1. Preparing for a Career – Cakó at the Beginning of His Path
One of the foundations and roots of Ferenc Cakó’s career was his father, Ferenc Fassel, also known as Fassel-L’ousa Ferenc1, who was one of the outstanding figures of 20th-century Hungarian fine art and who – it can safely be said – was only able to fully unfold his genius as a painter in the second half of his life. In any case, from early childhood his son could experience at home his father’s exceptional skills in drawing and painting, and thus, still under the name Ferenc Fassel, he was admitted at the age of fourteen to the legendary Budapest secondary school of fine arts. We often say, and can state again here, that the secondary school years are decisive for one’s later career choice, and it soon became clear that Ferenc Cakó (who later adopted his artistic name from members of his family) felt an exceptional attraction to drawing. He continuously won prizes in various school drawing competitions. A major role in his development was played by the fact that his figure-drawing teacher at the secondary school was the painter László Miskolczi, who taught drawing and charcoal drawing in an almost academic spirit. His graphics teacher was the graphic artist Gábor Gacs. He had a good relationship with both of them and was able to learn a great deal from them, and the spirit of this school is well illustrated – as Ferenc Cakó himself recalls – by how fascinating it was to observe the graphic artist Tibor Zala, who at the time was the highly respected director of the school, carrying out his own artistic work on the department’s printing presses. And we should not forget that alongside his studies and the prizes he won in competitions, the young secondary school student was already frequenting the Pannónia Film Studio at this time, because he already felt a very strong attraction to animation.
This was followed by the College of Fine Arts from 1969 (the college became a university in name after the change of regime and is now the Hungarian University of Fine Arts). Here, too, he studied with Tamás Kárpáti,4 the later excellent painter Zsuzsa Katona,5 Gábor Mihály,6 Valeria Sass,7 György Szabó,8 György Markolt9 and with excellent sculptors, and was a classmate of two later excellent restorers, Erzsébet Szent-Gály10 and Lajos Velledits.11 It is important to indicate the names of these colleagues in order to see how deviant – or rather, how individual – the curve of his life and artistic career was. In his first year, Szilárd Iván was his master painter, followed by specialisation. The graphic art course was the important one. When he was a freshman, Jenő Barcsay was an active teacher in his last year at the college, so he could still listen to his lectures and proofreading. Barcsay was very fond of his student, and Cakó still remembers his remark: 'you really like to draw'. His teachers in applied graphic art were graphic artists Zoltán Tamássy and Crescencia Zelenák, and György Konecsni had just died when he was in his first year. Already the college years mark a remarkable development. After all, Ferenc Cakó had been interested in filmmaking for many years and soon became one of the young prominent figures of the Hungarian amateur film movement, winning prizes at amateur film festivals. It was no coincidence that after graduating from college in 1974 he was invited to work at the Pannónia Film Studio, where he was a director-designer until 1991. It is important to note that his artistic genesis, like that of so many of his animation colleagues, is not linked to the Pannónia Film Studio, but to the Budapest School of Fine and Applied Arts and the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, although it was of course during his years at Pannónia that he became acquainted with the mysteries, secrets and methods of animation filmmaking, and it was here that he developed and refined his individual techniques.
Over the course of his long career, Ferenc Cakó gradually became a guru of Hungarian animated filmmaking. His attention first turned toward three-dimensional animation, and he created clay-based puppet films; works such as Sebaj Tóbiás (No Worries Tobias) and the episodes of the Zénó series became almost immortal classics. He also worked with other techniques, producing painted films as well as commercials. What must certainly be emphasized is his extraordinary work ethic, energy, and capacity for sustained effort, as for years filmmaking and fine-art creation proceeded simultaneously in his intellectual and physical workshop. The use of clay animation was so novel at the time that, in the early period, he could not find animators willing or able to work with this technique, and therefore had to do everything himself: he modeled the figures, animated them, and at the same time produced his illustrations and other applied graphic works in his home studio.
He then continued to create his films with an ever-developing technology based on sand-animation techniques. One of the peaks of his career (and there are many) came in 1988, when he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival with his sand-animation film Ab Ovo. International awards followed one after another, and in 1989 he was honoured at home as Artist of Merit, later becoming Distinguished Artist in 1999, while in the meantime winning – another top prize of the profession – the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1995.
2. The animator Cakó
Zoltán Varga analysed and assessed Ferenc Cakó’s film work as follows:
Nearly thirty animated short films, five series, countless performances (sand shows): Ferenc Cakó has been a defining figure of Hungarian animated film and – thanks to his sand performances, paintings, illustrations and posters – of visual culture for decades.
After completing the Applied Graphics programme at the Academy of Fine Arts, his entry into Pannónia Film Studio was secured by the string of first prizes he won at Amateur Film Festivals (Petőfi, 1973; Ókulária, 1974). At Pannónia, Cakó joined puppet-film production alongside Ottó Foky, whom he had admired since adolescence; there he learned the craft, and by the end of the decade he directed his first film (A szék, 1978). The following decade was marked both by the successful and still popular Cakó series and by major festival successes, which later became regular. While Ad astra (1982) received the Critics’ Prize in Annecy, Ab ovo (1987) conquered Cannes, winning the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film, and later Hamu (1994) also won the top prize (the Golden Bear) in Berlin. In 1995 the director founded his own studio, and under the aegis of C.A.K.Ó. further works were produced.”
Ferenc Cakó’s oeuvre is among the most versatile in Hungarian animation, yet even his most diverse films can be united by two guiding motifs: dreamlike transformations and a persistent interest in the handcrafted forms of animation. Among the early Pannónia films, the title character of A szék (The Chair) wanders out of the city and finds its place in nature – blooming there. This playful yet heartrending piece of object animation is exceptional, as no later works in his oeuvre were filmed on external, real locations. Nor did he continue to use object animation, although the motif of the chair plays an important role in later works such as Ad rem (Ad rem), Fészek (Nest), and Érintés (Touch). Much more foundational were two individual films from 1982: Ad astra and Autótortúra (Car Torture). Ad astra offers the first metaphorical formulation of the contrast between the human who longs for the clouds and grows wings, and the society that binds him to the ground and freezes him – quite literally – into a statue. This depiction of the insoluble conflict between individual fulfilment and restrictive forces characterises his later puppet films and sand animations alike. Ad astra also establishes the line of “abstract” Cakó films, which condense meanings into symbols. By contrast, Autótortúra inaugurates the series of humorous clay animations that are easily accessible to all, and it also foreshadows the director’s own creation, the character Zénó.
The Cakó clay-animation series primarily define the 1980s (Never Mind Tobias, 1982–85; Zénó, 1985–88), but the longest series – comprising fifty-two episodes – was created after the political transition (Töf-Töf Elefánt [Tof-Tof Elephant], 1991–94), while the individual clay-animation films belong to the post-millennial output. The adventures of Never Mind Tobias and Tof-Tof Elephant sprang from the imagination of István Csukás. Their world is dominated by fairy-tale fantasy rather than the burlesque quality that characterises Zénó and the earlier Car Torture, on which it is based. This shift in emphasis is clearly illustrated by the differing ways clay can be used to create transformations. In Never Mind Tobias, we witness transformations in the literal sense: Tobias (or sometimes only his hat), just like the young elephant, changes in ways suited to each situation and helpful in solving momentary problems – becoming a balloon, a bird, a telephone booth, a double bass, and so forth. By contrast, Zénó (like the protagonist struggling to start his car in Car Torture) undergoes not so much transformations as distortions: whatever he takes into his hands – from a vacuum cleaner to a garden hose – inevitably turns against him, just as in the classic burlesque films. One episode of the minimalist Zénó series presents a brilliant sequence of transformations: the headlines Zénó reads, and the figures, objects, and events they depict, all come to life through transformations of the hero’s head. The honorary epilogue to the Zénó series is Randevú (Rendezvous, 2004), in which a series of grotesque gags distort the clay body as the protagonist prepares for a date (for example, towel-drying himself so vigorously that he splits in two, or peeling off his face while shaving). Other individual clay films depart from burlesque: A róka és a holló (The Fox and the Crow, 2003) offers ironic variations on the well-known La Fontaine fable, while Hé, S. O. S.! (Hey, S.O.S.!, 2005) is built on a wealth of culture-historical references connected to the sea. Around the flailing hero on the water’s surface appear, among others, Hemingway’s old fisherman, Christ walking on water, and even Spielberg’s shark – yet none of them offers any help.
The exceptional use of clay animation can be observed in the Pannónia-era Ad rem, where clay alternates with animated coal dust to create symbolic imagery whose sombre resonances most closely recall the worldview of Jan Švankmajer, whom Cakó greatly admired. Ad rem demonstrates that three-dimensional animation is also capable of probing philosophical depths – and it is the puppet animations that offer the most complex examples of this. With his philosophical works, Cakó marked out a new path in Hungarian puppet animation, one on which no one had travelled before him. Labirintus (Labyrinth, 1999), Vízió (Vision, 2000) and Arc (Face, 2007) may be regarded as a thematic trilogy: beyond their shared fundamental questions, they are also linked by the fact that each puppet film moves masses of figures (their creation thus demanded substantial labour from the animators). Labyrinth, Vision and Face clothe the eternal questions of “who we are” and “where we are heading” in enigmatic sequences, and it is hardly an exaggeration to treat them as condensed human dramas. The exit-seeking mass in Labyrinth marches as one towards the hoped-for way out, while individual dramas, personal fates and archetypal characters periodically rise out of the “human mass” – from mourners to a pregnant woman to a mysterious spy. The general metaphor of searching for a way out is reinterpreted by the astonishing final image, which transforms what we have seen into a farewell to a concrete historical era: the maze forms the number 1999. In Vision we walk in a milieu that appears medieval, and in a story reimagining the motifs of the Tower of Babel and Jacob’s ladder, a cathedral stretching to the heavens is built out of ladders. Whereas Labyrinth is a film of horizontal movement, Vision guides both the events and the viewer’s gaze vertically: first upward, towards the soaring construction, and then downward, towards the fall. It is as if the modern (Kafkaesque and Orwellian) intrigues of Face unfold among the ruins left behind in Vision: a literally faceless mass is herded by surreal figures (eye-, ear- and mouth-people, bureaucrats with clock or shoe heads, thugs with boxing-glove heads) until the moment of rebellion, the time of revolution, arrives. Through its basic themes, Pszichoparádé (Psychoparade, 2002) is connected to these works, though its mixed formal world – including computer-animated figures alongside puppets – sets it apart. The bleak vision is perhaps Cakó’s most bizarre and saddest diagnosis of the shadow-sides of human existence – in which the only roles left for us are those of the insane rattling their own cages or drowning one another beneath the water’s surface.
The form of animation most directly connected to Cakó’s graphic-artist sensibility is the special technique of sand animation, in which the creation and continuous modification of sand drawings may be understood as visual art set in motion and expanded by the dimension of time. This is taken even further in sand drawing combined with projection technology: in 1996 Ferenc Cakó was the first in the world to perform a real-time sand animation show – since then he has had imitators in every corner of the globe.
Through its material of image-making, Ab ovo and the other sand films introduced something entirely new into Hungarian animation, and even internationally there were scarcely any precedents (the Canadian artist Caroline Leaf was the only significant forerunner). Cakó’s sand films are above all non-narrative – or only minimally narrative – works. The principal structural element of the films is the lyrical succession and associative flow of images. Even if the striking figures and events may prompt the viewer to “fabricate” stories, this is more possibility than necessity; these films stand closer to the compositional principles of poetry than to the characteristics of prose. From Ab ovo to Kövek (Stones, 2001) Cakó bases his sand animations on the surge of powerful, symbolic images; in Levelek (Letters, 2005) and Érintés (Touch, 2009) the narrative character becomes more pronounced, but these films too (at least in part) dissolve into the stream-of-consciousness-like fluidity of the earlier sand animations. One of the exceptions is Dózsa 1514 (2014), which, owing to its historical subject, naturally moves toward a more narrative mode. Its greater length (the work runs about fifteen minutes), the use of panning camera movements, and the visual elements that differ from the familiar motifs likewise set it apart from his other sand films (though the beautiful transformations are of course present here as well). Also constructed in an unusual manner are Világzabáló (World-Devourer, 2019) and Visszacsinálók (Rebuilders, 2019). Created on commission for the Ecumenical Aid Organisation, the work connects images through dissolves, and the drawing hand is also visible. It brings to the screen the eternal struggle between the allegorical “world-devourer” – embodying ecological disasters, social fractures and, even more, the cataclysms of war – and the “rebuilders”, who represent the forces of building, restoration and renewal. These are interwoven with historical and sociographic concreteness (invoking real Iraqi lives), accompanied by János Lackfi’s verse tale – scarcely tale-like in tone – narrated by Károly Rékasi.
Cakó’s Dózsa 1514 and World-Devourer are likewise variations on the fundamental motif of his sand animations: the representation of the relationship – the conflict, the struggle – between the individual and society. The dramatic core of these films is provided by the basic theme already outlined in Ab ovo (and traceable back to Ad astra). In Ab ovo this theme becomes especially strongly articulated in the final third, where we see a spatially formed sand figure setting out on its way – the lone traveller is literally trampled into the ground by the invisible “others”. In Ash the anatomy of political battles and (mass) manipulation already becomes detectable; the problem of manipulation and fanaticisation – with the orators inciting groups against one another, the profiteers poisoning the consciousness of city-dwellers, the assassinations and clashes – virtually dominates the imagery of Fészek (Nest). In the final sequence of Kövek (Stones) it is as if a revolution sweeps away the political brigands, while the framing device, which shows the animator’s hand and the stones set into motion through object animation, lends metaphysical dimensions to the questions of subjugation and power struggles. The overwhelming force of these sombre visions owes much to the accompanying music – especially the agitated sound world of Krzysztof Penderecki. Levelek (Letters) and Érintés (Touch) strike gentler chords; the easing of oppressive themes had earlier been foreshadowed by A homok dala (Song of the Sand, 1995), where the drawing hand is visible together with the emerging images, accompanied by impressionistic music. Although Letters and Touch also portray the forces, groups and institutions that generate discord in society, they devote much more space to the depiction of emotions – above all longing and yearning, the portrayal of love and relationships. A further modification of sand animation is its optimisation for series production: in Világmesék (World Tales, 2015–16) sand images are combined with cut-paper figures.
Cakó’s sand animations are unmistakable thanks to their characteristic iconography and visual construction. Ab ovo inaugurates the repertoire of visual motifs that return repeatedly – though altered, expanded and renewed – in later works. It is telling that one of the very first images in Ab ovo forms a human face, for the representation of the human face is one of the surest constants of Cakó’s sand animations, whether it appears as the face of young or old figures, or emerges within symbolic formations (in a tree, in an egg, in a root system), or is shaped into something grotesque. In the “visual vocabulary” of Ferenc Cakó’s animation, the depiction of faces – their emergence, transformation and reversion – occupies the foremost place, and these processes constitute characteristic image-elements of all his sand films. Alongside the face, the tree and the bird are also constant elements, and the figure of a woman standing in a wind-blown skirt with streaming hair (sometimes a pregnant woman), the eye motif, the leaf and the chair likewise play prominent roles in the imagery.
The unfolding and transformation of the visual basic motifs weave through the films, most of which run for less than ten minutes; emergence functions as a visual event, transformation as a visual process shaping the viewer’s experience. In every sand-image sequence by Cakó, the elements of the spectacle appear before the viewer within the dialectic of coming-into-being and passing-away, and, between the two, within perpetual change. A fundamental role in the pictorial stylisation is played by the monochrome character of the imagery (we are given visions “clothed” in ochre), and by a particular visual device that closely links Cakó’s films to one notable stylistic feature of the Renaissance: the application of sfumato, the elaboration of the smoke-like transitions between light and shadow. Cakó also frequently alludes to masters of the 19th and 20th centuries, above all Edvard Munch16 (in Nest), René Magritte17 (in Stones) and Marc Chagall18 (in Touch). These hidden or less hidden references only reinforce what is evident when viewing all his sand animations: Ferenc Cakó offers the public one of the most artistically inspired and artistically demanding oeuvres in the history of Hungarian animation.
3. The Visual Artist Cakó
Thus it is not true that Ferenc Cakó’s oeuvre could be characterised solely by his sand-animation films and performances. Firstly, his motion-picture career – let us call it that – is far more complex and multifaceted, for he is a defining and multiply awarded creator in Hungarian puppet film and animation film production, and his body of work in this sphere is significantly broader than generally assumed. Secondly, he also has an expressly visual-arts career of exceptional value; and because of its polarity and suggestive power, we mark this field as belonging to the world of still images.
It must be emphasised strongly that while his animation career has been sweeping in scope, his work as a visual artist and designer has simultaneously remained in the foreground: he paints, produces graphic works, designs posters, and undertakes illustration commissions, employing unusual techniques in these areas as well. His artistic practice is dual: he masters traditional painterly and graphic techniques, yet he also applies new methods not previously known in Hungary, and the approaches and perspectives of one field exert powerful influence on the other, and vice versa. His visual-arts world is likewise surreal and visionary; these works also contain references to art-historical traditions, while their realisation often reaches innovative solutions.
This variety is remarkable. While in most artists’ careers the professional path typically leads from the still image toward the moving image (and he follows this path as well), the reverse trajectory is far rarer: when an artist’s interest begins to turn from the world of moving images toward that of still images. In Ferenc Cakó’s case, alongside the simultaneous cultivation of these different fields, this process is also present.
Graphic activity has played a significant role in his life since the 1970s, alongside his animation work. His distinctive painterly activity becomes increasingly prominent from the 1980s onward. The peculiarity of his artistic personality lies in the almost symbiotic relationship among drawing, graphics and painting: the painterliness of his graphic works and the graphic quality of his paintings are continually perceptible.
Cakó’s painterly oeuvre and its thematic world are made even more distinctive by a peculiar duality characteristic almost exclusively of him: on the one hand their fairy-tale quality, and on the other their grotesque tendencies, reflecting the problems and contradictions of the age. His animation sensibility is present in his paintings insofar as he typically narrates stories in them as well – only here the images are frozen. Ferenc Cakó’s paintings, as well as his graphic works, are sustained by intense imagination. The foundation of his visual-arts work is drawing – indeed, we may even go a step further: virtuoso drawing. His works, which continually cross between fantasy and reality, unfold before us through striking and attractive formal invention. As Zoltán Varga also emphasises in his study, human-centredness is essential in his works: something is always happening to his figures, and this becomes possible in a still image because most of his pictures are populated by many figures. Their relations, quarrels, passions, reconciliations, harmonies, visions and dreams radiate personal stories toward us, often set within rich landscapes and environments. When he concentrates on the human figure or head, not only his virtuoso skill but also his psychological insight and sense for essentials become manifest.
It is as if the genre painting of Netherlandish art were a kind of historical model: his pictures are 20th–21st-century continuations of Brueghelian dynamism. At the same time, Ferenc Cakó’s visual-arts practice also leads into the realm of visionary surrealism, where his distinctive distortions gain significance; and his pictures and sheets often present us not only with images seen in a distorted mirror, but with a peculiar distorted mirror held up to our surroundings and our world.
The thematic roots of his works often connect to major artistic oeuvres from Shakespeare to Sándor Weöres, in some cases linking to the treasure-house of folkloric motifs, while – at the opposite extreme – they may be shaped by musical influences, for example by building on the music of Ravel.
Ferenc Cakó’s graphic work therefore cannot be separated from his painterly oeuvre, except insofar as his graphics concentrate more intensely on the concrete depiction of the human figure, reaching the deep analysis of personalities, a kind of caricatural, almost grotesque perspective that at times approaches contemporary interpretations of Boschian visions. Cakó is a virtuoso draftsman: he creates unique works, yet he is able to transfer his drawings at a high level into the techniques of printmaking. Already during his college studies he deepened his knowledge in the field of printmaking through mastering intaglio techniques. Although he attended the department of applied graphics, he remembers with appreciation the helpfulness of the two leading teachers of the printmaking department: graphic artists Károly Raszler and Tibor Rozanits. Copperplate etching has attracted him ever since; visionary prints created with this technique have been produced continuously, and most recently he has been exploring in his studio the possibilities of mezzotint, whose special roughening–scraping method makes it a venerable variant of copper engraving and allows tonal drawings to be reproduced more effectively. These techniques require highly specialised tools and workshop conditions, yet Ferenc Cakó strives to create all this around himself.
Another major field of his artistic activity is his extensive body of book illustrations, encompassing works of fiction, textbooks and popular-science publications. Whereas in his film work he creates the intellectual framework of the visual world, in illustrating books he must naturally adapt to the given literary work’s conception, plot, content, stylistic world and atmosphere. Ferenc Cakó has succeeded in this as well, though we see that he always approaches illustration as a fine artist. The success of this segment of his career is also demonstrated by the fact that although he illustrated only individual works for some authors, with others – notably the recently deceased István Csukás and, in many joint projects, Gábor Nógrádi – he developed long-standing collaborations spanning numerous books, relationships that, in the best sense of the word, evolved into friendships.
His illustrations also reveal the versatility of his technical proficiency. He works just as readily in black and white as in colour, and beyond printmaking techniques he draws in pencil and ink, and paints in watercolour and wash.
In his work as a visual artist, Cakó’s perfect technical mastery plays a distinguished role. The depth of his material handling is striking in his painting as well, but what appears continuously is his use of new – or not yet widely known – methods. Among these, the airbrush technique must be highlighted. The use of the spray gun in fine art originally spread within applied graphics; it is a method imported from the United States, more commonly known in Hungarian as “amerikai retus”. Spraying solvent-based paint onto a surface requires precise instrumentation and a well-functioning technical background, along with a high level of expertise from the artist. This technique makes it possible to create characteristically soft, almost dreamlike surfaces that – and this is very important – cannot be produced in any other way, for example with a paintbrush. Cakó lifted this technique out of applied graphic practices and turned it into a tool for creating autonomous artworks, establishing and making possible a completely unique visual world and mechanism of effect. This is where we must emphasise that in using the “amerikai retus” technique, the fine grain, the multitude of tiny, almost microscopic raster dots create the plasticity and appearance of forms and figures – and it was precisely this that gave Cakó Ferenc the idea to use sand. A genuine, literal deus ex machina.
Yet the arc continues, as the application of digital techniques also became part of the artist’s creative practice. One branch of this development was his discovery of how radically his painterly visions could be renewed by producing high-resolution prints from manually painted images, which could then be printed at sizes larger than the originals. Today’s high-tech digital production makes it possible to create prints of such resolution that even their enlarged versions have perfect visual and pictorial impact.
Further highly noteworthy works are those that function as the “stilled” moments of his sand animations, transformed into visual artworks. He had to find a technical solution to the problem of how the practice of sand animation – a chain of fleeting instants unfolding on a horizontal surface (“sand-drawing”) – could be halted and fixed at particular moments on the surface, so that the images could become works of visual art when displayed vertically. He succeeded in developing a method for fixing sand drawings on glass surfaces, and these works – enhanced by the striking device of being illuminated not from the front but from behind, from beyond the artwork – reveal an innovative domain within his visual art. It is no coincidence that we may call these works “luminous images” (he even held an exhibition under that title), though perhaps it is even more precise, in a more metaphorical sense, to refer to these works of art as light-bodies.
The author of these lines trusts that his partiality toward Ferenc Cakó has not loosened his objectivity – indeed, that it has sharpened his observational acuity. When one utters the name “Ferenc Cakó” today – thereby referring to the entirety of contemporary visual art – the immediate response is: “– Cakó? Of course: sand animation.” And this answer is both true and not true. For several reasons. It is true because one of the principal and defining causes of his international fame is indeed his genius invention (let us emphasise: it is his), his artistic creative method and technique, which he alone began to devise, develop and perfect. Today, however, it has – entirely independently of him – become a genuine worldwide movement. Yet distinction is important. He has been making sand-animation films since the 1980s, but the true premiere of his live sand-animation performance – we may calmly call it a performance art event – is connected to 1996. From that point on, in many cases he presented his unique projection-based work accompanied by live music to audiences physically present. And the term “physically present audience” typically indicates exceptionally great interest, meaning that Ferenc Cakó’s art has reached – and continues to reach – a vast number of people. A single sand-animation performance of his has, at any given moment, been seen by anywhere from several hundred to several thousand spectators, and by now in many distant as well as nearby parts of the world. This demonstrates the exceptional reach and effectiveness of his artistic achievement. The artist has often sought to ensure that his sand-animation performance is accompanied – preferably at the same venue – by his own expressis verbis visual-art exhibition, which makes such combined presentations all the more exciting in their complexity. One of the first joint programs of this kind, attracting great professional attention, took place in 2001 at the Pesti Vigadó and the Vigadó Gallery.
This text began as an analysis and introduction, together with the excellent, extensively quoted study by Zoltán Varga – and we hope it has become such – but the author of these lines must now also immediately register his strong subjective involvement. His subjective attachment to Ferenc Cakó, the artist and the human being. Our many decades of connection, our acknowledged friendship, has naturally influenced the tone of this writing. At the same time, it has – we hope successfully – striven never to lose sight of objectivity. And it cannot: for Ferenc Cakó’s artistic career has so many branches, so many paths, so many values and excitement, and so much has already been rendered objective, that from all this there emerges – we hope – a complex and quality-sensitive portrait of a filmmaker, animator and visual artist, one that can be perceived and interpreted by the reader as well.
Ferenc Cakó is an utterly exceptional phenomenon in contemporary visual culture and art. As the title of this essay also makes clear, he is equally an artist of the still image and the image in motion. His work in motion picture – as an animation filmmaker – is a uniquely individual contribution to the otherwise high-quality Hungarian animation tradition. And his sand-animation practice connects moving image and still image in a wholly singular way. But we must continually argue that, expressis verbis as a visual artist as well, he possesses an individual vision, a personal style rooted equally in the past and in the present, and a painterly and graphic oeuvre of exceptional technical quality.
1 Fassel L'ousa Ferenc (1915-2009) painter
2 László Miskolczi (1923-1988) painter, teacher at the Secondary School of Fine and Applied Arts
3 Tibor Zala (1920-2004) graphic artist, director of the Secondary School of Fine and Applied Arts from 1964 to 1980
4 Tamás Kárpáti (1949) painter
5 Zsuzsa Katona (1951) sculptor
6 Mihály Gábor (1942) Kossuth Prize-winning sculptor
7 Valéria Sass (1950) sculptor, teacher at the University of Fine Arts
8 György Szabó (1947) sculptor
9 György Markolt (1951) sculptor, professor at the University of Fine Arts
10 Erzsébet Szent-Gály (?-2016) wood sculptor and restorer, teacher at the University of Fine Arts
11 Lajos Velledits (1947) restorer artist
12 Zoltán Varga: Homokvíziók, bábtalányok és gyurmagegek – bepillantás Cakó Ferenc animációs filmjeibe (Sand Visions, Puppet Maidens and Plasticine Gags – An Insight into the Animated Films of Ferenc Cakó), Budapest, n.d. The author hereby also expresses his thanks for the opportunity to publish this material.
), publication entitled Animated Films of Ferenc Cakó, Budapest, n.d. The author would like to thank the author for the opportunity to publish this book.
13. Jan Svankmajer (1934) Czech animation artist, visual artist
14. Caroline Leaf (1946) American, Canadian animator, painter
15. Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020) Polish composer
16. Edvard Munch (1863-1944) Norwegian painter
17. René Magritte (1898-1967) Belgian painter
18. Mark Chagall (1887-1985) French painter of Russian origin
19. Raszler, Károly (1925-2005) Kossuth Prize-winning graphic artist, teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts
20. Rozanits Tibor (1931) graphic artist, teacher at the College of Fine Arts
21. István Csukás (1936-2020) Kossuth Prize-winning writer, poet
[2022]