Description:

(György Kovásznay, 1979, Hungary, DCP, 75 min.)

Hungarian artist, writer, and editor György Kovásznay was a prolific painter and animator, working primarily in the 1960s and 70s. He made a couple dozen shorts, but Habfürdő (variously translated as “Foam Bath” or “Bubble Bath”) is his sole feature, and his magnum opus. The plot is slight—focused on a studious nurse, her sexy nurse friend, and her friend’s hypochondriac fiancé—but the animation is a roiling, dynamic tapestry of ever-shifting styles. Kovásznay considered his films to be extensions of his painting, and brings to them a kinetic, kaleidoscopic energy and a visual style that Eyeworks co-curator Alexander Stewart has likened to Ralph Bakshi. Habfürdő is a modernist-infused cartoon, with musical numbers, that reflects on social and personal relationships in a communist society in flux. It might just be the strangest film you see this year.