Kontroll
Crazy subway workers try to catch a killer on the loose
Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is the Oedipal anti-hero at the heart of Hungarian director Nimród Antal's drop-dead brilliant Kontroll. A ticket-taker and a rent-a-cop, he's assigned to a misfit crew at odds with every other misfit crew in their Orwellian transit agency. The film, a surprisingly violent and kinetic slapstick comedy, begins with one character aping Harpo Marx's blowtorch lighter bit from Duck Soup and ends with scenes that recall Vincent Ward's visionary The Navigator.
Bulcsú is a Hal Hartley protagonist, too smart and too damaged for the world, set adrift in the film on the heels of a hooded figure pushing commuters into the path of onrushing trains. He tries to find love with a young woman (Eszter Balla) who rides the subway dressed in a bear suit while seeking his own identity in the motivations of the killer haunting his adopted, infernal home.
Vilmos Zsigmond apprentice DP Gyula Pados' fulsome cinematography makes of the subterranean sets the kind of textured iconographic landscape of Wim Wenders' late American films. (The picture was shot entirely in the labyrinthine subway warren beneath Budapest.)
A Jungian dream in which Bulcsú finds himself crawling through something like an endless vaginal tunnel is the moment when Kontroll comes fully alive: it's the juncture between metaphor, craft, and narrative--and for almost all of its final hour, the picture maintains an unbelievably high level of invention and insight. It's a great science-fiction piece, a razor-sharp satire, and an impressive calling card for an emerging Hungarian cinema. (W. Chaw, Film Freak Central)
(Screening made possible by ACE fees.)
Kontroll
Free show!
Sponsored by The Colorado Daily
Co-promoted by Program Council
Wed September 7, 2005, 7:00 & 9:15, Muenzinger Auditorium
105min, Hungary, 2003, Hungarian w/English subtitles, R, Color • official site
Tickets
10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission.
$7 w/UCB student ID,
$7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.
Parking
Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the
Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters
along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.
RTD Bus
Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus
International Film Series
(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.
First Person Cinema
(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.
C.U. Film Program
(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil
Grillo.
Celebrating Stan
Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.
C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.