Program Note
Hungary. Here, across three generations and a century, we meet three men. There's Vendel, a soldier at the front lines of a world war, unable to contain his boiling lust; his son Kálmán, a former competitive speed-eater celebrated under the Cold War-era Soviet regime; and Kálmán's son, Lajoska, a taxidermist who now cares for his morbidly obese father, who is too large to even stand. For these three men—and for the film Taxidermia—the body is a site of overstatement, dominated by obsessive consumption and overwhelming sensation. Penis shoots fire, stomachs expand endlessly, and straw is stuffed into the hollowed skins of eviscerated bodies. Through extreme close-ups, the body is fragmented and de-fleshed. These grotesquely exaggerated bodies, teetering on the edge of the surreal, become a display case for the sociopolitical traumas that Europe endured throughout the 20th century—communism, post-Cold War disillusionment, capitalism, and alienation. And then comes the film’s final scene: an elegant act of consuming a taxidermied body. It plays like a cold, autobiographical chapter in which the film itself declares its place as a cinematic body, packaged and circulated within the capitalist film market of the 21st century. The true horror of Taxidermia emerges most intensely in these moments—not in any one image of mutilation, but in the quiet, clinical clarity of what they signify. (Jin PARK)