Ellen Maria Gorrissen Lecture

Imagination in Service of Historic Reality

Gyula Gazdag is a screenwriter, director, and distinguished research professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television. In this talk, he will discuss his often satirical and absurdist work, which addresses human-rights issues in a dictatorial political system. He will screen some clips from his earlier films, many of which were banned by different political regimes in his native Hungary. Gazdag will also present his work-in-progress, a screenplay entitled Tourist Trip to Hell. The story is based on a 1921 advertisement in a Swiss newspaper that offered a tourist trip to the battlefields of the First World War’s Western Front. By bringing his characters to visit the eerie scene of “the Great War that was supposed to end all wars,” Gazdag intends to tell an absurdist tale of gullibility and forgetfulness.