The Style and the Man Himself

Marcell Jankovics’ Lifework in the Postmodern Age

Abstract

Marcell Jankovics (1941-2021) was a director of animation films, cultural historian, educator, and culture politician, an outstanding figure of Hungarian animation who won the Golden Palm Award for the best short film with his 1977 work Fighters. Towards the end of his life he often voiced the opinion that in spite of his rich life’s work he had no creative drawing style of his own. The ageing artist’s lament poses the question as to how the work of an artist who disdained post-modernism may contain post-modernist features. This is the question that we intend to examine by scrutinising the series of animation films János Vitéz, based on a narrative poem by Sándor Petőfi, the Tragedy of Man, adapted from Imre Madách’s mankind-poem, and Toldi, based on the epic trilogy by János Arany, as well as the book illustrations. Although the works of Marcell Jankovics are described as post-modernist from a iconographic perspective, his films, and his cultural history works, always point towards a single common (mythical, religious, ritual) logos. Thus, the oeuvre of Marcell Jankovics may be regarded as ‘post-modernist’ only in the sense that he is also characterised by a flair for classicising, that is, he also created a particular canon by way of invoking.