Final Cut: Hölgyeim és uraim

The magic of cinema, it could be said, resides not so much in the stories it tells as in the human gestures it illuminates: the different ways that we occupy space, and go about our daily business. What do we do in the morning for example ? We get up; we shower; we brush our teeth; we greet our partner or spouse at the breakfast table. We leave the house in a certain way, and return to it in another. What is magical about film is that it imbues such trivial actions with a certain style and archetypal resonance, never more so, perhaps, than when the gestures concerned are about love and romance.

The Hungarian director Gyorgy Palfi, previously known for such eccentric movies as Hukkle (2002) and Taxidermia (2006), has had the idea of constructing a whole film out of an anthology of such gestures, “stealing” extracts from over 500 existing films, and editing them together into a single continuous work of the imagination.

The completed film pays homage, in a way, to our practice of “zapping”, whether from channel to channel among the different television schedules, or else on the internet, as we dip in and out of options like YouTube. Random, however, merely on the surface, Palfi’s Final Cut is in fact a beautifully crafted work of art, taking viewers on a strange, dreamlike journey into the unconscious. This is the work of a poet: one of contemporary cinema’s most original and talented directors.

György Pálfi

Young Hungarian director György Pálfi has won several awards with his two feature films, including 'Best New Director' at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Donostia-San Sebastián, the Prix Fassbinder at the European Film Awards and the Grand Prize at the Hungarian Film Week. Both Hukkle (2002) as well as the grotesque comedy Taxidermia (2006), spanning the lives of three generations, were screened at film festivals and art-house cinemas around the globe and submitted as Hungarian entries in the category 'Best Foreign Language Film' at the US-Academy Awards.