Come Play with Us, Danny! (Bori Máté, Hungary 2021)
Single channel, HD video with sound

The material used for the video is a 35mm-fragment of an old Hungarian commercial from the Hungarian Film Archive. It was an old filmstrip they wanted to throw away.

It shows a woman on a television screen (of an older version of a television set). As for the sounds (noises of certain various electronic devices such as radio, telephone, etc.), Máté collected these from the BBC Sound Effects library. The spoken words are a distorted line from Stanley Kubrick’s film Shining (1980): “Come play with us, Danny.” The exclamation mark is the artist’s.

Apart from evoking such trivial forms of media as television and its indispensable partner ­­­– the often ideologically loaded commercial – this piece stands, on one hand, as a critique of these forms and places them in quotation marks by applying a more radical experimental form. On the other hand, it also invokes both the traditions of hand-painted abstract films and structuralist films by which it ceases to be a simple reference to the classical forms of media and opens up the discussion toward various ways of experimentation. The distorted line from Stanly Kubrick’s Shining (1980) is an indication of the often appropriating nature of experimental cinema and of the interconnections between Hollywood and experimental cinema. The line itself also functions as an invitation to step into a territory whose boundaries are still yet to be discovered.

Bori Máté is a Hungarian experimental filmmaker and currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (supervisor: Gabriele Jutz). Máté studied film history and film theory at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She has been making films since 2016. Most of her works are hand-painted abstract films. In her solo projects (The Headless Appearance, 2017, The Silent Spring Seahorse, 2018), Máté engages with questions of perception, the operation of memories and the inaccessibility of reality. She regularly works together with other artists, such as Péter Lichter and Ádám Márton Horváth. Their latest experimental feature film, The Philosophy of Horror (2020–21) is an abstract reflection on Noël Caroll’s famous film theoretical text of the same title. Máté’s films have been screened at such film festivals and venues as Berlin Critics’ Week, Jihlava IDFF, Oberhausen Film Festival, Film Festival Cottbus and the Torino Film Festival.