György Gerő

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Dada artist, avant-garde filmmaker, poet, editor. Born 1905 (or 1903). In the 1920s he was making avant-garde film experiments.

According to a memoir, Gerő’s first work was an animated "series of pictures of a blooming cactus". (On the third page in the typed memoir of Andor Tiszay, property of Gyula Száva.)

In 1924 he edited the short-lived dadaist review IS together with Imre Pán, Árpád Mezei and Károlly Kristóf. The journal lacked any public interest and only four issues were published, each in different format and typography, the last two in poster format. Issues included poems by the editors, Gerő's scripts, and contributions by Hans Arp, its only foreign correspondent. [1]

In one of the issues of IS, Gerő published his script for unrealised experimental film Béla. The original scene-by-scene film script and complete script of the film consist of 4 pages currently housed in the Budapest City Archives. It was later republished in the Lajos Kassák's book The History of the Isms [Az izmusok története], Magvetö Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 1972. Bruce Checefsky later made a film inspired by Gerö's script, Béla (2009, 35mm, black & white, sound, 6:29 min), filmed on location in Cleveland, Ohio. [2].

Lajos Kassák's review Dokumentum (1927) includes a descriptive passage of Gerö's conceptual theory as well as several key filmmaking techniques.

Gerö was spared political prison, declared a neurotic and placed into a private hospital in Vienna (as of 1935) where all traces of him were lost.

See also
Literature