Also known as The Age of the Barbarians
"By any measure, Sándor Reisenbüchler is one of the most consequential film artists to emerge from post-war Hungary – a notion validated by his being awarded in 1993 the nation’s most prestigious cultural honour, the Kossuth Prize. His hugely influential films are bound up with the flourishing of the Pannónia Studio in the 1960s and ‘70s into one of the communist block’s most internationally acclaimed filmmaking institutions. But Reisenbüchler was ill-suited to the straightforward role of national hero: a self-professed anarchistic hippie equally disillusioned with communism and capitalism, who made friends and enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain; the “hermit of animation” who laboured away on his strange creations at his kitchen table; the trained documentarian who produced some of the most luridly fantastical short films of the era.
"One thing is certain: nothing looks – or sounds – like Reisenbüchler. There is a protean and syncretic quality to his animations the refuses easy categorisation. He adapted epic poems and Jules Verne adventures, drawing on folkloric imagery and popular mid-century cinema, as well as developing his own steampunk take on science fiction. His blend of lurid painted landscapes and paper collage cut outs only adds to the eclecticism – to say nothing of his omnivorous approach to sound design, often cutting up familiar classical pieces into aural mood boards to match his visual energies. This is not to say that Reisenbüchler lacked clarity of vision: much of his work shares a keen ecological sense of mankind’s place in the natural order, and the dangers of pushing beyond its limits. It was a worldview that proved equally well suited for critiques of the state socialism he grew up with and the consumerist free-for-all that followed.
.... Pannónia..... Reisenbüchler began work there in 1964.... In the mid-sixties, Pannónia was one of the most vibrant studios in the eastern bloc. Established at the same time as the nationalisation of the film industry in 1951, the studio was made independent in 1957, and dominated animation in Hungary until the end of the communist era..... “I never liked Pannónia, because I was used to a different style at the Film Academy,” he recalled. “The filmmakers there didn’t look at the world through the eyes of an industrial artist. They questioned everything mercilessly… That wasn’t the case at Pannónia, and I stood out from the crowd.” That he had not come through the ranks as an animation student also told. “Since I am a self-taught cartoonist, I was surprised that my colleagues in the world of graphics described things as ‘beautiful’… For me, all this meant was that they didn’t want to look behind things, never wanting to offend anyone. In my eyes, what mattered was the message of a film, how it was structured, how it provoked, informed, or manipulated.” While admiring many of his colleagues, Reisenbüchler also sought inspiration in the poster art of Polish duo Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, as well as American popular cartoons. He took to working from home, painstakingly assembling his strange creations at his workbench in the village of Felsőgöd, north of the capital. “The hermit of animation” was on his way.
"His true breakthrough, however, came in 1968 with The Kidnapping of the Sun and Moon. The 11-minute film is based on an epic poem from 1952 by Ferenc Juhász, itself a composite rendering of folk legends from the Polish Carpathian territories.... Reisenbüchler later described his encounter with Juhász’s work as having “a lifelong significance. This film was and remains my ars poetica. This is faith in the eternal relationship between man and nature and the eternal possibility of renewal.” The sense of a primordial world of archetypal forms and figures is visualised in Reisenbüchler’s eye-popping, quasi-abstract collage style, which recalls the primitivist art of his compatriots Dezső Korniss and Endre Bálint as well as the traditional decorative designs of Polish peasants. Man and beast alike flicker and undulate, metamorphosing before our eyes, here resembling cells under a microscope, there seeming more like intricate architectural models. There is no dialogue: Reisenbüchler preferred to accompany his visuals with snippets of classical music, here deploying Spring from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons during the idyllic scene-setting, and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims at Hiroshima to accompany the post-apocalyptic visuals that follow the dragon’s attack.
".... In keeping with his strangely syncretic worldview, Reisenbüchler often drew in this work on early twentieth-century literary sources for his futuristic visions, lending them a kind of psychedelic, steam-punk aesthetic. Panic (1978) is derived from the 1936 novel War with the Newts by the Czech author Karel Čapek, about the discovery in the Indian Ocean of a sea-dwelling race of sentient amphibians who are enslaved and exploited by scientists – with dramatic consequences. Also present is the clear influence of the Japanese kaiju or monster films of Godzilla, Mothra, et al. Peacekeeping Expedition borrows from the pomp and circumstance of Jules Verne to decry imperialistic high-handedness, as a gang of jumped-up military men travel to Mars on a “civilising” mission that’s anything but, accompanied by the ironic jauntiness of a ragtime band...
.- Sam Goff, Klassiki
