Bourgeois dictionaries (Private Hungary 7)

Forgacs recontextualizes archival home movies and film journals from the 1930s through to the 1950s, taking small moments, individual shots or whole sequences from a variety of sources and editing them together into a mosaic of middle class Hungarian life.

The soundtrack layers political radio broadcasts of the times over the ambient music of Tibor Szemzo, creating a sense of expectancy, of fate. The images however are resolutely concerned with the everyday, the personal, the pleasurable. Tantalising glimpses of cafe society, fur coats, cigars, flirtations, erotic encounters and picnics are interspersed with moments that mark turning points in family life; a father laid in state, poppy seed loaves being baked as a son leaves for the front, a daughter’s first communion.

The 2nd world war is referred to in an incidental way; planes flying over head intercut with the 1944 figure skating championships or a little cat being petted in the bombed out ruins of a building. A catalogue of daily life at once nostalgic and familiar.