By Oliver Baumgarten. Somewhere in a living room in Hungary there’s a TV running. A classic is shown: Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. The Russian cinematic masterpiece rumbles into the room’s couch environment on adequately high volume. A cat has laid itself to rest on one of the cushions, watching the screen with scrutinizing glances. “No”, it seems to think. “This famous stairway sequence that’s about to start, that doesn’t really bother me, being a cat and all that.” Slowly its sleepy eyes are closing. It’s napping. But not even a tired cat can withstand the power of Eisenstein’s effective editing: Barely fallen asleep it conjures up a dream of being a hero cat, all arranged in a perfectly segmented montage, as a homage to said stairway sequence.

With CATMAN the two Hungarian filmmakers Juli Szabó and Tamás Lehoczky have created a whole series of ironic short films, where their cat’s life gets a distinctive new shade through the effects of the cinematic medium on the poor animal. With CATMAN 0 – OR THE RUSSIAN MONTAGE SCHOOL’S EFFECT ON A HUNGARIAN CAT the two directors pay homage to a great master of world cinema: Sergej M. Eisenstein. Using footage of their straying cat and overlaying it with POTEMKIN music they have produced a stunning reminiscence of Eisensteins “Montage of Attractions” in the editing room, which once again proofs impressively just how powerful this way of editing still is even today. At the same time they find a comedic distance to their cinematic hero due to their choice of subject matter and thus can present CATMAN 0 as a very felicitous example of cultivated cinephilia.

Links

• CATMAN 0 (H 2008. Juli Szabó, Tamás Lehoczky)
• Filming in Complete Independence – An interview with Juli Szabó and Tamás Lehoczky
• Gotten Off Lightly – Franziska Schuster about the Hungarian film market