Fehérlófia; or, "Son of the White Mare"
On a curious folk story's evolution from a Shamanic heroic epic to a Hungarian animated masterpiece
I.
Fehérlófia (“Son of the White Mare”) is one of the more interesting examples of required reading for Hungarian schoolchildren. It’s also one of the more interesting examples of a full-length animated movie from any film industry. Like most folk tales, it’s told in language so sparse that the reader’s imagination must do most of the heavy lifting, and thus in literary form, it’s wide open for individual interpretation. This is, of course, something that an animation director can appreciate. Folk tales don’t always receive our full appreciation in the modern world, and it’s often due to the bare, unvarnished prose in which they’re told. Typically they must be encountered over and over again to remain lodged in our memories, and the most popular ones tend to be those that have received adaptations into cartoons or other forms of visual storytelling. In the Anglophone world, we have cartoons that depict all kinds of stories from folktale collectors like the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, not to mention the fables of Aesop. But the most popular ones, the ones that Disney would often adapt into Silly Symphonies shorts if not full-length features tend to be mere “fairy tales” — flights of fancy that often resemble little more than wish-fulfillment fantasies. These stories, while interesting, often don’t point to anything truly raw and primordial within human consciousness. Fehérlófia is a strong exception to this, as it’s a folk tale rife with dream-like and inexplicable story elements that suggest an elevated pre-Christian mythopoesis rather than merely the vulgar psychological landscape of ancient commoners and women.
In this discussion, I’ll attend to the story in its written form as well as the animated film version by Marcell Jankovics. A while back, I wrote a short post in praise of the animator Peter Chung, focusing on his critical insights regarding visual narration, discussing how they’ve influenced my thinking from an early age. The post ends with a list of what I consider ten outstanding examples of animation, and Fehérlófia (1981) is #4 on the list. But in addition to discussing what Jankovics contributed with this film, I also would like to discuss the original version of this story and what within it gets preserved. In addition to its mesmerizing repetition and mystifying, thinly detailed plotline, what makes Fehérlófia such a special part of Hungarian literature is that it almost certainly came from the Shamanic folklore of Siberia back when the Magyars lived around that region, which makes some of the original elements of the animated film all the more impressive.
II.
I’ll briefly jot down the plot for the tale as it’s written in the Eredeti Népmesék (“Original Folk Tales”), recorded by László Arany, particularly since the Wikipedia page explains it somewhat oddly. Here’s how it goes:
A human infant is raised by a white mare and nursed on her milk for fourteen years, all the way until he can strip a giant tree of its bark, and once he does that, the mare dies. The boy goes out into the world, and separately meets three strong men: Fanyüvő (Tree Shaker), Kőmorzsoló (Stone Crusher) and Vasgyúró (Iron Kneader). One by one, he defeats them all in wrestling matches. He establishes himself as the strongest, but he also becomes their friend and recruits them to form a group of four, and they journey off together.
All four go into a hut one day, they decide to stay there for a while, and they establish a system wherein one man stays and cooks porridge while the others hunt. A magical but impish little dwarf named Hétszűnyű Kapanyányimonyók goes into the hut and steals the porridge from Fanyüvő on the first day, then Kőmorzsoló on the second, and finally Vasgyúró on the third. But when it’s Fehérlófia’s turn to make the porridge, he outwits the dwarf by tying his beard to a tree trunk. When all four men go to capture the supposedly trapped dwarf, they find that he has ran off, taking the entire tree with him. The four men follow his tracks for seven days and seven nights, and finally they discover that the dwarf has disappeared down into a vast pit. After Fehérlófia’s friends are too cowardly to descend downward, he decides to go by placing himself into a basket tied to a rope (as with a well that uses a water pulley system). He then gets the three men to slowly lower him down into what turns out to be a vast underworld.
Upon entering this underworld, Fehérlófia finds the magic dwarf and talks to him. Fehérlófia learns that there are three captive princesses nearby: one in a copper castle guarded by a three-headed dragon, one in a silver castle guarded by a seven-headed dragon, and one in a golden castle guarded by a twelve-headed dragon. Fehérlófia decided to rescue the princesses and proceeds to kill all three of the dragons one by one, though he takes significant damage from the third. After rescuing the princesses, he realizes he must raise them up to the surface without accompanying them, since not everyone can fit into the basket at once. So he raises them up and waits for the basket to come down to retrieve him, but it never comes down, meaning that his three friends have betrayed him and gone with the princesses.
Fehérlófia then wanders around for a bit and finds a griffin nest with little griffin babies in it. He uses his coat to help protect them from rain while he takes shelter within a bush. The adult griffin arrives, sees Fehérlófia’s kind deed, and offers to help him. Fehérlófia says he wants to go up to his homeworld, so the griffin agrees, but he tells Fehérlófia that he needs to feed him a bunch of bread and bacon as he flies up, since he will get hungry. Fehérlófia finds some bread and bacon and then does as he’s asked. However, toward the end of the griffin’s journey, Fehérlófia runs out of food, and so he cuts off one of his arms, and then one of his legs, and he feeds them both to the griffin. After the griffin has ended his flight, he sees that Fehérlófia has sacrificed his own body, and so he gives him a bottle of magic wine. This fully restores Fehérlófia, causing his limbs to return and giving him seven times his original strength. He then goes to confront the three companions who abandoned him. After he sees them, one by one they all die of fright, and so Fehérlófia returns two of the rescued princesses to their fathers and then marries the youngest, having her all to himself. The end.
III.
Although it may seem strange, Fehérlófia almost certainly originates in the shamanic epic tale of a hero named Kögüdei-mergen from Siberia. An article entitled “The Epic Story of Kögüdei-mergen and Southern Siberian Shamans” by Dávid Somfai Kara (from the Book of Proceedings on the International Conference Dedicated to the Siberian Turkic Epic Tradition and Shamanism Religion, 2022) convincingly argues the case that the story comes from Southern Siberia’s Turkic-speaking population comprising the Altai-Telengits, the Khakas, and the Tuvans. One reason we can determine such an origin is that we know the Magyars who settled in what’s now called Hungary once lived in Siberia, and in fact the closest linguistic relatives to Hungarian are the Mansi and Khanty languages spoken by the people of Western Siberia (even though Hungarians are less genetically similar to the Siberians than the other Uralic-speaking Europeans: the Finns, Estonians, and Karelians). So the linguistic connection between Hungarian and the Turkic languages makes a Siberian origin possible, even with no other evidence. Fortunately, there is more.
A more direct reason that we can pinpoint a Siberian origin is due to a discovery from around 1720 of a Baraba Tatar shaman’s drum, which included a number of images depicting a story about the passage from upper to lower realms (as with the Norse, there seem to be three realms in Shamanic mythology: the underworld, the earth, and the sky). Although the Baraba Tatars were converted to Islam starting in the 17th century, this drum was shown to preserve the old culture, and it contains seven images:
A Sacred Tree (Bay-kayïng)
A Wide Road (taram-jol) leading to the Sky (tengeri)
A Giant Bird (Kaan-kuš) living on the Sacred Tree (Bay-terek/kadïng)
Horsemen with a bow on a spiritual mount (tïn-buura)
A Giant Monster (Ker-jutpa) that swallows everything
A Sacred Frog (Bay-baka), the ambassador (elči) of the Lower World
Three Deer (Üč-mïygak) hiding the soul (tïn) of the enemy
The significance of these images were a mystery for quite some time, but they were eventually identified and explained by the 20th century Hungarian orientalist Vilmos Diószegi, who wrote extensively on the distant memories of Shamanic religion recorded in Hungarian folklore.
Additionally — this is the second major piece of evidence for the Shamanic origin of Fehérlófia — in 1963, the Altai-Telengit epic story of the mythological hero Kögüdei-mergen was translated (it’s technically called The Epic of Maadai-Kara, named after Kögüdei-mergen’s father), and it was shown to contain many of the same elements as found on this drum. The beauty of this story’s existence is that the Altai-Telengits never converted to Islam, so along with the Tuvans and Khakas, they preserved basically the same mythology that the Baraba-Tatars had abandoned. Its plot is quite different from Fehérlófia, but there are a number of key elements that reconcile them, which I’ll discuss in a moment. The story goes like this:
First, the leader Maadai-Kara’s country is invaded by his rival, an evil khan named Kara-Kula who takes the people and their animals/livestock captive. Maadai-Kara puts his infant son Kögüdei-mergen into a cradle and hides him in the hollow of a Sacred Tree. Later on, a white mare who was taken by Kara-Kula escapes, runs over to the tree, and stays there, nursing the infant to adolescence.
With that prologue out of the way, the story truly begins when Kögüdei-mergen comes of age and realizes what has happened. He further discovers that Kara-Kula’s soul has been divided and hidden in the bellies of three Magic Deer, who have escaped to the sky realm. Kögüdei-mergen goes to the sky realm, kills these deer, and takes possession of Kara-Kula’s soul, ultimately destroying him and freeing the captured people, and so they return back to the middle realm. Kara-Kula’s wife Kara-Taajï, who is a demon originally from the lower realm, tries to seduce Kögüdei-mergen, but he rejects her, and she vows revenge on him for spurning her advances.
Kögüdei-mergen then returns to the earthly realm to find a good wife, and he meets six identical warriors who accompany him. He decides he wants to marry a woman named Altïn-Küskü, but her father tells him he needs to accomplish seven tasks in order to do so. Kögüdei-mergen easily does the first six tasks with the help of his six warrior friends, but then for the seventh, he must descend to the lower realm and cut off the flippers of a giant beast called Ker-balïk or Ker-jutpa, who swallows his opponents whole (among the Tuvan people, this beast is also known as Ala-moos, or “spotted demon”). Kögüdei-mergen does exactly this, brings the flippers back, and then he is able to marry Altïn-Küskü.
However, when Kögüdei-mergen returns, he learns that the demon woman Kara-Taajï has stolen the souls of his parents and has absconded to the underworld, which means Kögüdei-mergen must go back down there to kill her and retrieve them. So he does. He kills Kara-Taajï and saves his parents, but then he decides he must also kill her father Erlik-beg, the lord of the entire lower realm, who lives in a palace guarded by frog men. Kögüdei-mergen bypasses the frog men and kills Erlik-beg, ultimately ending the story and returning all of the trapped souls in the underworld back to the middle realm. The seven warriors (Kögüdei-mergen and the six friends he found) turn into stars and become what we know as the Big Dipper constellation, while the three magic deer also become stars and form Orion’s Belt.
IV.
Clearly, there are serious differences between the two stories. For instance, although Fehérlófia is raised by a white mare, he makes three friends instead of six, and they betray him, whereas in “Kögüdei-mergen,” they remain loyal. He also does not need to avenge his parents, as his birth is mysterious (probably because the sociopolitical context fell away as the Magyars departed from that region). There is also no Great Bird or griffin in the Altai-Telengit epic, which suggests that the Hungarian story preserves story elements that eventually fell out in Southern Siberia. In fact, modern retellings of the same epic seem to be highly different, as one can see in this short educational cartoon. Additionally, there is no division of an enemy’s soul into three deer in the Hungarian story (Hungarian folklore in fact holds the figure of the magical deer in great reverence). So there is some indication that the Hungarian story preserves some things while discarding others.
Despite the differences, however, both stories share several features in common:
The main hero being reared by a white mare
Division between at least a regular world and an underworld
A sacred tree that connects these realms
A navel of the world (i.e., a well or cave) that connects the realms
A great chthonic monster (like a final boss) of the lower world whom the hero defeats in order to secure a marriage (although it is interesting that “Kögüdei-mergen” has two distinct episodes involving the underworld, first with a monster, then with a demon patriarch)
Departing from Dávid Somfai Kara’s argument a bit, I’ve also noticed some curious elements in Fehérlófia that tie it even closer to the Shamanic religion. For instance, when Fehérlófia is brought back to his home realm by the griffin and must sever his own limbs from his body in order to feed it, only to have the griffin restore them, this distinctly recalls the ordeal that shamans claim to go through when they are stricken with an initiatory sickness. Mircea Eliade supplies some discussion on what happens in his Rites and Symbols of Initiation (1958):
According to a Yakut informant, the spirits carry the future shaman to Hell and shut him in a house for three years. Here he undergoes his initiation; the spirits cut off his head (which they set to one side, for the novice must watch his own dismemberment with his own eyes) and hack his body to bits, which are later distributed among the spirits of various sicknesses. It is only on this condition that the future shaman will obtain the power of healing. His bones are then covered with new flesh, and in some cases he is also given new blood.
The wine that the griffin gives to Fehérlófia would seem to symbolize this “new blood.” But this isn’t the only connection. Eliade additionally provides an even longer citation on the same basic initiatory process:
From a long and eventful autobiography that an Avam-Samoyed shaman confided to A. A. Popov, I will select a few significant episodes. Stricken with smallpox, the future shaman remained unconscious for three days, so nearly dead that on the third day he was almost buried. He saw himself go down to Hell, and, after many adventures, was carried to an island, in the middle of which stood a young birch tree which reached up to Heaven. It was the Tree of the Lord of the Earth, and the Lord gave him a branch of it to make himself a drum. Next he came to a mountain. Passing through an opening, he met a naked man plying the bellows at an immense fire on which was a kettle. The man caught him with a hook, cut off his head, and chopped his body to bits three and put them all into the kettle. There he boiled the body for years, and then forged him a head on an anvil. Finally he fished out the bones, which were floating in a river, put them together, and covered them with flesh. During his adventures in the Other World, the future shaman met several semidivine personages, in human or animal form, and each of them revealed doctrines to him or taught him secrets of the healing art. When he awoke in his yurt, among his relatives, he was initiated and could begin to shamanize.
This description of a shamanic initiation ritual bears even more resemblance to Fehérlófia. For one thing, there’s a naked man plying the bellows on a fire heating a kettle who acts as a psychopomp of sorts for the initiate. Although such a figure doesn’t actually dismember Fehérlófia, the magical dwarf named Hétszűnyű Kapanyányimonyók does appear at a hearth and leads him down to the underworld by disappearing through a pit. That he drags a tree to the pit is all the more tantalizing, since although such a tree doesn’t necessarily act as the Great Tree connecting three worlds, it is still evocative of such a notion. Also, the name Hétszűnyű appears to be an archaic spelling of “hétszínű,” meaning “seven-colored.” Without wanting to be too promiscuous in my interpretation, the seven colors of a rainbow do often suggest passage from one metaphysical realm into another cross-culturally, as with for example the rainbow bridge in Norse mythology. We also find from Popov’s recollection that the shamanic initiate reports having various adventures in the lower realm, which of course is true of both Fehérlófia and Kögüdei-mergen.
Although Fehérlófia doesn’t feature an upper realm in the sky, there are other figures from Hungarian folklore that do suggest having the shamanic ability to cross all three realms. For instance, there’s the Garabonciás, a kind of Hungarian wizard, as well as the Táltos, an earlier version of the same thing. Both figures carry a magical staff that can extend upwards all the way to the moon, and both can climb up them, thus entering the sky realm. This, too, seems to be a holdover from the Shamanic religions of Siberia.
V.
As much as I’d like to go on about the Shamanic origins of various Hungarian myths, let me finally address the Fehérlófia cartoon. One of the things I find most fascinating about the cartoon is that Marcell Jankovics doesn’t attempt to adapt any one instantiation of the story in pristine form. His version of the story varies quite a bit from the version we find collected by László Arany, and one gets the sense that he sees himself as just another storyteller in the long line of storytellers entrusted with the task of presenting the tale, much like how we have no reason to consider Richard Wagner’s telling of the Niebelungenlied “inauthentic” just because he changes some things around, like all virtually all the bards who came before him. It is possible that Jankovics adds details based on versions that he himself had known from personal research or other oral retellings, or he may have blended plot points from other folk tales. He was, after all, the director and producer of an entire cartoon series based on Hungarian folklore, as well as a great student of early Hungarian history (which he later put into his movies). But being an amateur in this area, I cannot pinpoint which elements come from where, so my insights here should be taken as somewhat tentative.
One detail too precise to seem wholly fabricated is the introduction Jankovics gives to the entire story. Whereas the written version of Fehérlófia starts without an introduction indicating where the titular character came from or why he was raised by a mare, Jankovics makes the mare his actual mother, and she conceives him through a kind of divine parthenogenesis. One of the first things we learn is that there is a Great Tree, and it has 77 roots and 77 branches. Accompanying the 77 roots are 77 dragons, and among the 77 branches, 77 crows. Though the tree doesn’t play an outsized role in the story, Jankovics is still reintroducing an element that was there in the original Siberian version but not in the later Hungarian one from the Eredeti Népmesék. However, the details about the 77 dragons and 77 crows are quite precise, leading me to suspect it wasn’t Jankovics’s own idea.
In any case, more is added to the cartoon version that is nowhere to be found in the previous two. We learn that before the titular character was born there was king and queen, both of whom resemble celestial deities (though we’re told that this occurred near the gates of Hell), and they have three sons who decide one day that they want wives. The king tells them that they may get married and each can rule over a kingdom, but each kingdom will have a lair guarded by a dragon that no one must ever go into. The three sons all agree and find wives. Everything goes well, but then the wives eventually become curious and go into the forbidden areas. This immediately causes their husbands to die, and then the dragons capture them, and hell is unleashed upon the world. Again, it is hard to know where Jankovics got this idea, but it does faintly recall the legend of Bluebeard, which Béla Bartók adapted into a symbolist opera. Its implications do, however, become clear as the plot progresses.
Later on, Fehérlófia’s mother, the white mare, first gives birth to two sons who run away instantly. She then gets pregnant and gives birth to Fehérlófia due to some kind of divine blessing, and she rears him making sure that he’ll know about the evil dragons and captured princesses, thus giving him a sense of purpose to drive the plot forward — also quite similar to the original Siberian tale. From that point on, much of the story follows the Hungarian written version, except for a few big changes. First, Fehérlófia proves his strength by pulling a tree out from its roots (rather than stripping off its bark), earning him the name “Fanyüvő,” or “Tree Shaker.” This means that he and the Fanyüvő from the Hungarian folk tale are merged into one person, and so he only has two men who accompany him, presumably the other two sons of the white mare. Second, Fehérlófia/Fanyüvő’s brothers don’t betray him as they do in the Hungarian folk tale. Instead, they accidentally seal up the pit through which he has ascended when he’s trying to come back. He believes they’ve betrayed him, but they explain to him later that it was a mistake, and he forgives them. Again, the lack of betrayal is an element in the original Siberian story, though the amount of companions is different.
Much of the changes are done to give the cartoon version of Fehérlófia a sense of balance and symmetry appropriate for its medium. The three princes who die in the beginning resemble the three heroes whom Fehérlófia/Fanyüvő leads. The three dragons at the beginning are the same three dragons Fehérlófia/Fanyüvő slays at the end. The story is told using the same repetition one finds in the written folk tale, with plenty of anaphora in the dialogue and narration, but also plenty of repeated actions that come in threes. At one point, Fehérlófia/Fanyüvő wants Vasgyúró to forge him a sword, and he does so, but it takes him three tries to get it right — this is something not found in the Eredeti Népmesék, but it fits with all the other actions that occur three times. On the whole, the use of repetition gives the film a hypnotic effect, which is complemented nicely by its minimalistic, ambient electronic soundtrack of long pedal tones, ringing chords, noisy interjections, and extended drones.
As for the animation style, let’s just say it’s quite far from both the Disney and the UPA style that were still dominant at the time. This was Jankovics’s second feature film after János Vitéz (1973, translated into English as “Johnny Corncob”), which had a visual approach heavily influenced by George Dunning’s work on Yellow Submarine (1968). Fehérlófia drops that influence pretty much altogether, forging its own style. It is more dramatic and “primitive” than János in that it uses bold, simple shapes and strong contrast for its lights and shadows. The colors are often bright and intense, and Jankovics puts great effort into demonstrating that the story takes place within some kind of cosmic realm outside of historical time. It is an expressionistic and colorful cartoon that makes strong use of geometrically simple shapes — not only in the character design, but as a basic compositional feature. These shapes frequently move about, pulsating and dancing, morphing from one into another, keeping all the images in a continual state of flux. They also occasionally form the basis of the camera shot, guiding its movement as they rotate or change angles, not unlike the various occult images you find in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain (1973). The animation is also often quite suggestive — for instance, although we see Fehérlófia severing his own limbs, it is not easy to tell what exactly is happening if one does not already know the story (I suspect this has to do with Soviet censorship more than anything). In any case, there is no concern here for the kind of lifelike visual mimesis found in the Disney fairy tale adaptations. The Disney movies present characters to whom the viewer can relate. Fehérlófia presents characters more aligned with ceremonial masks and marionette puppets than Hollywood actors — figures that suggest archetypes rather than individuals.
The most striking thing about Jankovics’s Fehérlófia, however, I’ve saved for last. It is that the film acts as an oblique commentary on the modern world, something no other version of the tale could have done. The three “dragons” are fully revealed at the beginning of the movie, so there is no element of surprise when they show up later, but slowly it becomes clearer and clearer that they don’t resemble dragons at all. Only when Fehérlófia/Fanyüvő confronts and wrestles them towards the end of the movie does the viewer gain a better sense of what they are. The three-headed dragon resembles a stone golem, and he can projectile vomit molten lava as an attack. The seven-headed dragon resembles a wartime killing machine — at times, a rocket, and at other times, a tank. Its seven heads look like shredders or industrial trash compactors. He is metal, mechanical, mobile, and he fires bullets and other projectiles. And finally, the twelve-headed dragon resembles a vast cityscape, and when he moves about, the animation depicting him often appears pixelated like an early video game, suggesting that he’s a being of both metal and electricity. Thus, when Fehérlófia/Fanyüvő slays all of these beasts one by one, the implication is that he has restored a Golden Age that existed prior to the reign of the dragons. But since the story takes place altogether outside of historical time, the “dark age” of modernity that the film implies is essentially an eternal metaphysical condition, something always latent as a possibility; something, in other words, that man can always unleash upon himself.
Now, if we consider the description of these dragons from the original Hungarian folk tale, ignoring how they’re visually depicted, the idea seems to be that each dragon is going from the recognizable to the increasingly abstract and elemental. A three-headed dragon is somewhat conceivable. A twelve-headed dragon is bizarre, insectoid, nightmarish, and in that sense a perfect avatar of chthonic forces. If we compare this tale to, let’s say, Beowulf, the succession of enemies moves in a similar direction. First Beowulf kills Grendel, a humanoid monster, then his mother (who is bigger and scarier and lives in an underground cave), and then finally a dragon. We’re moving in an increasingly elemental, chthonic direction. But when you consider what Jankovics does, he gives the same pattern a level of metaphysical complexity absent from these ancient heroic tales. By associating the dragons with modern technology, each one goes from being elemental (stone golems) to being increasingly commonplace (urban life), even though the beasts are still called “dragons” with the same number of heads, thus retaining the same chthonic implications. Understood in a certain way, it looks like Jankovics’s version of Fehérlófia betrays a view of the modern world similar to what we find in Rudolf Steiner and William Blake insofar as they see it as similarly chthonic rather than solar (I’ve wrote about this at length; see the hyperlinks). And this view, it should be noted, opposes that of J.J. Bachofen, who felt that the modern world represents the triumph of solar deities and the rule of the fathers over the “Mother Right” of ancient times.
From an ancient Southern Siberian hero story with elements that draw upon shamanic initiation rites, the Fehérlófia cartoon not only restores elements from the original story (whether intentionally or otherwise), but it also produces an interesting commentary on the metaphysical nature of modernity itself. Jankovics could have simply retold the story with no additional input, but the exigencies of the time in which he lived compelled him to add details that he saw hidden within the story, bringing them out like any oral poet would when retelling an old tale to a traveling war band.
But more importantly according to my own aesthetic perspective, Fehérlófia demonstrates a kind of potential hidden within animation as an art form that is seldom realized. The sad thing about Fehérlófia is that it didn’t earn much money. It was a box office failure, essentially. According to an interview with Marcell Jankovics, it got the most attention in Debrecen, the easternmost city in Hungary, and he suspects that most audiences elsewhere were put off instantly by the film’s opening dedication, “In memory of the Scythians, Huns, Avars and other nomadic peoples,” since it could only serve to remind them of their distant origins — something perhaps they were busy trying to forget. Animation has sadly been an art form with a history marked chiefly by mass man’s desire for novelty. As soon as animated shorts and features have acquired a new gimmick, audiences have historically come to demand it — CGI being among the most embarrassing examples. Mass audiences, moreover, don’t really know what they want from animation. On the one hand, realism is always impressive, but on the other hand, there’s no better realism than in a live action film, which creates a serious problem. The twentieth century has been marked by a lack of clarity in what animation, with its simplified forms and expressive, suggestive motions, ultimately should be expected to portray. With movies like Fehérlófia, I can hold out hope that more people will discover them and recognize their ability to tap into forgotten elements of man’s inner nature — hidden crevices that the video camera cannot reach by merely pointing at the exterior, carnal world surrounding us, something that seems to be capable of telling us less and less with each passing year.