Márk Novák
Márk Novák (1935–1972) was a Hungarian film director and one of the founding members of the Balázs Béla Studio. In 1965, he made his first and only feature-length film, an adaptation of Lajos Galambos’s novel The Martyrdom of St. John.Novák’s most important work, however, emerged in the early 1960s through two remarkable short films. Still Life (1963), that continues the avant-garde tradition of “pure cinema,” relying on visual composition and association rather than conventional narrative. Tuesday (1963), by contrast, draws on the surrealists’ method of free association and the visual and comic conventions of burlesque to construct a modern grotesque portrait of an alcoholic’s inner world. Together, the two films reveal Novák’s distinctive artistic vision, his deep understanding of film history, and his remarkable ability to create powerful visual forms, developed in collaboration with cinematographer János Tóth. These works ultimately demonstrate that Novák was, above all, a poet of cinema. He committed suicide in 1972