Sándor Reisenbüchler - Barbárok ideje / A Era dos Bárbaros, 1970

Also known as The Age of the Barbarians"By any measure, Sándor Reisenbüchler is one of the most consequential film artists to emerge from post-war Hungary – a notion validated by his being awarded in 1993 the nation’s most prestigious cultural honour, the Kossuth Prize. His hugely influential films are bound up with the flourishing of the Pannónia Studio in the 1960s and ‘70s into one of the communist block’s most internationally acclaimed filmmaking institutions. But Reisenbüchler was ill-suited to the straightforward role of national hero: a self-professed anarchistic hippie equally disillusioned with communism and capitalism, who made friends and enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain; the “hermit of animation” who laboured away on his strange creations at his kitchen table; the trained documentarian who produced some of the most luridly fantastical short films of the era."One thing is certain: nothing looks – or sounds – like Reisenbüchler. There is a protean and syncretic…