This year, Kossuth Award winning cinematographer Sándor Kardos will receive our festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. We have asked three film professionals, theoreticians Beja Margitházi and Gábor Gelencsér, as well as Kossuth and Béla Balázs Award winning cinematographer Tibor Máthé, to pen what first comes to their mind about Sándor Kardos.
The invisible interpretation of reality
When I think of Sándor Kardos, the first thing that comes to my mind is his famous slit camera films, which had an enormous influence on me in my youth when I started going to the cinema. I was amazed by how he, using this technique in his unique, internationally outstanding films, made the relativised movements “move on”; how his camera recorded every moment through the slit without any interruption in time. Depending on their own speed, the moving elements appear distorted, elongated, while the unmoving elements appear as horizontal lines in the film. During the 19 minutes of Slit Film, the spirit of Japanese bushido manifests itself and then falls apart, even on the level of the story and of the accompanying images. In the short story The Handkerchief, read out by the narrator almost word for word, in the meeting point of East and West, a slow, calm and meditative atmosphere is born through close observations and concise phrasing, and this atmosphere is reflected smoothly in the amorphous shapes of the images shifting from left to right and then from right to left. The viewer can witness how objects, people and everyday images transform into something known-unknown: undulating faces spread out and gradually thin into nothing, the details of reality stretch and shrink like modelling clay, while constantly stimulating the senses. The point of view is fixed, but the objects reveal new faces again and again, and the whole film is surrounded by a mysterious metaphysical aura. Just as a torn handkerchief in Akutagawa’s story offers a glimpse of something below the surface, the invisible interpretation of reality starts to appear through the slit of the slit camera.
Beja Margitházi
Well-planned and well-structured imagery, yet with something unpredictable
When I think about Sándor Kárdos, the first thing that comes to my mind is the Horus Archives. But not because the collection he has created is more important than his work as a cinematographer or as a director, but because the photos in this astonishingly strong material show one, if not the most important aspect of his work. How can you at least get closer to that type of image creation which is well-planned and well-structured, yet there is something more in it, something unpredictable, unexpected, which is beyond intention, in which – as he said about the Horus Archives – “God’s finger got in the picture”? I believe he has managed to get close to this miracle as a cinematographer in many of his films. First of all, in the films he made with András Jeles, with whom he started to work together in the Amateur Film Club at ELTE university. They made their exam films together, and then he photographed Jeles’ first three feature films, The Little Valentino, Dream Brigade and The Annunciation. The next thing that comes to mind is the diversity of his cinematography. He has worked with filmmakers with the most different styles, from Jeles through Béla Tarr and Géza Bereményi to Péter Tímár. If we look at the films of the latter three directors, Almanac of Fall, The Disciples and Sound Eroticism, we clearly see this diversity in genre and style. And lastly what comes to my mind is Kardos as a director, who, in this position, can fulfil his wishes to experiment, and does it on the most basic level. He uses new technology, both a slit camera from sports races and a 360-degree panoramic camera, in order to create the image. However, it is important to note that his experiments are not self-centred: he adapts stories by writers (Akutagawa Ryunosuke in Slit Film, Kafka in Metamorphosis and Rilke in The Gravedigger) with whom this unique, unusual way of representation works well, as it can convey their as well as director-cinematographer-author Kardos’ ideas turned into images.
Gábor Gelencsér
An emotional love of light
I feel honoured to be offered the opportunity to briefly praise Kossuth Award winning cinematographer Sándor Kardos’ diverse work on the occasion that he will receive the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He attended the cinematography class at the College of Theatre and Film Arts a couple of years before me, where his exceptional talent was already evident. As a first-year student, I was amazed to see how strong the visuality, built on dramaturgy, was in his exam films, and how it all radiated an emotional love of light already back then, which would later characterize his DoP career. His work shows that he believes in the mysterious power of the image shaped by light, and that it is ideas that make true pictures. His whole body of work reveals this dramaturgical sensitivity, an excellent ability to think in pictures as well as an outstanding ability to show what is invisible. The master we both had, cinematographer and teacher György Illés, believed that after graduation, his students should become intelligent cinematographers who can tell, on a high level, all kinds of stories. Sándor Kardos believes the same, and he has justly become one of the greatest representatives of the Hungarian cinematography school. All his works are shaped by his passion for light and by his unstopping urge to experiment, which was accompanied by a high level of technical knowledge, be it film or photography. In addition to all this, he has been collecting old amateur photographs for decades, having created a huge, internationally acknowledged collection. Dear Sanyi, please allow me to congratulate you on the Lifetime Achievement Award from the bottom of my heart, and wish you further success.
Tibor Máthé cinematographer
