During her travels through the Great Alföld, the lowlands of southeastern Hungary, Esther Kinsky arrives in an orphan town near the Romanian border, where she becomes enamored with and bids to restore a ramshackle mozi (the Hungarian term for “cinema”). As any film programmer could anticipate, this Sisyphean, yet well-intended undertaking is a disaster: projector parts are absent, brittle reels are strewn about the floors, the linoleum is blistered and the windows are clotted with fly droppings. Still, the building calls to Kinsky, with its angular signage and mustard-yellow seats—an irresistible movie house with good bones, if only it had the right administration. Seeing Further is an autoethnographic, deliberately difficult to describe account of Kinsky’s efforts, translated from German into English by Caroline Schmidt. An elegy for film exhibition, or, the social conditions in which film exhibition thrives, the book builds upon a failure to reproduce the cine-ecosystems of yore and an architecture for appraising the act of seeing.
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