Introduction

Gàbor Bòdy's (1946–85) short artistic career, which yielded exceptionally rich creative work, is an anomalous, almost inexplicable phenomenon of the post-1968 K#x00E0;d#x00E0;r era in Hungary. This period was marked on the one hand by the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism, which allowed for an increasingly market-oriented economic policy closer to capitalism (while preserving state ownership), and on the other by the military suppression of the Prague Spring. The latter indicated the impossibility of reforming state socialism, and the measures aiming at the new economic mechanism were gradually stopped. The long period of stagnation this engendered lasted until the 1989 regime change. Body's fate and the spirit of his films, while exceptional, are, at the same time, inseparable from this era. A far-reaching universal and national, generational, and existentialist drama unfolds across the film frames and on the pages of his biography. Body was a larger-than-life personality. He opposed his circumstances, broke barriers, and broke out of tight frames. At the same time, he paid the price by becoming part of the system, which eventually consumed and destroyed him: he committed suicide at the age of thirty-nine. He attempted to be simultaneously inside and outside of the state-socialist system. As a result, he created a remarkable but incomplete oeuvre, bequeathing to us an impressively rich, diverse, open fragment in the Romanticist sense, the elements of which constantly hint at the desire for universality and completeness.