An Aesthetics of Personal Time

Since 1988 the Hungarian artist and filmmaker Peter Forgacs has assembled the Private Hungary documentary series from an archival collection of home movie stock dating back to the 1930s and up to the present. His films draw upon a film archive, established by Forgacs himself: the Private Film and Photo Archives in Budapest. The Private Hungary documentary series deals with the Hungarian Bourgeois under two totalitarian regimes: first Nazism then Communism. But Forgacs has also made films that focus on other kind of historical and political situations or disasters. His film The Maelstrom from 1997 is about the persecution of the Jewish population in the Netherlands during the German occupation. It draws upon the found home movies of the Dutch Jewish family Peereboom and of the home movies of the Austrian Nazi Seys-Inquart, who was appointed Reichs Commissioner of the Netherlands in 1940 as representative of Hitler. His recent film El Perro Negro (The Black Dog) from 2005 is about the Spanish Civil War and consists again out of home movies.

The material of all of Forgacs’s films belongs to the domestic sphere, (home movies) whereas the films as such deal with catastrophic historical and political events and situations. All his films and installations act upon the tension between personal time and history.  Personal history is not represented as part of collective or “official” history, (as synecdoche of it); it is in radical tension with it. Forgacs’s archival footage keeps insisting on the private and affective.

Forgacs’s films and installations are not documentary in any traditional sense: we get little historical information about the specific political situations. The image we get of it is very limited because restricted to the personal life of one or two families as represented in their home movies.  His films do not work on the basis of information, historical facts or representational image, but on the basis of the affective relationships between the people in the home movies, between the filmed persons and the cameraman and between the filmed characters and the viewers.

In my talk I will argue that it is because of these affective relations that his films and installations are able to establish transcultural and transhistorical relationships with audiences who have no immediate stake in the specificity of the political events that frame the home movies. It is because of this very specific aesthetics that past and present are not presented as continuous or metonymical but rather as metaphorical. The past events are not seen at a distance, but they are presented in their inner connectedness with the present time of the viewer.

Ernst van Alphen, Leiden University, The Netherlands