The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles takes its title from the first published novel by Agatha Christie (detective Hercule Poirot’s debut), with the text serving as narrative basis for this sumptuous experimental collage-film by Péter Lichter.

While a Hungarian voice-over drives us through the steps of a classical whodunnit, the baroque visuals enact a playful dance with the dense stream of words – alternately poetic and mysterious, cheeky and ironic. Using video-game designs as prime material, as well as fragments from 100 films (of the silent and early sound period), The Mysterious Affair at Styles presents a curious fusion between past and future, and between the iconic power of the archival image and the possibilities of modern technology.

Selected for IFFR’s Harbour programme, the film will be a feast for lovers of repurposed footage and visual spatialisation. The screen becomes both a magician’s hat and an architect’s demented dream, brimming with an endless parade of images (between, within, amongst, around other images). Undoubtedly inspired by the maps included in Christie’s novel, Lichter builds a film that reads as a homage and parody of Lev Manovich’s database concept – pushing to the limit the screen saturation of desktop documentaries, and itself becoming a combinatory experiment in the study of styles.

– Cristina Álvarez López