Go West: East European Filmmakers in the World

Andrei Tarkovsky, Milos Forman, Roman Polanski, István Szabó, Dusan Makavejev: five familiar names, five highly regarded filmmakers from Eastern Europe. Tarkovsky: a Russian, a Soviet exile toward the end of his life, who died in 1986. Forman: first a Czech, an exile until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and an American moviemaker since. Polanski: a Polish-born international star director. Makavejev: a Serb from Yugoslavia, later a globetrotter and, for the past few years, stateless, who thinks of himself as a member of a non-existent nation, the Yugoslav. Szabó: a Hungarian film director born, bred and living in Hungary, who owes his success to international co-productions.

Szabó is best known outside Hungary for his three films on Central European subjects, Colonel Redl, Hanussen and, of course, the Oscar-winning Mephisto. In Hungary, however, his early autobiographical trilogy (The Age of Daydreaming, Father, Love Film) are regarded as equally important. They portray the generation maturing in the 1960s. Father is the most personal (and, to many, the best) film Szabó has ever made. That trilogy of a contemporary setting was followed by films about the generation before and the history of its recent past: 25 Firemen Street, Budapest Tales, and perhaps also Confidence which, unlike the previous two, was an intimate drama involving only a few characters, set during the German occupation of Hungary. Although the Central European films appear to break away from Hungary, in fact they simply step backward in time, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in order to achieve a broader view of the region's past and its history leading to the tragedy of the Second World War. Mephisto's box-office and critical success opened the road to the West for Szabó, too. The answer to the question why he, alone of the directors in this volume, stayed in his native country, is, interestingly enough, to be found in a much earlier work, Love Film (1980), which also tackles the problems of exile, the constant pain of being away from one's native soil.

Szabó's career seems to have suffered a break after the political changeover of 1989. It is greatly to the merit of David Paul that he is free of the clichés about "existing" socialism and correctly sees that repression was not all-encompassing or absolute. Film production was, in fact, one of the "success sectors" of the Kádár era, where artists - granted that they observed certain rules - enjoyed a relative freedom: each could test the tolerance of the system according to their own courage and temperament. Szabó was never directly political but consistently travelled his own road and built up a coherent oeuvre. That organic progress seems to have come to a halt since the changeover. The opportunities for filmmaking in Hungary having been drastically curtailed, Szabó for the first time accepted an offer to direct a film fully abroad (Meeting Venus is a big international production through and through), and he is being forced to do the same again now. He has had no opportunity to make a film in Hungary since Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe, which was released in 1993 and won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival and anything but enthusiastic reviews at home. Actually, that happens every time an artist takes it upon himself to talk about the most pressing problems of the present (here, the birth pangs of the brave new world, and the way 1989 has turned the life of ordinary people upside down) without keeping his distance or waiting for things to settle down. In Paul's astute observation, foremost in Szabó's set of values has been a sense of security. Who else, then, should have made a film about an entire country losing its security, if not him? Increasingly appreciated as time passes, Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe can now be seen as a film of moral indignation and deep empathy.