Iluminace 2025, 37(3):119-146 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1825

Ritualization and Táltos Procedures in Péter Lichter’s Nutrition Fugue (2018)

Bori Máté ORCID...
University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria ✉

In his film Nutrition Fugue (2018), Hungarian experimental filmmaker Péter Lichter appropriates remnants of discarded film strips from a socialist grocery advertisement (közért, literally, “for the community”), featuring images of processed meat dishes. As an exemplary case of geographically specific materialist film practice, the film functions as both a historical artifact — documenting East Central Europe under the socialist regime — and as a disruptive rupture, bringing past and present materialities into dialogue. This paper argues that Lichter’s process of cutting, decaying, and reassembling the film stock enacts a form of material self-dismemberment that contests dominant (visual and narrative) representational regimes. This ritual undoing of cinematic form resonates deeply with the logic of the ancient Hungarian táltos tradition. The verb tált, meaning “to open wide,” is connected to shamanistic procedures of ecstatic dismemberment, renewal, and revelation, serving as a tool for transmutation and perceptual expansion. This ritualistic transformation constitutes a strategy of cultural re-appropriation. By subjecting embedded cultural images to this process, Lichter dislodges and re-contextualizes official image regimes and contested symbols of national identity, working toward the liberation of human perception against repressive and arbitrary systems. Lichter does this by creating a sensorial field that disorients and expands perception through visual and auditory haptics, facilitating an affective and trance-like encounter and positioning itself as a ritual site where perception is “opened (tált),” and the viewer enters a space of transformation.

Keywords: Hungarian experimental cinema, process cinema, shamanic procedure, visual and auditory haptics

Received: May 9, 2025; Revised: September 19, 2025; Accepted: December 3, 2025; Published: February 3, 2026  Show citation

ACS AIP APA ASA Harvard Chicago IEEE ISO690 MLA NLM Turabian Vancouver
Máté, B. (2025). Ritualization and Táltos Procedures in Péter Lichter’s Nutrition Fugue (2018). Iluminace, 37(3), 119-146. doi: 10.58193/ilu.1825
Share...
Download citation
  • BibTeX (.bib)
  • Bookends (.ris)
  • EasyBib (.ris)
  • EndNote (.enw)
  • EndNote 8 (.xml)
  • ISI WoS (.isi)
  • Medlars (.medlars)
  • Mendeley (.ris)
  • MODS (.xml)
  • Papers (.ris)
  • RefWorks (.txt)
  • RefManager (.ris)
  • RIS (.ris)
  • MS Word (.xml)
  • Zotero (.ris)
    • Open full article

    References

    1. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). Go to original source...
    2. Barker, Jennifer M. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Go to original source...
    3. Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
    4. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. "Thesis on the Audiovisual," Non-Fiction, no. 3 (2021), accessed September 30, 2025, https://opencitylondon.com/non-fiction/issue-3-space/thesis-on-the-audiovisual/.
    5. Coulthard, Lisa. "Haptic Aurality: Listening to the Films of Michael Haneke," Film-Philosophy 16, no. 1 (2012), 16-29. Go to original source...
    6. Csuja, László. "A Balázs Béla Stúdió vonzáskörzete: 'Irányított véletlenek' - Lichter Péter," Balkon, no. 1 (2013), 40-43.
    7. Diószegi, Vilmos. A pogány magyarok hitvilága (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1983).
    8. Dömötör, Tekla. Hungarian Folk Beliefs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
    9. Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Arkana, 1989).
    10. Gelencsér, Gábor, ed. bbs 50: A Balázs Béla Stúdió 50 éve (Budapest: Műcsarnok, 2009).
    11. Gerő, András. "A Kossuth kultusz," Mozgó világ 29, no. 4 (2004), accessed September 30, 2025, https://epa.oszk.hu/01300/01326/00038/08gero.html.
    12. Hornok, Rita. "Turanism as a political myth in the context of the Hungarian politics of memory," Society Register 9, no. 3 (2025), 77-100. Go to original source...
    13. Huigen, Siegfried, and Dorota Kołodziejczyk, eds. East-Central Europe between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Go to original source...
    14. Jutz, Gabriele. "Striking Textures, Sensuous Surfaces in Photography and Film," Open Arts Journal, no. 7 (2019), 11-25. Go to original source...
    15. Kim, Jihoon. "Bruce Elder's Film-Digital Hybrids and Materialist Historiography," Millennium Film Journal, no. 56 (2012), 30-40.
    16. Knowles, Kim. "Self-Skilling and Home Brewing: Some Reflections on Photochemical Film Culture," in Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, eds. Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault (Montreal, Kingston, London, and Chicago: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019), 75-84. Go to original source...
    17. Kríza, Ildikó. "Táltos as a Supernatural Being in Hungarian Tales and Legends," Ethnographica et Folkloristica Carpathica, no. 5-6 (1988), 257-264.
    18. Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
    19. Nagy, Ádám. "A peremvidék kavalkádja: A Balázs Béla Stúdió vázlatos története és irányzatai,"Filmtett, March 3, 2010, accessed September 30, 2025, https://filmtett.ro/cikk/a-balazs-belastudio-vazlatos-tortenete-es-iranyzatai.
    20. Pócs, Éva. "The Hungarian Táltos and the Shamanism of Pagan Hungarians: Questions and Hypotheses," Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 63, no. 1 (2018), 149-196. Go to original source...
    21. Romsics, Ignác. Magyarország története (Budapest: Kossuth Kiadó, 2017).
    22. Simonyi, Sonja. "The Man Behind the Curtain: Gábor Bódy, Experimental Film Culture and Networks of State Control in Late Socialist Hungary," Third Text 32, no. 4 (2018), 519-529. Go to original source...
    23. Stutley, Margaret. An Introduction to Shamanism (London: Routledge, 2003). Go to original source...
    24. Szalay, Dorottya. "Konceptualizmus egy kortárs magyar kísérleti filmben: Lichter Péter: Non-Places: Beyond the Infinite," Alföld, (2016), 88-95.
    25. Takahashi, Tess. "After the Death of Film: Writing the Natural World in the Digital Age," Visible Language 42, no. 1 (2008), 44-69.
    26. Takahashi, Tess. "Writing the World: Medium-Specificity and Avant-Garde Film in the Digital Age," in Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, eds. Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault (Montreal, Kingston, London, and Chicago: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019), 459-483. Go to original source...
    27. Tóth, Margit. Mágia: Hungarian Myth, Magic and Folklore (Woodbury: Lewellyn Worldwide, 2024).

    This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is properly cited. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.


    Return to the content