Nemes, Csaba: Remake 1-10 (2007)

The work – originally submitted for the Hungarian Pavilion at Venice Biennial –, presents the events of the riots in Budapest in the autumn of 2006 in the form of short animations. What happened shocked the whole society, and triggered opinions from everybody, yet the events remained unreflected in contemporary art. Perhaps this is why three of short the films entitled Remake by Csaba Nemes.

Besides the emblematic moments of the autumn of 2006, the siege of the Hungarian State Television, or the riding of a tank, the short, clip-like scenes of these works also show how Hungarian society experienced these impulses which are still rather unusual for them. How did the happenings affect the “besiegers” and the “defenders”, the people in the street, close friends or political analysts? Csaba Nemes starts the individual scenes from media footage, private videos, and his own personal reconstruction of the events. The short, about one-minute-long stories are presented in different animation techniques and styles.

Csaba Nemes claims to have chosen animation “because this is the least documentary genre, it is not characterized by the ruthless naturalism of technical images. An important part of animation is drawing, that is, manual work, in spite of the fact that the work is now done on computers. This genre helps alienate and artistically analyze the concrete events, because it provides the opportunity to condense and to present from a different perspective the happenings documented by films, and through it the ironic, farcical remake of the autumn events may be created.”