I will never forget the time when Kati Macskássy and Zoltán Jeney met at KAFF in 2007. We went to have breakfast, and Kati was already sitting at a table. She noticed us and waved at us to join her. They greeted each other with genuine joy and immediately began counting how many years it had been since they had worked together…
Zoli remembered that Kati was pregnant when they edited the film Push Button at Pannonia in 1973. They had hardly seen each other since then, but 34 years later, in the restaurant,they chatted with such enthusiasm, it was as if they had picked up the conversation right where they’d left off the day before. Zoli was deeply shaken by Kati’s unexpected and early passing in 2008. We lost a great friend in film.
A much better-known story in film history is the meeting of Zoltán Jeney and Zoltán Huszárik during Jeney’s postgraduate music composition studies in Rome in 1968, because Sinbad (1971), one of the brightest moments of Hungarian culture, is a result of their shared cinema experiences and conversations. Their first opportunity to collaborate came with the original 1969 short Capriccio, which was also significant in terms of animation.
In the early seventies, Gábor Bódy invited prominent masters of associated arts to Balázs Béla Studio to renew the language of film together. Round (1975) is a characteristic answer to that challenge, having musical tones strictly organizing the animated “order of masking” above the “natural picture” conveying life’s movements of unpredictable direction and density.
He made Kalah, an experimental project based on an Eastern board game, in 1980, with Dóra Maurer. This avant-garde motion picture, built on sober logic, was recorded on celluloid and achieved frame-by-frame accuracy in synchronizing sound and image through painstakingly meticulous work.
Jeney engaged in animation again 30 (!) years after Kalah, when I heard him working on Pavane, listening to the magical sounds coming through to my room upstairs, where I was working on my film Zenit (2010), practically above Zoli’s head. Sitting in the sound, I could see the music grow together with the film…
In contrast, in Vox Animae (2012), he came up with the struggle of the stringed instrument during the process of creating the film, taking advantage of digital technology.
During the production of Transit (2017), the great Szabolcs Keresteš helped rethink the unique Jeney “self-quotations” for the visuals. We had the chance to watch this film together with Zoli at the 2019 KAFF, having delightful conversations after the screening. We could spend time with wonderful colleagues in our last animation summer together…
Zoltán Jeney enjoyed coming to Kecskemét—he followed the recent developments of Hungarian animation with interest, liked the company of young artists, and found pleasure in recalling the memories of historic moments shared with his contemporaries. He watched the work of Ferenc Mikulás with respect, as he had been devoting his life to Hungarian animation. Great warriors of great causes tend to understand each other.
Zoltán Jeney will be with us again at KAFF through his animation-adjacent works, looking down at us from a “high-angle” position—just as Round was shot back then—sipping from a cup on the terrace of a heavenly restaurant, surrounded by some heavenly friends, as they follow our goal-ridden paths, which nonetheless seem random from a certain distance…
Zoltán Jeney—member of the legendary New Music Studio, Kossuth and Erkel Prize-winning composer, and a major figure of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music—passed away six years ago, in 2019, at the age of 76. But his spirit remains with us.
Éva M Tóth
animated film director
