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Esther Kinsky’s Celluloid Dreams

In Seeing Further, a novel obsessed with the tactile feeling of arthouse cinema, the sad state of our moviegoing comes into focus.

Early movie house interior with audience and piano player, 1913.

In Ray Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes, the filmmaker John Cassavetes is asked by a friend, Burt Lane, what makes him tick. The two are sitting in a restaurant, their table set with silverware, salt and pepper shakers, and condiments. Cassavetes grabs each object one by one, brings it close, and then drops it to the floor. Lane interprets the performance as an answer: “He was telling me that he felt a void inside himself that he couldn’t fill no matter how fiercely he grabbed for things.” Iconoclastic, collaborative, combative, Cassavetes made art to wage a war with that void. He knew it was futile. “The idea of making a film,” Cassavetes once said, “is to package a lifetime of emotion and ideas into a two-hour capsule form, two hours where some images flash across the screen and in that two hours the hope is that the audience will forget everything and that celluloid will change lives. Now that’s insane, that’s a preposterously presumptuous assumption, and yet that’s the hope.”

The narrator of Esther Kinsky’s latest novel, Seeing Further, believes that once upon a time, celluloid could change lives. Susceptible to Cassavetes’s insane hope, she won’t resign herself to fatalism. The novel’s narrator closely resembles Kinsky herself, a German author and translator fixated on peripatetic, ethnographic projects that delve into the lives of the people she encounters. Despite their differences in self-presentation, Kinsky and Cassavetes share a set of values regarding cinema. It was Cassavetes who proclaimed that “television sucks,” and Kinsky agrees but puts it more mildly: Television and the “permanent accessibility of private screens” diminished cinema’s cultural footprint and drew people to these lesser forms of viewing. The two also share a gripe: There’s a right way and a wrong way to make and consume art—what Kinsky calls “the how of seeing.” As both project and object, cinema is social. Cassavetes made his movies with the input and authorship of his actors; Kinsky’s notion of an ideal cinema is a communal viewing coauthored by the gazes of an audience. To lodge its complaints, Kinsky’s novel invokes the director, a champion of grievance, right from the epigraph: “There is something important in people, something that’s dying—the senses, a universal thing.” Kinsky reframes seeing as a deliberate and conscientious choice rather than the passive absorption of visual input. Favoring the how of seeing over the what also serves a story purpose: With a few exceptions, it’s difficult for books to dramatize what’s being watched on a screen. Seeing Further’s focus on the conditions of viewership drives home its point about a shifting cinema landscape, but it also allows the book to roam beyond the confines of the theater.

In Seeing Further—translated by Caroline Schmidt—the nameless narrator travels to a small Hungarian town, where she buys, refurbishes, and reopens a defunct cinema; a few weeks later, the theater shuts down. Depicting one woman’s attempt to rekindle cinema in rural Hungary, the novel is about what can and can’t be revived, but the narrator’s personal project is to experience the death of cinema firsthand. The book smudges the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction with its essayistic aloofness and ethnographic bent. Black-and-white photographs of the landscape, the town, and the cinema’s interior grant the book the posture of a travelogue. The novel begins when the narrator visits the Alföld, a vast flatlands in the southeast of Hungary, with a vague notion of photographing the landscape. This is “a land of dearth, a region of voids”—a blankness she finds appealing: “What was this essential quality that........

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