The venue was crammed. People were jostling for position on the floor, on the stairs. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, interspersed with a few visible Hungarian emigrés (elderly, formally dressed, disgruntled at the mob scene) and one or two poorly groomed men carrying those bulging, faintly sinister plastic bags that for some reason are the mark of the obsessive cinéaste, the characters who never miss a screening at Anthology Film Archives, and whose London cousins are, at this very minute, loudly shushing someone talking through the credits at the BFI.
When Krasznahorkai turned up, escorted by his interviewer, the critic James Wood, he stood on stage to receive a protracted round of applause, which he absorbed genially, turning and bowing slightly, his hands steepled in a vaguely clerical gesture you usually only see from Indian politicians or high-ranking organised criminals on HBO.
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