Bódy, Gábor: Armour (Berlin, 1983)

Gábor Bódy (1946–1985) made this short film during his Berlin grant days on the Sony camera provided for his use by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). Around this time, Bódy was seeking to work “as often and as personally as possible” in video, which he considered a new, personal, “intimate and informal” device. Knight's Armor is just one of the short films he made during this time, like others that are in the Museum's collection (The Hostage, Brothers, The Demon in Berlin, and Either/Or in Chinatown). The film's protagonist is played by a young woman Sophie von Plessen (costume designer for the German sci-fi The Hamburg Disease). A time traveller in knight's armor, she walks the streets of Berlin in the early 1980s: “She marches by the Gropiusbau; the Gloriette in the background; she sits on the terrace of a café on the Kurfürstendamm; she rides through the Grunewald, then dismounts her horse at the shore of a lake; she rides on (several scenes), descends the stairs of the Reichstag, has a snack at an S-Bahn stop; on horseback on the shore...” − so László Beke summarizes the scenes and settings in Bódy's catalogue raisonné. Following the armored knight, the camera records chance events in her environment and the modern “western” reality. This puts various human ages, ideals, and ways of life in an unusual, revealing collocation. Krisztina Szipőcs