In the summer of 1866 there was war between Prussia and Austria.
The troops are on the move in half of Europe, they also bring a disease into circulation: cholera.
In Judit Elek's 1984 film “Summer of Passion”, a chicken is the first victim of the disease.
Later people also die, but the actual illness that is told is different for the film scholar Lisa Gotto: “Chronos is the pathogen.
Time does not heal wounds, it is itself the ailment, a disease that has been made visible. "
With her text on “Summer of Passion”, Gotto also turns against a common consequence of temporality: things are forgotten.
Films, books, moments fall back into history and have to be salvaged from it.
The presence of Judit Elek's works is limited by a variety of obstacles: They have to be technically secured by different carrier media, and then they also need an introduction, because simply in this way it will not be possible to understand what a highly talented woman in communist Hungary was capable of doing in communist Hungary before 1989 tried to tell.
Observation-intensive enthusiasm
The book “Kino unter Druck”, in which Dominik Graf and Lisa Gotto deal with “film culture behind the iron curtain”, tries both to give concrete introductions to works that are worth preserving and - at least to some extent - to develop a theory as to why in the state-controlled, ideologically monitored film cultures of the countries of the real existing socialism, such great films have been made time and again. Masterpieces by Věra Chytilová in what was then Czechoslovakia, by Andrzej Wajda in Poland, by Márta Mészáros in Hungary.
With Dominik Graf and Lisa Gotto, two people with very different backgrounds meet on a common ground: Graf is one of the most important film artists in Germany, and he's just coming to the cinema with “Fabian or The Walk to the Dog”, a film adaptation of Erich's novel Kästner;
Gotto teaches film theory in Vienna.
The common ground is a concrete, detailed, observation-intensive enthusiasm for the films presented - "beautiful, delicate, almost slipped films".
Analytical and enthusiastic
At the heart of “Cinema under Pressure” is also a polemic. It aims at the German film of today, to which Dominik Graf is one, but to which he has repeatedly taken a pronounced outsider position. It is a cinema of drawers, in which the likelihood that “fantastic, great, but somewhat insubordinate scripts” will seek funding, let alone hope for realization, is low. The battle term state cinema, which Graf heard from Klaus Lemke, “is not that wrong”.