Vakvagany
dir. Benjamin Meade
Fri-Sun Feb 21-23 at Consolidated Works.
This season’s film series at Consolidated Works has the lovely, loose title “Interpretations,” and is so meta-film it hurts. Each entry looks at film in the context of film, so that our assumptions about film’s universe (about narrative, class, critical acclaim; about vision itself) are turned back on themselves.
The one you really want to see is Vakvagany, which uses as its starting point a few reels’ worth of home movies discovered in a filthy Budapest apartment. The conceit has a familiar postmodern feel–the application of rigorous study to the fruits of a chance encounter–but filmmaker Benjamin Meade doesn’t turn this into a story about filmmaking. He keeps the subjects in his crosshairs, even as those crosshairs grow increasingly weird.
The home movies of the Locsei family, made from the late ’40s through the ’60s, are creepy in the way that home movies are: intimate, fractured, mysteriously loaded. Meade tries to track down the family, with limited success and conflicting reports. Papa Locsei may have been a communist, may have cooperated with the Nazis, may have helped the Jews–the vague, imprecise subtitles add their own obfuscating layer. In one clip, Locsei sorts a small mountain of jewelry and tags each piece, a gesture rife with sinister references to other films.
In the absence of real information, Meade offers the films to various experts for interpretation, but each one brings his own agenda: Crime writer James Ellroy can’t help but see a fucked-up narrative; experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage waxes poetic about love and stultification; psychiatrist Dr. Roy Menninger is so Freudian he’s almost ridiculous.
But it’s Menninger who seems closest to the truth. He notes the lack of affect on the Locsei children’s faces, is particularly obsessed with a clip of the mother holding the son’s penis while he urinates, with his baby sister watching. Something, he keeps saying, is not right here. And when we finally meet the Locsei children, both in their late 40s, Menninger is vindicated. Erno is an ungainly alcoholic, mentally ill and minimally employed cleaning streets. When he’s shown the films of his parents, he doesn’t recognize them until he’s told who they are. His sister, Atuska, is a tense recluse: The filmmakers square off with her in an interview in which she pulls her sweater over her face and keeps threatening to call the police.
In the end we know precisely nothing about the Locseis, except what film can tell us.