Az én XX. századom

Enyedi's debut may draw comparisons to the work of the French surrealists and the Czech New Wave, but it's marching to the beat of its own demented drum, the product of an eccentric and personal vision. Its non linear narrative collapses space and time and the occassional disgressions from its main conceit---following the lives of identical twins separated at birth at the advent of the 20th century--seem indulgent, but there are a wealth of ideas explored playfully in elegant style.

Exploration of the character of a century in which electricity and communication technologies transformed life amidst political and sexual upheaval, but the digressions prove more successful and affecting than the main narrative, such as there is one. The spirit-filled cosmos created by the filmmaker certainly possesses charm and oozes cinematic style, even if it may not quite cohere. My choice of a subject through whom to voyage through the 20th century would indubitably be Sergei Pankejeff.

At times, I was a little bored with the characters. The high score is for the photography and all technical aspects.

One of the darndest things I ever did see.

I like its "first film energy," youthful, playful, and destructive. This was shot on celluloid from early 1900s, which gives it an archaic and magical feeling, especially when combined with the expressive lightning. Enyedi has an original reflection on film here: a single person can play two twin-sisters thanks to cinema's trick. But this is modernity; same object acquiring different meanings in different systems, statuses, classes, because of a break in time-space, which is what cinema does.

https://letterboxd.com/ladyspiggott/film/my-twentieth-century/

so dreamy and gorgeous for the first ~hour, and the music is lush