SFJFF 29: I am Von Hofler, Variation on Werther

In 1983, Hungarian media artist Peter Forgacs established the Private Photo and Film Archive Foundation in Budapest, from which he has created 15 documentary films in a series called Private Hungary. Each film assembles old photographs and home movie footage and combines them with Forgacs' own video segments and interviews in a loosely woven montage which chronicles a life. I am Von Hofler is the story of Tibor Von Hofler, dilettante, chemist, amateur filmmaker, and spoiled son and heir to the estate of well-known industrialist Jakob Von Hofler. Video interviews with the 103 year-old Tibor and segments of his 9.5mm home-movie footage are curiously combined with bits of a 1975 film about Werther, Goethe's famous sorrowful literary character, who was supposedly modelled on Tibor's great-great grandfather. The whole is accompanied by translated narrative, much of it in the form of letters between family members, lovers, and friends. It is a peculiar, original, and subjective approach to history, which speaks via aural/visual disconnects and surrealistic combinations and overlays to aspects of life and character not usually found in historical documentary. The catalogue blurb mentions scenes of Tibor jauntily playing piano as the mother of his only son is heard pleading for money, of erotic photos combined with stern letters from his mother, and of Tibor and friends enjoying holiday time on a lake while his aunt describes conditions in the ghetto. I would add to this the even more remarkable spectacle of young Werther trying to drown himself in a plastic bag full of water edited together with ancient movie footage of a lady being spanked (hard, with a stick) in the garden, as Tibor's abandoned fiancee (he left her three days before the wedding) heaps scorn upon his head.

There is footage of public events, of private funerals, of the dead bodies of his parents, of his infant son playing in a meadow of tall grass, of swimming and climbing and dancing and eating and taking showers: Von Hofler was, among other things, an assiduous chronicler of his own life long before Forgacs came along. But the picture that floats to the surface of this streaming, impressionistic facade is of a strangely disconnected, selfish, frivolous man who cared little for his family and even less for our opinion. The film is compelling anyway, for its air of nonconformity, its strangeness, and perhaps also for the voyeuristic sense of pleasure we experience when people we don't necessarily admire continue to show us who they are.