Cinema's Alchemist

Bill Nichols is professor of cinema at San Francisco State University. Michael Renov is vice dean of academic affairs and professor of critical studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

"PÉter ForgÁcs is indeed an alchemist, as this insightful compendium of essays proclaims; his extraordinary process transforms ordinary home movies into works of profound and sometimes mysterious beauty. This volume brilliantly articulates the qualities that make his work so distinctive and important, not only as acts of cinematic archaeology but as transformative art. Michael Renov’s concise appreciation of ForgÁcs’ devastating reimagining of pre-Holocaust Jewish family movies in The Maelstrom, and Bill Nichols’s and Scott MacDonald’s revealing interviews with the filmmaker himself, are among the gems to be discovered." -Peter L. Stein, Executive Director, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker "There are film makers who have created a documentary opus of great significance, and have thereby deepened our understanding of the past. PÉter ForgÁcs, Hungarian film maker and media artist, is such a man. He composes films as if they were musical compositions-by using found material." -from the 2007 Erasmus Prize Laudatio

• ContentsIntroductionBill Nichols Part I. Setting the Scene1. PÉter ForgÁcs: An InterviewScott MacDonald2. The Memory of Loss: PÉter ForgÁcs’s Saga of Family Life and Social HellPeter ForgÁcs and Bill Nichols, in dialoguePart II. The Holocaust Films3. Towards a New Historiography: The Aesthetics of TemporalityErnst van Alphen4. Ordinary Film: The MaelstromMichael S. Roth5. Historical Discourses of the Unimaginable: The MaelstromMichael Renov6. Waiting, Hoping, among the Ruins of All the RestKaja Silverman7. The Trace: Framing the Presence of the Past in Free FallMalin WahlbergPart III. Other Films/Other Contexts8. How to Make History Perceptible: The Bartos Family and the Private Hungary seriesRoger Odin9. Found Images as Witness to Central European History: A BibÓ Reader and Miss Universe 1929Catherine Portuges10. Re-envisioning the Documentary Fact: On Saying and Showing in Wittgenstein Tractatus and Bourgeois DictionariesTyrus Miller11. The World Rewound: Wittgenstein TractatusWhitney Davis12. Taking the Part for the Whole: Some Thoughts Inspired by the Film Music of Tibor SzemzÖTamÁs KorÁnyi13. Analytical Spaces: The Installations of PÉter ForgÁcsLÁszlÓ F. FÖldÉnyi14. Reorchestrating History: Transforming The Danube Exodus into a Database DocumentaryMarsha KinderAcknowledgmentsFilmographyContributorsIndex