With Eastern Europe pre-empting all expectations, what's to become of the "video revolution" as capitalism moves in? Made two years ago, István Dárday and Györgyi Szalai's The Documentator offers a biting prognosis. "Perhaps the first postcommunist movie to come out of Eastern Europe, this film depicts Budapest as a sleazy Eurotown consumed by the fires of the image culture. The dialectic of glitz and squalor, fiction and documentary, personal drama and history is unrelenting. Virtually everything in this mad, ambitious movie is mediated by the TV monitor, punctuated by the squeals of car tires and orgasm. Parodying the Knife in the Water mode, a staple of Eastern European art film, the film's sketchy narrative concerns a sordid triangle of a dour intellectual (here, the mighty mogul of the bootleg video market), his smashing blonde concubine, and the young, leatherclad second-in-command called Rambo. Individual drama, however, is subsumed by history. The older man is not only hooked on surveillance devices, but obsessed with the idea of a "video lexicon," spending most of his free time creating and studying his image archive. The result is a mad visual encyclopedia that evokes Eisenstein and Vertov and includes long compelling passages of newsreel data (Budapest 1956, Prague and Paris 1968), Hungarian TV commercials and all manner of exploitation films." --J. Hoberman, The Village Voice