Espejos 2022

Slow Mirror

Igor e Ivan Buharov | 2007 | 86'

SYNOPSIS

Do you know what drink the bartender serves you? Do you know what drink the bartender serves? If your lover serves the drink, it is your destruction. If the drink is fiery, within it brings enlightenment. Drink the drink of intoxication, be consumed by love! A drop happily seeks its death in the ocean water. All the world is a bar and the things in it simply glasses. Our friend raises his glass to us and we pay the bill. Even wisdom is drunk, descending into stupor. Earth and heaven are drunk and so are all the angels.

BIOGRAPHY

Igor e Ivan Buharov

Kornél Szilágyi (1971, Hungría) y Nándor Hevesi (1974, Hungría) han estado trabajando juntos bajo el pseudónimo de Igor e Ivan Buharov desde 1994. Tras completar sus estudios en comunicación visual e intermediática, ambos cursaron el programa de doctorado en artes liberales de la Universidad Húngara de Bellas Artes. Sus carreras en filme experimental empezaron con las tendencias intermediáticas que emergieron en el sistema cultural institucional que se reestructuró tras los cambios políticos de principios de los noventa. Desde entonces, los Buharov han desarrollado una práctica artística única, pasando a ser figuras definitorias de la escena contemporánea de las artes visuales, la música y el cine de Hungría. Han sido galardonados en numerosos festivales de cine (por ejemplo, la Semana de Cine Experimental de Madrid, el Festival de Cine Independiente de Hungría, el Festival de Cine de Milán o el Mediawave Film Festival), y han asistido a varios programas de residencias internacionales (por ejemplo, Transit Artist in Residency, el MQ Vienna, y el Künstlerhaus Bethanien). El dúo ha expuesto sus obras en el Manifesta 8 (2010), la bienal de Kíev (2015), el documenta 14 (2017), y la Bienal de Varsovia (2019), entre otros. His mediatically varied activity oscillates on the border of film, fine art, music and performance, as seen in his feature film Most of the souls that live here (2016) and his performative project entitled Eternal Intentionfield Tuning (2018), which incorporates live music, exhibition and performance.

Multimedia

Critical text

The films of Ivan and Igor Buharov (pseudonyms of Kornél Szilágyi and Nándor Hevesi) are like rolling buckets. Slow Mirror (2007) is a concatenation of picturesque situations that never fail to appeal to essential issues such as relationships between individuals, death and paranoia. The artifice and genius of the Hungarian filmmakers is manifested through narrative intersections, plots that connect and disconnect under the arbitrariness of the dream in which everyone and no one is connected. Because what begins in a grotesque and no less hilarious way following a single character, quickly transforms into a thematic tangle that is not afraid to mix plots, spaces, genres and registers. A man in a wheelchair who has a goal to accomplish, a recreational comic death that will lead the widow to have more than one new suitor, and so on. The visceral starting plots and subplots will be mixed with a new vision of fiction through mystery, ritual and dreams. And between the innocent and the nightmarish, the objectivity of the world will be broken, reinforcing the non-linearity of space and time and constituting a rare and dazzling trash onirism.

Filmed in an overwhelming super 8 enlarged to 35mm, Slow Mirror materializes fractured ideas in a unique “Frankenstein's monster”; something unique within the Hungarian panorama that goes back to home videos and underground fictions, but starting from labyrinthine premises and modernist ideals. Here everything is present and the mirror takes too long to reflect reality, thus generating a series of barbaric disjunctions that end up turning the everyday into the strange and vice versa. BORJA CASTILLEJO CALVO

Technical Sheet