KORNÉL SZILÁGYI, NÁNDOR HEVESI (AKA IGOR AND IVAN BUHAROV)

Rudderless, 2010

30' 2010, B/W, video transfer from super 8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Essm9jyR0sA

The artist duo Igor and Ivan Buharov (Kornél Szilágyi and Nándor Hevesi) have been working together since 1995 in the field of experimental film, music, and visual arts. Besides working on the edge of film and visual arts, they also collaborate with different groups beyond the visual art scene. Since 1994 they have played in the bands Labor 40, then Pop Ivan, and are co-authors in the collective Kaos Camping, presenting audiovisual performances. The Budapest-based artists met in the 1990s during their art pedagogical studies at Eger Pedagogical College; since then they have been making films and music together. Nándor is also a painter and free jazz musician, and Kornél studied at the Intermedia Department of the University of Fine Arts in Budapest where he is a DLA student.

The Buharovs shoot their films mainly with super 8 technique and combine elements of experimental filmmaking and narrative story-telling. The use of dreamlike imagery, poetical and philosophical texts, and self-written music give the specific atmosphere of their films. The world created by the Buharovs moves on the frontier of dream and reality, they capture archetypical experiences in surrealistic atmosphere. The protagonists are mostly friends and non-actors, who live outside of mainstream and elite culture, and often speak out poetic or philosophical dialogues given to them. The vision of freedom and its impossibility, the slow steps of the individual towards self-liberation are topics touched with melancholy and irony.



The film ‘Rudderless’ inspired by a 1971-poem with same title by Hungarian poet István Domonkos (1940). The poem is a modern epos, a self-reflection of a person living in minority status in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s, with relevance today: an individual forced into migration, and brought under uncontrollable circumstances in a globalized world. Without directly using the text, the film follows the poem in black and white images, accompanied mainly by their own music. We follow a journey which the protagonist starts from a forest passing through different lands and cities in solitude, then encountering different people, getting in short personal relations, finally ending up at his lonely caravan in the woods where he departed. The first 30-minute version of the film was finished and first presented at Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain. Among the images, textual material also appears: Domonkos’s poem, thoughts about power, governance, and freedom. Similarly to the poet, the artists are also skeptical about the positive effects of governance, and propose alternatives in anarcho-communist ideas, and quote, for instance, Errico Malatesta:

"With all this, the government does not change its nature. If it acts as regulator or guarantor of the rights and duties of each, it perverts the sentiments of justice. It justifies wrong and punishes every act that offends or menaces the privileges of the governors and proprietors. It declares just and legal the most atrocious exploitation of the miserable, which means a slow and continuous material and moral murder, perpetrated by those who have on those who have not.”

more information: http://www.buharov.hu/portfolio/

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