Multi-subjectivity in Péter Forgács’s adaptation of Péter Nádas’s Own Death

Résumé

Own Death, an autobiographical narrative by one of Hungary’s most acclaimed prose writers, tells the story of the author’s heart attack and resuscitation with a focus on the episode that is popularly referred to as a « near-death experience ». In his adaptation,3 the experimental film-maker Péter Forgács turned Nádas’s narrative into a melancholic-poetic-ironic complex of text and images that can be seen as both an adaptation of or homage to Nádas’s literary work and Forgács’s own self-reflexive autobiography in film. In my paper I discuss Forgács’s adaptation as an essayistic answer to Nádas’s philosophical autobiography and try to describe its texture of voice, text, and image as a reflection on the inevitably multi-subjective nature of adaptations of autobiographies.