Hukkle · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the old man on the bench. He sits at the edge of a road in the Hungarian lowlands and hiccups — hukk — at intervals, for the whole film, a small involuntary sound that means nothing and organizes everything. He is the film's clock. Around him a village goes about its day: a shepherdess and her flock, a woman at a stove, bees, a mole tunneling, a snake, water striders skating a pond's skin. György Pálfi's debut looks, for long stretches, like a nature documentary that wandered into a farmhouse. Then you notice the men keep dying. And the women, working their kitchens with the same unhurried care they bring to cooking, are leaching arsenic from flypaper. The serenity and the horror are not two films. They are one image, watched twice.

The thing to understand first is the camera's appetite. Gergely Pohárnok shoots a pig's snout and a bride's face with exactly the same patience, goes under a table, inside a beehive, through soil and water, stitching impossible continuities with discreet digital seams. Deleuze had a name for a vision like this, and he found it in Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera — one of Hukkle's direct ancestors. He called it the gramme, or the material eye: perception freed from any human center, the camera become pure matter among matter, sampling the world at any point rather than from a person's eyeline. When Hukkle dives through earth to follow a mole, it isn't showing us what a character sees. Nobody is watching. The film is. This is what Deleuze meant by a plane of immanence — an acentered, non-human vision, the world filming itself, with no privileged observer to rank a murder above a pollination. That flattening is the film's whole moral engine. Evil doesn't stand out here because the camera refuses the hierarchy that would make it stand out. Killing enters the frame at the same register as digestion.

Which leaves the viewer stranded in a very particular way. There is a crime, and there is no detective. The sensory-motor machinery of the thriller — perceive the clue, question the suspect, act, resolve — has been unplugged. What we get instead are Deleuze's opsigns and sonsigns: pure optical and sound situations, moments where a character (and we with them) can only look and listen, with no available action to discharge what we've registered. The hiccuping man is almost the pure form of this. He is a seer, not an agent — he endures, he witnesses, he does nothing, and the murders proceed past him like weather. Pálfi hands us the detective's job with none of the detective's tools. We are asked to notice, which is a different faculty than to act.

So how does the mystery ever surface? Through a beautiful piece of misdirection about where meaning lives. Most of the clues are what Deleuze called demarks — small anomalies that break habit and force interpretation. A man is sick. A widow grieves. A substance is prepared in a kitchen. Each is nothing on its own; the pattern only closes in retrospect, across cuts wide enough that you assemble it after the fact, if at all. And then, at a wedding, the film does its most astonishing thing: a folk singer performs a traditional ballad whose lyrics narrate the poisonings, plainly, aloud, to a community that does not flinch. This is a lectosign — an image that has quietly lost its self-evidence and now has to be read — produced through audiovisual disjunction, sound and picture telling two different stories at once. The eyes have been watching a pastoral. The ears are handed the confession. The solution was never going to be in the image, because the image had sworn itself to surfaces. It arrives as a speech-act, a legending voice — the crime survives as folk culture, sung the way a village sings anything, which is the coldest joke in the film.

Place this in a lineage and its originality sharpens. From Ruttmann's Berlin and Vertov it takes the wordless city-symphony, the community organized by rhythm rather than plot. From Microcosmos it takes the insect-scale macro gaze. From Franju's Le Sang des bêtes it takes the documentary calm that films slaughter as ordinary process, and from Sátántangó the mud and duration of the post-communist Hungarian village — which Pálfi answers with something brisker and slyer. From Playtime it inherits narrative carried by designed ambient sound, and pushes it nearly to total silence. What Pálfi adds is the fusion: he braids a whodunit into the kino-eye, so that the democratic camera which grants everything equal weight becomes, without changing a thing, the perfect instrument for hiding a murder in plain sight.

That is the invention worth naming. Hukkle proves you can tell a crime story entirely by withholding the crime's grammar — by trusting montage, sound, and the viewer's patience to do what exposition does. Watch it once and it's a village breathing. Watch it again, knowing, and every gesture curdles. The film hasn't changed. Your eyes have. Ask yourself which viewing is the true one, and you'll find Pálfi has left the question, deliberately, unhiccuped.