A grotesque Hungarian body-horror included for the way it listens: Amon Tobin's stark industrial pulses and a sound design that treats the body itself as an instrument.
Taxidermia extends a line the archive's film list already runs. György Pálfi's 2006 film moves through three generations of one family, a wartime orderly, an obese competitive eater, a taxidermist, and uses their bodies as the ground for a coded account of twentieth-century Hungary. It set a benchmark for body horror, and its violence is as much conceptual as shown, which keeps it close to Tetsuo and Videodrome rather than to the splatter tradition.
What earns it an entry is how it sounds. The score is by Amon Tobin, who set aside lush orchestration in favour of layered electronic textures, stark industrial pulses and organic manipulations built to mimic physiological distress; the music was substantial enough to be released afterwards as an EP. Around it, the sound design pushes hyper-amplified bodily noise to the front, the wet and the laboured and the mastication made enormous.
That is the archive's own habit turned into cinema: the body heard as a noise source, distress rendered as texture. Where Begotten made decay a visual method, Taxidermia makes the body an instrument, and entries naturally beside the industrial-adjacent films for it.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene