Erzsébet Bori
Making a Virtue of Necessity
The 27th Hungarian Film Week
Pál Sándor, Károly Makk, Miklós Jancsó: Szeressük egymást, gyerekek (Love Each Other) * András Kern: Sztracsatella (Straciatella) * Ildikó Szabó: Csajok (Bitches) * György Czabán, György Pálos: A kenyereslány balladája (A Bread Girl's Ballad) * Márta Mészáros: A hetedik szoba (The Seventh Room) * András Sipos: Az én kis nõvérem (My Little Sister) * Miklós Jancsó: Elmondták-e neked? (Have You Been Told?) * Ibolya Fekete: Bolshe Vita * Péter Gothár: Hagyjállógva Vászka (Letgohang Vaska) * András Szirtes: A kisbaba reggelije (Baby's Breakfast).
The traditional annual review of Hungarian films was held, as usual, at the beginning of the year. It produced no spectacular breakthrough, no revolutionary innovation, no epoch-making masterpiece. Filmmaking in Hungary has not yet emerged from the deep trough it has long been in. At the same time, the outlines of a new industry are beginning to emerge more clearly. The trend was made the more obvious by the fact that the management of the Film Week has been taken over by a new man and a new team. György Horváth had made his mark by programming for the Örökmozgó Film Múzeum and the Toldi Cinema, two of the best art cinemas in Budapest; he must have been awarded the job of Festival Director in recognition of his work as one of the initiators and organizers of the Titanic Film Presence Festival. The latter, now in its third year, aims to call attention to films that fall through the large holes in the net of professional (not only commercial) film distribution. With a menu of both alternative and experimental films, the Titanic offers a much more varied and exciting picture of world cinema than traditional festivals do.
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At this year's festival, twenty-three full-length feature films were shown. That figure conforms to the average but a closer examination reveals some astonishing changes. Of the twenty-three films, nine were made partly or entirely on video, and one director (András Szirtes) used an ancient hand-crank camera. Nearly half of the pieces shown were not feature films in the accepted sense of the term; they were sketch or episode films, works by independent, alternative directors, or they were on the borderline between documentary and fiction (a striking number of works were fictional variations on earlier documentaries). Counting the number of low-budget movies would be futile: by international standards, practically every film produced in Hungary is low budget.
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Several of this year's documentaries dealt with Jewish topics. These included important pieces like Miklós Jancsó's "educational" film Elmondták-e neked? (Have You Been Told?) or Judit Elek's portrait of Elie Wiesel. Jancsó, although his last feature film was made in 1991, has been very active in these last few years. He has lectured widely, taught in America and travelled all over the Carpathian Basin looking for, salvaging and filming abandoned Jewish cemeteries in the lands of "historical" Hungary. Have You Been Told? is a continuation of that work. Made for students and the young, Jewish and Gentile, the film guides its viewers through the Hungarian Holocaust exhibition of the Budapest History Museum and the Hungarian history of the last hundred years. It is a masterpiece of its kind. The evidence is available also in textbooks (although the facts were selected and arranged in the script according to their own train of thought and inner logic) but not even the most attractive illustrated book can match the effect of Miklós Jancsó's voice as he narrates and interprets the events, now addressing his audience, now asking them questions, taking his audience very seriously and making it emotionally involved. "Tell it to your sons," the Jews demand. "Ask your parents and grandparents about it," Jancsó suggests.[...]
The great number of works dealing with Hungarian Jews and the Hungarian Holocaust is easy to explain, the upsurge in films about Russia and Russians is much more surprising. Ibolya Fekete has already given us two documentaries on the new wave of migration passing through Hungary since the end of the 1980s. Her new film, Bolshe Vita, uses the same material for fiction, to tell the story of three Russian boys, one English and one American girl, trying their luck and testing their love during the summer of 1989 in Hungary. Part of the film's appeal is the director's refusal to try to cram more into her given frame than it could take. Bolshe Vita deservedly won the prize for Best First Film at the festival. The topic is interesting, the story-telling is sound and, even though its characters come from abroad, Bolshe Vita tells more about Hungary now than the majority of contemporary movies do.
The subtitle to Péter Gothár's Grand Prix-winning film Hagyjállógva Vászka (Letgohang Vaska) is "a labour camp story". It is about the magical mystery tour and folk-tale adventures of Letgohang Vaska, a gangster from St Petersburg, and Vanka, a village thief in the Petrograd of the Bolsheviks. The script, by László Bratka, is powerful in itself but is curiously lit up by the knowledge that the story grew out of the gulag subculture that has existed in Russia since Tsarist times. Beside the writings of Chekhov, Solzhenytsin, Shalamov and the others, the special language of this self-enclosed world is now known in a dictionary form along with its own art form: tattoos. The film was made on a shoe-string, on video. Beyond marvellous performances by the Russian actors, Gothár combines images and narrative so that together they carry extra meaning. He uses rich, folk-tale imagery going far beyond the limits of the frequently belittled video technique. It is a genuine revelation.
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Erzsébet Bori
is our regular film critic.
