In Esther Kinsky’s fiction, landscapes write and speak. Across her novels we find “waters sighing,” “shadows of leaves scribbling notes,” the Oder drawing “countless watery question marks and intertwining letters,” “annotating the landscape.” Kinsky animates the environments of her books, reminding us that the world is alive, that the borders between ourselves and our settings are sometimes as thin as wisps of clouds, and that the self exists outside of the self, reflected in infinite pieces of broken mirrors—in objects, buildings, landscapes, rivers, trees.
In Kinsky’s latest novel, Seeing Further, the landscapes are still alive—but as the backdrop to the book’s main focus, the lost beauty and magic of cinema. Seeing Further is an elegy to the film-reel cinemas of the past, those places “that fomented stories by robbing you of words before the screen,” “these dormant motion-picture castles, with their worm-eaten, rusty, blockaded doors.” The question opening Seeing Further continues the preoccupations of Kinsky’s earlier fiction: “How to direct the gaze?” And Kinsky decides to turn her gaze to the abandoned ritual of cinema because, as her autobiographical narrator argues, “in the past century no location was as important for the how of seeing.” The narrator continues: “The collective experience facilitated by this space is disappearing along with it,” and so “this loss, whether mourned or not, deserves to be described and merits consideration.” Films and landscapes both point us to questions about the collective, to “the boundary between images seen and things experienced,” and Kinsky brings them into dialogue in strange and unexpected ways.
As she does this, Kinsky supplies only sparse characterization and plot. An unnamed narrator discovers a run-down cinema she wants to revive in a small town in southeast Hungary because of her responsibility “to reawaken a space for collective seeing.” She leaves Budapest to restore the building, revives the cinema according to her own tastes, and finally sells it after public indifference. In the middle of this, she pauses to tell the story of a timber merchant who falls in love with movies and travels from village to village to project films in the late 1920s. Kinsky stages no direct dialogue, sketches few additional characters, and avoids dramatic conflict.
What, then, is in this novel? The past: details watched in slow motion. Rain and wind, the musty scent of damp wood, heavy felt curtains, people smoking in screening rooms, “plumes rising before the image and floating in the air.” Projectors thrumming, clicking with life. Concession stands, coat checks, “old-fashioned tear-off tickets made of a thin textured cardboard,” and celluloid film strips, teeming with “an entirely distinct, unrepeatable magic”—“beauties from a different time.” Seeing Further reads like those eulogies in which we grasp at memories of a person we have lost so that we can cling to him and hold him on this side of death. “Where to bring a deceased screen?” Kinsky’s narrator asks. “Were there still small residues of images and scenes sticking to the edges of the holes and damaged spots?”
The epigraph, a quote from the filmmaker John Cassavetes, prepares us for this tone: “There is something important in people, something that’s dying—the senses, a universal thing. […] The whole world is dying of sadness.” Kinsky writes to remind us of those beautiful fragments of the past, that time before we learned to glutton ourselves with streaming. Early on, the narrator asks, “why the cinema?” She goes on to provide many answers. “Seeing is a proficiency you should acquire,” and the cinema “a venue where seeing was a collective experience.” Kinsky’s narrator explains that “the cinema was always a place to which you brought your own solitude, but it used to be that you did so knowing you would take your place among other solitary people. […] You surrendered to the beam of light from the projector, operated by a foreign hand. […] You abandoned yourself to the place, in order to see.” And now? The cinemas of old, Kinsky’s narrator concludes, “died due to lack of an audience, lack of renovations, due to the general rampant, feeble opinion that it’s enough to watch digitized images flicker across any old screen.”
At times Kinsky’s language becomes even more didactic and academic, such as when she writes that “the disappearance of the cinematic site is inseparable from the infiltration of this volitional act of seeing, committed under the pretense of a larger selection, and relegated to the realm of the private…” Yet she balances this discourse with beautiful descriptions of solitary people and the landscapes they inhabit, like when lovers gather outside the narrator’s cinema for a final screening, observing how “a wind had picked up outside, eddying the dust on the dry, hard-packed dirt ground, forming small funnels with little things swirling helplessly inside: small pieces of wood, scraps of twine, the scattered, used entry tickets from previous screenings.” Winter takes over, and “in this cold, starving birds dropped from the trees like forgotten toys, weary and frostbitten, and helpless wild animals, knowing how to put their hooves down so gently that only a trace remained, as if blown onto the surface, advanced into the gardens, where here and there was a brassica plant gone to flower.” I’m not sure yet what all this means—the long-time of nature and the short-time of cinema—but I emerged from the novel dwelling on the rhythms of loss and time. Kinsky—in Caroline Schmidt’s elegant English translation—remains one of our most lyrical writers, and a master of description, mood, and tone. As a result, this book is less of a novel and more of a brief dream, an appointment in a dark room suspended in the light of images, half-quiet, cinema.
You leave Seeing Further with the feeling that Kinsky’s narrator has made her argument, over and over, about how “a trip to the cinema expands the world and stretches time,” and about how, without the collective moviegoing of old, we can no longer talk with one another and experience together like we used to. Kinsky couches the romanticism and elegy in the dreaming eyes of the narrator, who longs for “a time when everyone went to the cinema every day, rushed there, in fact, as a matter of course, frequenting the screen in order to train their gaze.” After a number of pages, you get the point. And you wonder about where else we can train our gaze, and about whether we can glimpse pieces of old cinema glinting in the rubble of today. And sometimes, suddenly, the narrator’s sentences unwind and they surprise. At one point, she muses: “the films—I really grew to like them.” Then, she writes, moving from the known to that beautiful space of novels and films, the land between the known and not-known: “Never would I have thought the cinema could be such a rock in my life; every film was like an excursion into another country, every time, and I was alone and at the same time I wasn’t.”
