FIASCO

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With fragments from Imre Kertész‘ book.

Fiasco describes the attempt of a new beginning, to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, in an inhumane totalitarian system, the Stalinist Budapest, as the author Imre Kertész himself has experienced. The photo essay is about the visual adaptation of Kertész’s own literary method: the attempt to put together fragmentary evidence, fragments of the present age and Déjà vus into a complete picture. From the assembly of excerpts from the novel and photographic image sequences results a superposition of time, an exciting ambiguity, a picture puzzle.

“With the photonovel fiasco, an homage to la jetée by Chris Marker is proposed: in a nameless airport in a large, foreign yet familiar city, a man is searching for a way to survive, in a system which has condemned all those people who have not yet lost their belief in the individual and in freedom.”
nathalie hénon and jean-francois rettig, rencontres internationals

The photonovel transforms Imre Kertész’ literary method into a visual language: by joining fragmentary elements from the past and the present, by finding traces that link experience and remembering.
The book with its filmic images moves the “reader” to think movement; by flicking through the book, the editing, the montage is effected through the reader’s exploration of it.