Local Sensorium, Local Cinema: György Pálfi’s Sensuous Body Politics

György Pálfi’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 official history, hegemonic ideologies, and conventional patterns of (cinematic) understanding. In the present study I analyse the ways Pálfi’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.