Local Sensorium, Local Cinema: Gyorgy Palfi's Sensuous Body Politics

Gyorgy Palfi's Hukkle (2002) and Taxidermia (2006) establish markedly unique cinematic styles and richly sensorial life-worlds, which function in both films as counter-discourses opposing offcial history, hegemonic ideologies, and conventional patterns of (cinematic) understanding. In the present study I analyse the ways Palfi's films communicate through non-symbolic meaning, bodily discourses, and a heavy reliance on the multisensory evocation of the local sensorium (Marks) and the local habitus (Bourdieu) so as to create significance on the margins of established, hegemonic systems of meaning, cinema, ideology and identity.