My 20th Century

Ildikó Enyedi’s 1989 debut My 20th Century looks to the future through the frame of the past, luring us out of the cave by the light of the cinema. Enamoured with universal concepts and material dilemmas, cutting across space and time, sprinkled with irony, symbolism, and realism, Enyedi muses on the twin origins of modernity and cinema, both born of electricity. Twin infants Dóra and Lili enter a world of impoverished yet acutely idealized theatricality. Transported by a rollercoaster of ideas and images, we observe a dog undergoing a Pavlovian experiment – regardless of what is unveiled next, this serves as a pointed reminder that our 20th century was undoubtedly one of paradoxes and we, like the dog connected to electrodes, knew little of the universe beyond our own laboratory.
Dorota Lech