Seeing Further — Esther Kinsky

On a journey through the south-east of Hungary some years back, Esther Kinsky finds herself in a small town in the Alföld, the Great Hungarian Plain. Resignation and a glorification of the past are the most dominant threads in the inhabitants’ conversations. Like many other things, the cinema, ‘mozi’ in Hungarian, has long since closed.

Esther Kinsky's own passion for the cinema moves her to bring the decaying mozi back to life.

This book is both an account of her time running the local mozi, and a meditation on the irresistible magic of the cinema, ‘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’. Seeing Further is a powerfully eloquent declaration of love to the cinema and the collective experience of watching by Esther Kinsky, one of Germany's most important contemporary writers.