 György Kovásznai 70 KByte |
The painter, author and animated film director György Kovásznai, or, as he had signed his works as well, György Gábor Kovásznai would have been 64 years old on 15th May. As long as he lived, he waged constant war with the world and consequently with art, of which he was so much a part. Indeed, he never managed to decide in which genre to create something great – as an artist of fine arts, as an author or as a cartoon maker. "There are tensions in me, in all of us and somehow I have to resolve them, just like all of us. Furthermore: I would like to be useful in my own way and if the desire becomes strong enough and when the results achieved comply with this goal in full, then I believe that all these categories of style and genre will melt away and become irrelevant..." (Self-interview) He was a gifted, versatile artist, a well read, educated man. He wrote plays, short stories, novels and theoretical pieces. He published both in "Élet és Irodalom" (Life and Literature) and "Nagyvilág" (Wide World). He had an impact as a painter as well. His almost classical Self Portrait is in strong contradiction with the alertness of his painted figures and image composition, which are also typical for his rich colours. Picasso's impact on his expressive pictures is undeniable even though he offers a contradictory view about him in a later Self Interview stating that "he skipped the task of concrete exploration of reality in the great and universal Feast of Life and Joy", therefore his grand universality is a fake one. This directly leads to the conclusion that "modern fine arts kept highbrow generalities for themselves and let concrete individualities to photography, graphics, advertisements and finally to pop". Here, in the pop media it became spoilt en masse. He established his statements on his own research and in this he received significant assistance from excursions to the world of manual labourers, when he worked in the mines as a haulageman, interrupting his studies in order to gain personal experiences about real life and true relationships among the workers. He professed with Aristotle that art must be more consequent and truer than life. He came to the art of animation at the beginning of the sixties arriving from the School for Fine Arts. It is the magical sixties when both in animation and feature films the world of film has turned around. This is even more true for animation which blossomed suddenly, out of the blue, was filled with substance instead of babbling and chirping, and, eventually growing up, began to pry into the delicate affairs of human existence. Thought control slackened a bit which resulted in flaring ambitions for experiments. In animation, graphical and painting values have come to force, unusual techniques, new style or striking creative approaches were adopted. Kovásznai was one of these artists: "...he approached animation from painting and the innovative twentieth century graphics. In the mid-sixties, as a Hungarian cartoonist, he turned toward modern European fine arts and the influence of colourful Paris-workshops poured into the yield of Pannonia Film Studio through is films. Picasso's Mediterranean colourfulness, the decorative touch of Matisse's paintings and the spatial experience in his lights, fine artist-film maker gestures of the diabolic Jean Cocteau – all productively influenced Kovásznai's thinking. He much loved Saul Steinberg's graphics as well. The playful eclectic approach of the world famous cartoonist-philosopher obviously influenced Kovásznai's style-changing works." (Sándor Reisenbüchler) He created a new, "adult" way of animation by his very first film, Monologue (1963), a common work with Dezső Korniss, great master of the Hungarian European School. Its innovative impact lies in its nature of publicity, comprising a generation's time span of our continent and nation in merely 12 minutes. Of his films of public nature, a notable one is Calendar (1972), made in thin graphics, which refers to his own age's Neonazi incidents through evoking the years of Nazism from 1933 on. The influence of the Parisian documentary school brought along a change of style in his oeuvre. Using the method called "anima verité" he captured individual, non recurrent moments, faces of every day life in hundreds of sketches and later used them woven into his films (Sprouting No. 3369, Ring Nights, Reportrait). He recorded characters in cafes as well. Taped discussions, noises in this teeming, living world and later used them in his films. The most beautiful and lasting are his throbbing, expressively painted-animations. In Transformations he abandons background and phase graphics in a very innovative way in order to repaint the emerging picture under the camera in a very time demanding way. The method returns in Ca ira more clearly, in higher synthesis, picturing the French revolution with discipline. The beautiful one-minute piece, Gloria Mundi is really astonishing presenting the heavenly frescoes of churches and the mushrooming cloud of nuclear bombs in a daring association with elbowing little angels. His film The Memory of Summer '74 is fresh, glaringly merry, based on the rock hits of the era. By 1979 he completed his only full time animation film, Foam Bath, which became the third full time animation film in Hungary. The graphic-type animated-musical, or, as the creators marked it in the sub-title: "musical animated cartoon for heartbeats" , provoked a mixed sense of critique when presented. Both the story, which was reminiscent to the Hungarian film comedies of the thirties and consequently held in a very low esteem and not able-bodied, both the strange and special drawing technique of presentation shocked the viewer. Yet, the director's intention was to make a popular film acting at the same time with the strength of novelty, using effects of everyday life and avoiding the application of "miracles" otherwise commonly accepted in animated cartoons. This was the reason, why he portrayed the main characters using living models, just like in his other short films made with the technique of 'anima verité". Though they are stable figure designs, but in dramatic conflicts they begin to move in strange budding, waving movements thus exposing their characters. Beside the images, the second highlighted element in the film is music, which is reflected rhythmically in the pulsation of lines and colours. He was working on the plan of a new full night animation cartoon, the animated adaptation of Candide, which however he was unable to realise: This flamboyant spirit, who kept on trying new ways and directions, was carried off death in his youth. His good friend and fellow-artist Sándor Juhász writes: "he was an animator in the true sense of the word. I like to think about his work as life giving leaven, starting healthy, sound processes." <Film Színház Muzsika (Film, Theatre and Music), 14 January, 1984>
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 Gloria Mundi (1969) 80 KByte | |
 Budding (1971) 69 KByte | |
 The Memory of Summer '74(1974) 69 KByte | |
 Foam Bath (1979) 64 KByte | |
 Foam Bath (1979) 90 KByte | |
 Foam Bath (1979) 66 KByte |
