Verder kijken

by Esther Kinsky, Josephine Rijnaarts (Translator)

Op reis door het zuidoosten van Hongarije belandt de hoofdpersoon in een bijna uitgestorven plaatsje. De overgebleven bewoners denken vol weemoed terug aan de tijd dat het sociale leven in hun dorp nog bloeide en de mozi, Hongaars voor bioscoop, het bruisende middelpunt vormde. Zoals zoveel voorzieningen is de mozi al lang gesloten, maar het gebouw staat er nog. Aangespoord door de bewoners en gedreven door haar enthousiasme voor de cinema in het algemeen probeert de hoofdpersoon deze mozi weer tot leven te wekken. Of dat ook lukt?

Verder kijken is een ode aan de bioscoop, dat magische oord waar je samen in het donker van alles beleeft, collectief en toch anoniem, een unieke sensatie. En het roept de vraag op wat er verloren gaat nu deze gezamenlijke ervaring steeds meer plaatsmaakt voor het individuele kijken.

Dit boek is geïllustreerd met zwart-wit foto's.

Genres: Fiction, Film, German Literature, Literary Fiction, Hungarian Literature

225 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 2023

About the author

Esther Kinsky, geboren 1956, hat Slawistik und Anglistik in Bonn und Toronto studiert. Sie arbeitet als Übersetzerin aus dem Polnischen, Englischen und Russischen. Ihr übersetzerisches Oeuvre umfasst u. a. Werke von Ida Fink, Hanna Krall, Ryszard Krysnicki, Aleksander Wat, Joseph O'Connor und Jane Smiley.

Kinksy lebt in Berlin. 2009 wurde sie mit dem Paul-Celan-Preis ausgezeichnet und 2011 erhielt sie den Karl-Dedecius-Preis.

Reviews

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esther Kinsky is one of my favourite writers, ever thoughtful and observant. This novel (as is often the case, the UK edition considers it nonfiction, while the US edition explicitly calls it a novel) is the account of a woman's discovery of an abandoned cinema in a village east of Budapest and her decision to purchase it to try to revive the film going experience that is giving away to the small screen. Slow moving and inevitably Sebaldian (with many original black white photographs) this is a work that combines the narrator's love of the cinema, with a fictionalized account of the development of the film experience through the depiction of a variety of characters local to the town and its history. Kinsky's work is often called autofiction and although there is always a strong sense of place, landscape, and experience running through her narratives, it is not possible to pull the author out of her narrators. The setting of this work, the endless plains of eastern Hungary is familiar—her first, more conventional novel Summer Resort is set there, so Kinsky is no doubt drawing on a real-life sojourn in this region in the mid-2000s, but as ever, very little of the narrator's personal background or history is revealed. Why is she in Hungary? What does she do for a living? Kinsky's narrators tend to shadow her own life, but retain boundaries. Autofiction, on the other hand, tends to be a much more self-focused, sometimes even self-obsessed medium. It's this ability to touch deeply yet stand apart that makes novels like this so intriguing.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2025/02/26/lo...

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

The celluloid never lets you go 😭

I love when people love things and write about them with so much care and tenderness and attention that you can feel the love in each word. This was beautiful and made me want to go to the cinema for an entire day to watch movies

Also an especially fun read since I’ve started working in a film archive 🥹

[Janick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Das Schwinden des Kinos als Ort lässt sich nicht trennen von der Unterwanderung des Sehens als Willensakt durch die Vorgaukelung einer größeren Auswahl, abgedrängt ins Private, Kleine, Kontrollierbare. Der Öffentlichkeit entzogen, der Subversion entfremdet."

[Spiros · Rating 5 out of 5]

The narrator of this tale finds herself in a region of Southern Hungary bordering both Romania and Serbia, a lowland region in which, it is said, one can stand on a pumpkin and see into Budapest. In a small town that has fallen on depressed economic conditions, she comes across a deserted movie theater; as she interacts with the locals, she is drawn into an inevitable pipedream of rehabilitating the cinema. Coincidentally, her neighbor in Budapest was the lover of the film obsessed man who brought the cinema into the southern town, which rather conveniently holds the narrative themes together.
All in all, this is wonderfully engaging narrative that examines the validity of memories based on lived experience as opposed to memories generated from memories produced by literature, art, and movies. Particularly enticing is the way in which the region is a hodgepodge of various cultures throughout the region, as though the Austro-Hungarian Empire has finally reached its full potential.

Also, the protagonist's iteration of linden trees insistently brought a certain Mitchell and Webb sketch (the one where Robert Webb plays Queen Victoria and David Mitchell plays Gladstone) into my head, which is a nice bonus.

[charlots · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2

“Wenn sich Laci zu keiner Nachfrage bewegt fühlte, sagte sie: Dieser scharfe graue Dämmer ist nichts für mich.
Das Gedicht geht anders, sagte Laci.
Ich weiß, antwortete Julika.”

nette passagen, die passieren

merci à johanna

[Wouter Zwemmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nogal nostalgisch boek over verouderde bioscopen als plekken van hoop, als toevluchtsoord voor eenzamen, ongelukkigen en verliefden. De twintigste eeuw is de eeuw van de bioscoop in die zin, als “weelderig ingerichte locatie voor films”. Kinsky schrijft haar verhaal over vertalen dorpen in Hongarije, of zoals ze het zelf beschrijft: “(…) deze gekwetste grensstreken en niemandszones van Midden-Europa.” In die contreien gaat hoofdpersoon op zoek naar verlaten bioscopen. In een desolaat dorp koopt ze er één met de intentie om die weer tot leven te wekken.

Hoe zou je dit boek moeten lezen? Als een stijloefening in nostalgie, in tegen beter weten in willen vasthouden aan een verleden dat niet meer bestaat? Of als een allegorie voor een verdwijnend Europa?

Kinsky concludeert dat nostalgie geen zin heeft. “Een bioscoop alleen voor je eigen plezier werkte niet (…).” Na één zomer sluit de bioscoop alweer wegens gebrek aan belangstelling. Na twee jaar slaagt hoofdpersoon erin om de bioscoop te verkopen aan iemand die er een bowlingbaan van wil maken, “een ordentelijk vermaakscentrum zoals hij het formuleerde, waar de mensen iets aan hadden.” “(…) hij stak zijn minachting voor het belachelijke idee om in deze tijd een bioscoop nieuw leven in te blazen niet onder stoelen of banken. Dat had je toch meteen kunnen weten, zei hij belerend.” In deze tijd waarin de interesse is verschoven van de bioscoop naar ‘content’, van het ‘hoe’ naar het ‘wat’, waarbij het niet uitmaakt of je in een zaal of op je eigen privé-beeldschermen kijkt. De eenzamen, ongelukkigen en verliefden komen niet meer samen in de bioscoop maar zijn nu in hun eigen omgeving in hun eentje eenzaam, ongelukkig of verliefd.

Eén van de vrouwen die hoofdpersoon ontmoet, heeft een baan in de grootste tegelfabriek van het land. Haar enige taak is het opvegen van kapotte tegels. “De hele dag alleen maar scherven opvegen? vroeg ik ongelovig. Ze lachte, ja, er ging zoveel kapot.” Wat Kinsky aan ons laat om te bedenken is dat sommige zaken in het leven het verdienen om kapot te gaan: armoede, onderdrukking, femicide, machismo, uitbuiting, racisme, oorlog… zullen we nog even doorgaan? Vandaar dat het algemene nostalgische levensgevoel van verlies en ‘vroeger was alles beter’ niet standhoudt. Nostalgie is iets van het verleden en niet iets om nostalgisch over te zijn.

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

the great tragedy of the 21st century is that basically the mid 20th century perfected how me took in culture and everything since then has simply dismantled the institutions that we love, leaving mostly rubbish in its path. behold seeing further a love letter that the cinema fallen, the community zone where one persons idiosyncrasy defines the small town they are in. Its easy when there is nothing else, but the people want the slop (most of the time), with the cinephile imagining all the great walls that could hold their beloved projections.

I did not really enjoy this, but found the writing solid, the idea fine enough, and the reading of it sort of boring. But what do I know.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This atmospheric novel is about nostalgia for films and the collective experience of watching them in a theater. The plot about reviving a movie theater in Hungary is sparse. Rebuilding the theater for people who don’t want to attend is a metaphor for townspeople who desire more plot than experience.

[sj · Rating 3 out of 5]

could have done more i feel but still really interesting/enjoyable to me. like the pictures. the cast of characters working together felt very community theatre to me. hard to star rate but somewhere between 3/4

[Mara Strange · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cinema isn't dead!!!

[Rachel Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my cinema man from Glasgow :’)

[carola · Rating 2 out of 5]

una stella per il cinema, una stella per l’ungheria

[Colette Bernheim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only the third book I’ve read this year but might end up being the best book I read this year….

[Bridget Bonaparte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really boring and pointless book though it did make me want to re-subscribe to the criterion channel.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A ponderous walk through the Hungarian countryside, grappling with what cinema was, and what place it holds in today’s world. In Esther Kinsky’s words: “Film wasn’t a mere sequence of projected images–film was cinema, and it became reality when the gaze met the screen, and the seeing happened surrounded by other viewers. An experience unimaginable without the presence of other participants, who’s identities literally remained in the dark although they were also silent confidants, accomplices in seeing.”

I found myself taken with the people here. Their culture, their restrained determination. The downfall of the theater is mirrored in the town in which the story takes place. There’s a sense of waiting for the outside world to arrive, but it never does. This is coupled with a loss of curiosity in their daily lives. In the end, Ester walks through the city she had lived in 16 years prior.

“In the snaking road not a curtain stirred, unlike in earlier days, when every footstep awoke an irrepressible curiosity, a genuine voraciousness for new things, for a brief look at a face, a figure that did not belong in the street. Even this curiosity seemed to have disappeared.”

That rings true to me, and is sad. By having access to the world at our fingertips, why go to the cinema? Why sit with others when we can sit on our couches? Why talk to others about a movie in person, when we can read what people think about it on Rotten Tomatoes? Our lives are expanding in one sense, but contracting in another. The world’s waning interest in going to the movies is just one example of this, but it feels like a big one to me. One last quote that stood out to me:

“The more the privatization of all experience eats away at our lives, the more fabulous appears a venue where seeing was a collective experience, where wit, terror, dismay and relief found a communal expression without encroaching on the anonymity afforded by the dark room.”

In other words: “Heartbreak feels good in a place like this” ;)

[JanLu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sehr schöne Passagen, die immer wieder spannende Beschreibungen über die Verlassenheit von Dörfern, alternde Menschen und vor allem natürlich das Kino tragen.

Gerade der Blick auf die das WIE sehen gefällt mir sehr gut, ebenso wie die Sprache, die in Passagen wirklich toll ist. Insgesamt ist drumherum aber sehr viel, das mein Interesse einfach gar nicht geweckt hat und so war es selten ein drauf (auf das Buch) freuen, stattdessen aber ein Erfreuen an den Passagen.


„Das Was triumphierte über das Wie, jeder gewöhnte sich daran, die eigene Einsamkeit, die sich früher ins Kino ausführen ließ, vor dem heimischen Bildschirm im Nacken sitzen zu haben, ein privates Buckelchen, dem es wohl dort war. In einer immer unbequemeren, schnelleren, bedrängteren Welt gab die vorgegaukelte Bequemlichkeit der steten Verfügbarkeit von Daten, die sich zu einer Bilderreihe fügten, Anlass zur Fürsprache für den kleinen Blick im kleinen Raum.“

[matti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eine Kinoromantikerin ist hier am Werk, die ein vergessenes Kino in einem ungarischen Dorf wiederbeleben möchte - da sprüht ganz viel Liebe fürs Filmschauen in Gesellschaft durch.
📽
"Der Gang ins Kino weitet die Welt und die Zeit, das Kino bleibt ein Wunderort."

Im Dorf wird mit Skepsis oder Teilnahmslosigkeit auf das Projekt geschaut. Ein paar Mitstreiter finden sich dann doch und so nimmt die Wiederbelebung immer weiter Formen an.
Wenn der alte Projektor angeschmissen wird, ist das schon ein magischer Moment - im Buch finden sich auch einige Fotos des Kinos und aus dem kleinen Ort.

Manchmal ist der Text etwas philosophisch/theoretisch - gerade auch zu Beginn, was mir den Einstieg etwas erschwert hat.
Der Blick auf die Geschichte des ehemaligen Filmvorführers erweitert die nostalgischen Kinogedanken, da der mit einem mobilen Kino über die Dörfer getingelt ist.

Insgesamt keine packende Story drumherum, aber ein lohnenswerte Text für Freunde der Kinomagie.

[Paul Narvaez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a pre-disposition to this subject matter. It's about collapse, decay, memory, cinema, loneliness. I especially loved her writing, her language. The reflections on time and it marching on.
It's fragmentary and has interstitals with photos (a la Sebald). At times I was unsure whether I was reading fiction, or memoir, or travelogue, or diary. It seemed fictional and then we are shown photographic evidence of place. I liked that journey. Set in a no mans land in southern Hungary bordering other states equally lost, forgotten or neglected.

[Marije · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Films hadden deze ruimte nodig, het doek, de kijkers in het donker, en de kijkers hadden op hun beurt het donker nodig, de anonimiteit in de ban van de beelden, het kijken in een filmruimte, alles wat alleen mogelijk was in de bioscoop. Alleen zo konden films tot hun recht komen. Alle blikken in één richting en iedere blik op zijn eigen horizon.’

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very sad little book. Esther Kinsky describes in sparse prose her attempt to restore and revive a film theater. Are we too obsessed with details to be able to see further?

[Esther]

Weeral een topper. Esther Kinsky doet de wereld vertragen en doet je kijken naar de wereld om je heen, iets wat we vandaag soms iets te snel vergeten. Aanrader!

[Charley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a moving and overall lovely read

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely meditation on our collective contemporary condition. Thought experiment: who of the world's great directors would best have adapted it to the screen? My pick: Michelangelo Antonioni.

[Toma Prichard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story about a German settling in a Hungarian village to resurrect its space-age relic of a cinema is almost entirely without dialogue. Like, there are fewer than ten direct quotes in the entire novel. But Seeing Further avoids sounding sterile or standoffish. This is partly because in her meditations on cinema and on marginality Kinsky's narrator is empathetic to a degree that is unfashionable today, and partly because being thought-burdened and dialogue-deprived is a feature of even the most garrulous people in the real, non-fictional world. How many minutes of the day do you spend speaking to other people versus thinking to yourself?

The central insight of Seeing Further is that how we see is as important as what we see. The experience of seeing a movie at at home, on your smart TV for instance, is "fundamentally different" from seeing the same movie at the cinema, as "it occurs without a partitioning off, without surmounting the distance between your trusted, domestic surroundings and the cinema, without the conscious act of entering into a space that is subjected to different rules, and without animating the range between the eye and the cinema. (56)" Like Newton with his corpuscular theory of light, which lends the inscrutable and ephemeral phenomenon of light a materiality and solidity, the narrator's mediations on the "range between the eye and the cinema" discover a materiality and density in our gazes, laden with memories and expectations, which are funneled by the darkness of the movie theater towards the screen, where we hope to find resonances of real life and reaffirmations of favorite tropes.

Seeing Further is a pastoral novel. The Great Hungarian Plain, with its boundless horizons and blindingly white overcast, is peopled with modern-day shepherds who tend lovingly to things dear to them, be it antiquated projection paraphernalia or a mental list of the neighbors that have come and gone in one's neighborhood (which a memorable side character obsessively recites and on which he is losing his hold as he develops dementia). Far from idealizing rural life, Kinsky relates the incredible boredom that attends settling in an isolated place and the ability to perceive infinitesimal changes that one develops living in such a slow-moving environment: "the great weariness of the person who has toiled to the bone besides an immense sky, and then, exhausted, fell asleep on the edge of the field below the burden of emptiness and can feel the grass growing beneath their heart. (138)" What Seeing Further lacks in dialogue it makes up for in illuminating scenes like this.

[🪞🎠 · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The cinema is a space of expectations that are seldom let down - not even by a bad film, since every time, no matter what, you end up seeing further than you had before, exploring a horizon that would not exist without the screen” (51). Esther Kinsky’s love for the cinema is evident in each word, it is alive on the pages. The act of going to the movie theater and seeing, intention and meaning behind the ‘how,’ is as important as ever. I was moved by the narrator’s attempt to revive the desolate, abandoned space that was once a lifeline, a cornerstone. Even if failed, the attempt is commendable because it is important work. No matter how the world and its general viewing culture may change, the dark room offering anonymity and a shared gaze at the horizon on screen must be maintained and celebrated. We can go to the cinema and gaze into a mirror, a microscope, a whole new world. We can experience a lifetime in a couple short hours. The rules of time and space evaporate when the auditorium doors close and we are left there in the darkness with only the flickering glow of the screen. Regardless of the convenience that personal screens and streaming services may provide, how could this magic possibly be forgotten?

The story is beautiful. I was entranced by the characters and the vast landscape covered in ice and white light. It made me think of my time spent in Europe (where I stumbled upon this book- in Lisbon) and my seeking out theaters in each new city I visit. To see the preserved cinemas and which films they decide to include in their programs. I was completely drawn into these Hungarian lowlands. And the overlapping timelines which attest to the fact that passion for cinema spans generations and will always remain. When she returns to the cinema 16 years later and it is once again abandoned, once again an orphan, it made me sad. Because the reality is that time changes things and some people will move further and further from this horizon, no longer feeling a need for the cinema in their lives. But for many, it will remain a precious gift, a place of refuge. A physical place worthy of respect and when necessary, arduous tasks to keep it alive. Just as Laci and Józsi and Esther tenderly proclaim, “The celluloid never lets you go.”
Long live the cinema.

[Rosemary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why go to the cinema? Why leave the house at all?

The cinema is a place where things happen. They stop the film because smoke is coming from the projection booth (The Davinci Code). The image onscreen bubbles up as the celluloid strip overheats (13 going on 30). They paramedics remove someone who's passed out while the image onscreen is paused (Calvary).

December 21st 2018, the last Friday before Christmas: the screening room is silent as everyone waits for Bergman's The Passion of Anna to begin. No one is chatting because evidently everyone came alone. The lights go down and the film starts, Liv Ullman and Max Von Sydow wake up from separate beds. The cast is right but something is wrong, the film is in black and white but I know The Passion of Anna is in colour. Or maybe I've misremembered. After 10 minutes the projectionist comes in and apologises, they accidentally started showing Shame - can we give him a few minutes to change to the right film? A few people say they don't mind watching Shame instead, if it's too much hassle to change it. Someone adds that they came to the screening of Shame that was scheduled a couple of days ago, but that The Passion of Anna is what was actually shown. No one said anything at the time. The projectionist offers this person a refund but they say "no, no, I don't mind watching The Passion of Anna again". No one feels particularly strongly about what we watch. This is a room full of people who came to the cinema alone while their colleagues went to the pub on the last workday before Christmas, who wanted to watch a Bergman film but didn't mind which one. Where else would they go if not to the cinema?

[Alissa Hattman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esther Kinsky’s Seeing Further is as much about her reverence for cinema as it is about the fall of the commons through privatization and neoliberalism. The book is written in five parts and includes black and white photographs that are mostly representational of Hungary, where Kinsky once owned a small movie theater. With patient, precise prose, Kinsky helps us experience the textures, sensations, and collectivity that is lost when we subordinate our viewing to computer screens and streaming services. What most impressed me about this book is how Kinsky shows the cinema as intersectional of personal and collective histories, of art and politics, of landscapes and capitalism. There is a generative tension between nostalgia and a hope for the future that permeates the book. We don’t get much of Kinsky herself. She is an outsider who buys a cinema and then somewhat blithely abandons the project. Her frame is limited, but aren't all our frames limited? Place many directors in one location and they would all film the space differently. What I know of Kinsky—she’s multilingual, a world traveler, and prefers listening to speaking—with each those positionalities, something will be lost and something gained. Ultimately, this is a book about hope for the arts as a common space where we can learn to see more together.

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's hard for me to be impartial towards a book like this. one thing that sets seeing further apart from other filmic writing might be its relative indifference to films; to kinsky, they are backdrops to the shared sight of cinema, which she contrasts with all these other forms of vision the book constantly charts like seeing the plains, or the seasons, or time passing. the novel's take on the "weight of history" feels akin to a mountain range in the distance one can glimpse if one manages to look up right as the day's haze has, momentarily, lifted. for all the sadness, everything is remarkably gentle. cinema could have lived on and has not. seeing is diminished but not extinguished. there are the windows and the life that stretches on longer. "so much gets broken."

"the evening air was heady with the scent of linden blossoms, people sauntered in the light of the streetlamps, automobiles passed down to the boulevard, and everything seemed livelier now by night, than it had by day, and you could even buy flowers, single roses or small bound bouquets." this passage breaks my heart so severely

[Claudia Ronchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A veritable poetic ode to the cinema as a physical realm, where watching films becomes a collective rite. It is set in a European country not immediately brought to mind when one speaks of film.

“Where do you direct your gaze?” Esther Kinsky asks us immediately following the prologue. A few lines later, she responds with a perspective that is nearly impossible not to embrace: “Even if confined to the margins of events, the cinema as a place of seeing preserves a mythic aura. The more the privatization of all experience devours life, the more fable-like a place appears where the experience of seeing was collective, where humor, fear, horror, and relief found communal expression without anonymity being compromised in the dark space. Even those who no longer go to the cinema know, in some way, the peculiarity of the experience, of the place, of stepping into an obscurity from which one directs one’s gaze elsewhere, of the tacit rule: all gazes in the same direction, the direction determined by the projectionist, invisible to the audience.”

Perfect reading to re-discover the magic of the cinema theatres.

[Marvin · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Where to direct the gaze? There are two aspects of seeing: WHAT you see and HOW you see it. This investigation into SEEING FURTHER will involve only the question HOW. It pertains to the place the viewer takes. It concerns point of view and remove from the things and images, from the action, proximity and distance, vastness. Vastness is more than physical; it is the scope of possibilities you allow." Thus this "novel" begins. And so it goes page after page (though I bailed out after about 50 pages, and there are about 50 pages of photos in a text that's only 205 pages). To me it's more like a book-length essay than a novel--and a boring one at that. I can't imagine a review that made me think this would appeal to me.