Esther Kinsky lyric elegy for movies

In Esther KinskyFiction, landscapes write and speak. Through his novels, we find “soupire waters”, “Shadows of Leaves scribbled notes”, the drawing of Oder “countless aqueous marks and intertwined letters”, “Annotating the Landscape”. Kinsky animates the environments of his books, reminding us that the world is alive, that the boundaries between ourselves and our parameters are sometimes as thin as the wicks of the clouds, and that the Self exists outside of oneself, reflected in infinite pieces of broken mirrors – in objects, buildings, landscapes, rivers, trees.

In Kinsky’s latest novel, See furtherThe landscapes are still alive, but in the background to the main objective of the book, the lost beauty and the magic of cinema. See further is an elegy for film film cinemas from the past, these places “that the fomented stories by depriving you of words before the screen”, “these sleeping castles of movement of movement, with their rusty and rusty doors.” The opening of the question See further Continue the concerns of Kinsky’s previous fiction: “How to direct the look?” And Kinsky decides to turn his gaze to the ritual of abandoned cinema because, as argued by his autobiographical narrator: “During the last century, no location was also important for the how duty. “The narrator continues:” the collective experience facilitated by this space disappears with it “, and therefore” this loss, whether it is cried or not, deserves to be described and deserves a consideration “. Films and landscapes indicate the questions on the collective, towards” the border between the images seen and experienced things “, and Kinsky puts them in a strange and unexpected dialogue.

While she is doing this, Kinsky provides only characterization and sparse route. An anonymous narrator discovers a dilapidated cinema that she wants to rekindle in a small town in the south-east of Hungary because of her responsibility “to awaken a space for collective vision”. She leaves Budapest to restore the building, revives cinema according to her own tastes and finally sells it after public indifference. In the middle of that, she stops to tell the story of a wooden merchant who falls in love with films and village trips in the village in the film project in the late 1920s. Kinsky did not stadium, sketch some additional characters and avoids dramatic conflicts.

What is in this novel? The past: details regarded in slow motion. Rain and wind, the moldy smell of wet wood, heavy leaf curtains, people who smoke in screening rooms, “plumes rising before the image and floating in the air”. The spotlights strike, clicking with life. Concession stands, verification of the coats, “old -fashioned cardboard tear tickets in thin texture” and celluloid film bands, teeming with a “entirely distinct and non -repatted magic” – “Beauties from another moment”. See further Reads like these praise in which we grasp the memories of a person we have lost so that we can hang on to him and maintain him on this side of death. “Where to bring a deceased screen?” Asks the narrator of Kinsky. “Was there still small residues of images and scenes stuck on the edges of damaged holes and stains?”

The epigraph, a quote from the filmmaker John CassavetesPrepares us in this tone: “There is something important in people, something that dies – the senses, a universal thing. (…) The whole world dies of sadness. ” Kinsky writes to remind us of these beautiful fragments of the past, this time before we learned to slip with streaming. At the beginning, the narrator asks: “Why the cinema?” It continues to provide many answers. “See is a skill you should acquire”, and the cinema “a place where to see was a collective experience”. Kinsky’s narrator explains that “cinema has always been a place where you brought your own solitude, but it was that you did it knowing that you take your place among other lonely people. (…) You went to the projector’s light beam, operated by a foreign hand. (…) You have abandoned yourself instead, to see. ” And now? The cinemas of the former Kinsky narrator conclude: “Died because of the lack of audiences, the lack of renovations, due to the general and weak opinion that it is enough to look at digitized images to sparkle on any old screen.”

Sometimes Kinsky’s language becomes even more didactic and academic, as when she writes that “the disappearance of the cinematographic site is inseparable from the infiltration of this voluntary act of seeing, engaged under the pretension of a wider selection, and relegated to the private sector …” However, it balances this discourse with beautiful descriptions and the landscapes and the landscapers that they have used And the landscapers that they have accustomed, like the lovers of the narration and the landscapers and the landscapers they inhabit, like the lovers of the narration and the landscapers and the landscapers that they have accustomed, like the lovers outside the interview and the landscapers and the landscapers they have inhabited, like the lovers outside the interview and the landscapes and the landscapes for a projection A finish, observing how “a wind had taken up outside, turning the dust on the dry and hard earth floor, forming small funnels with small swirling things helpless inside: small pieces of wood, rim, the entrance tickets dispersed and used previous projections.” Winter takes over, and “in these cold and hungry birds that fell trees like forgotten toys, tired and frozen wild animals, and defenseless, knowing how to put their hooves so gently that only a trace remained, as if it were blown on the surface, advanced in the gardens, where here and there was a brassica plant lying on flow.” I am not yet sure of what all this means – the time of nature and the short time of cinema – but I got out of the novel that linger on the rhythms of loss and time. Kinsky – in the elegant English translation of Caroline Schmidt – Remaine one of our most lyrical writers and a master of description, mood and tone. Consequently, this book is less a novel and more a brief dream, an appointment in a dark room suspended in the light of images, half quiet, in the cinema.

You go See further With the feeling that the narrator of Kinsky has made his argument, repeatedly, on the way in which “a journey to the cinema widens the world and extends over time”, and on the way in which, without the collective film of the past, we can no longer speak with each other and live together as we used to. Kinsky makes sofas romanticism and elega in the dreamers of the narrator, which aspires to “a moment when everyone went to the cinema every day, rushed, in fact, in fact, by frequenting the screen to form his gaze.” After a number of pages, you get the point. And you wonder where we can train our eyes and if we can maintain pieces of old cinema in today’s rubble. And sometimes, suddenly, the narrator’s sentences relax and they surprise. At one point, she thinks: “The films – I really learned to love them.” Then, she writes, going from the known to this beautiful space of novels and films, the land between the known and not known: “I would never have thought that cinema could be such a rock in my life; Each film was like an excursion to another country, every time, and I was alone and at the same time as I was not. ”