the Great Hungarian Plain, in whose towns ‘you could see from one end of a street to the other and even farther, to the horizon’. But if this book is about broader horizons, it is equally about developing a practice of looking closely. Throughout Seeing Further Kinsky chronicles prolonged, painstaking gazes into the acacias, the cornfields, the rail tracks and the distant sky arching over the heat and dust. In the process, memories, vistas and speculations coalesce, and her long, meandering sentences become an enactment of a meditative vision, to the point at which you begin to believe that seeing takes time, as well as space. Ultimately, Kinsky tells us, seeing is ‘a proficiency you acquire. A competence you slowly become aware of. Should you desire.’
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, translated by Caroline Schmidt. Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover)
