Ritualization and Táltos Procedures in Péter Lichter's Nutrition Fugue (2018)

In his film Nutrition Fugue (2018), Hungarian experimental filmmaker Pter Lichter appropriates remnants of discarded film strips from a socialist grocery advertisement (kzrt, literally, “for the community”), featuring images of processed meat dishes. As an exemplary case of geographically specific materialist film practice, the film functions as both a historical artifact — documenting East Central Europe under the socialist regime — and as a disruptive rupture, bringing past and present materialities into dialogue. This paper argues that Lichter’s process of cutting, decaying, and reassembling the film stock enacts a form of material self-dismemberment that contests dominant (visual and narrative) representational regimes. This ritual undoing of cinematic form resonates deeply with the logic of the ancient Hungarian tltos tradition. The verb tlt, meaning “to open wide,” is connected to shamanistic procedures of ecstatic dismemberment, renewal, and revelation, serving as a tool for transmutation and perceptual expansion. This ritualistic transformation constitutes a strategy of cultural re-appropriation. By subjecting embedded cultural images to this process, Lichter dislodges and re-contextualizes official image regimes and contested symbols of national identity, working toward the liberation of human perception against repressive and arbitrary systems. Lichter does this by creating a sensorial field that disorients and expands perception through visual and auditory haptics, facilitating an affective and trance-like encounter and positioning itself as a ritual site where perception is “opened (tlt),” and the viewer enters a space of transformation.