When you were young what did you want
to do when you grew up? What did your parents have in mind for you?
Back then, just as today, the children of the well-to-do could become anything,
so my parents did not much care what and how I studied. Typically, on the
day of my secondary school leaving exams, my father asked me where I was going
to so smartly got up. To my finals, I told him. What? he said. You're sitting
your leaving exams already? Mother paid more attention, but she wasn't really
bothered about how well I did at school. I originally studied law; being a
lawyer gave you status, it wasn't taken very seriously. Anyone who didn't
know what to do and wanted to put off a decision, studied law. I was an articled
clerk for three years. I also read ethnography, but I never completed my studies.
Who helped you interpret and put up with "Socialism"?
Leszek Kolakowsi was a revelation, and of course Herbert Marcuse was important
too. But above all, Bakunin, perhaps because he's so utopian, so impracticable.
What social scientists do you like reading today? Whose ideas and world
view can you identify with?
There aren't too many such thinkers: Noam Chomsky or Karl Popper, perhaps.
But they don't really move me either. If there is someone I find convincing,
it's Stephen Hawking. I have taken to reading natural scientists.
What writers are dear to you?
I read a lot. I was much moved by Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger. My favourites
include Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Russian authors and 20th-century Americans.
The last novel I read was by Updike. I was most influenced by Hemingway, his
fantastic simplicity, his dialogue, his lyricism.
Who had the greatest influence on you philosophically or ideologically?
A longing for solidarity and equality lead me to what are called the populist
writers and sociologists. I personally knew well one of the greatest Hungarian
writers of the century, Zsigmond Móricz. I was also in touch with the outlawed
National Peasant Party during the war. And though I considered myself a populist
heart and soul, there was a basic tenet in their ideology-that Hungarians
are not just one nation amongst others-which I never believed in. This attitude
of theirs, in the thirties and forties, was not just heady chauvinism-which
it was too-but also resistance to the Germans and compassion with the have-nots
and the oppressed. They have long since excommunicated me; they hold me, because
of my films, a traitor to Hungarians. Among the influences on me in my youth,
I now find Bakunin more important than the narodniks. He also based his philosophy
on solidarity.
I read many of his works, in French. Elemér Muharay was another decisive influence
on my ideas. I still consider him my mentor. I got to know him before 1945,
he belonged to the socialist left wing of the Peasant Party. He and his amateur
theatrical and folk dance group were active in the anti-German students' movement,
in the latter part of the war. After the war he invited me to be the secretary
of his newly forming group, which gathered under the rallying cry of a New
Folk Art. I got into the Horváth Árpád People's College in 1945, and it was
the famous film theorist, Béla Balázs, who suggested that I go and study film
directing at the Academy of Theatre and Film.
What films and actors do you remember seeing as a child or young man?
I remember Tom Mix, the cowboy in
classic westerns. And I can recall a silent film, The Sacrifice of the Seal
of the Con-fessional, in which the priest keeps the seal of the confessional
and does not betray a murderer, at the price of himself being executed. It's
a great story. The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard was also a great experience.
I went to see all Hungarian films, and many Italian and German ones. Films
from Allied countries weren't allowed into the country during the war. But
I don't remember most of the films I saw before 1945. It was really during
my college years that I started going to the cinema again. It was at that
time that I saw the classic Russian films. I thought Chapaev was a great film;
one of the scenes-a psychological offensive-I tried later to reproduce in
a film of mine. Later, when I had the film brought to the studio in Budapest,
to show to my girlfriend Giovanna, I was astonished to see that Chapaev was
a Stalinist work.
Your political affiliations after the war?
The extreme left. As many other members of my generation, I believed in change,
in the possibility of turning the world round by tomorrow. Anyone who rejects
this now does not know what the caste system of the Horthy era was like, what
those three million beggars meant. At the end of 1946, together with the majority
of the Muharay group, I joined the Communist Party. In 1955, when Imre Nagy
was replaced as Prime Minister, I was downgraded to a candidate member. I
don't now remember for what reason. My membership lapsed, together with the
Hungarian Workers' Party, in 1956, and later I did not even consider joining
the reformed Communist Party, Kádár's Hungarian Socialist Workers Party (MSZMP).
No one really urged me, György Aczél, who was the chief ideologist of the
party, Kádár's best friend, even dissuaded me from joining.
Did none of the mud of the fifties stick to you?
I completed my studies in 1950, and then directed newsreels-without any conviction.
My role, just as the whole crew's, was rather formal. We had to produce material
conforming to the required ideology, radiating optimism, in which reality
was not to appear, even by chance. The place had to be surveyed before shooting,
the editor wrote the script, which was then censored.
What rocked your Communist convictions?
The first and decisive shock was the arrest, show trial and execution of
the former Communist Minister of the Interior, then Foreign Minister, László
Rajk. I too believed, more or less, that Rajk had been a mole, perhaps because
propaganda was so successfully done. Until a few months after the trial, a
journalist friend with links to the Ministry of the Interior told me all about
it. We were sitting in this bar, and he kept relating the details. At closing
time we staggered out, sat on a bench somewhere, and wept till dawn. From
that night on I knew that First Secretary Mátyás Rákosi and his "comrades"
were criminals, and the system had nothing to do with a new world. Complete
disillusionment came with the suppression of the revolution. From then on
I always referred to our "sweet" Stalinism as so-called Socialism.
Why did you wait for so long after the transition before making a feature
film?
I felt I had nothing to say, I could not react to what was my daily experience.
That is why for a long time I did not make feature films, and did documentaries
on all sorts of topics and localities.
Please mention some.
I made many documentaries for "Gypsy Magazine" of Hungarian Television; those
made between 1994 and 1996 were compiled into a three-part series, The Forest
is Green, The Mountains are Green, Luck Comes and Luck Goes. I made a documentary
for Italian television on a tavern by Lake Balaton (O dolce terra d'Ungheria),
and a portrait of Félix Lojko, the violin virtuoso , with Grunwalsky. An album
by the photographer Lajos Erdélyi on Jewish cemeteries in Transylvania provided
the idea for The Message of Stones, which showed Jewish monuments in the neighbouring
countries, synagogues now used for other purposes. Remnants was about the
last Jewish couple living in a village in Máramaros (Maramures¸), and their
Roma friend.
How far are these latter films mementos of the thinning Jewish population?
Only by implication. In Kassa (Kos©ice), for instance, we recorded a ball
held in a community centre, which is a converted synagogue. The pictures speak
for themselves. In Jassy in Moldavia, our guide was an 86-year-old Yiddish
linguist, Icig Shwarz. He told us that before the war there were 900,000 Jews
in Romania, by the time of the film only 16,000. There were 50,000 Jews in
Jassy, now there are only 600. In 1941 the Iron Guard murdered 20,000 Jews
using knives. At the pogrom memorial in the cemetery, we met a family on a
visit from Israel, grandfather, father and children, and the grandfather turned
out to be one of the few survivors. My old, open-minded friend recited Kaddish,
apparently he could not be shaken by anything. As for me-maybe because of
my age-I struggled hard not to cry.
What is it that interests you in Jews?
Their difference, that despite thousands of years of harassment they have
survived. Religion, religious life with its rich ritual also provided Jews
with an escape from the hardships of everyday existence. I'm only half Hungarian,
my mother was Romanian, my father's parents included Unitarians. This may
be why I was always interested in being different, in the life of minority
groups.
Were you ever forced, while making films or when presenting them, to make
concessions? Any conflict with the "nonexistent" censorship?
My first film, The Bells Have Gone to Rome, was rather difficult to manage,
everyone tried to interfere. It was then I decided I'd never let anyone interfere
with my films. When they wanted to cut a scene from My Way Home, I only agreed
to re-shoot it if the General Manager put down his "wishes" in writing.
In the films of your earlier period you were intrigued by the rites of
history: first the mechanism of authority and power, and later the movement
and structuring of masses, how they are manipulated.
Those films are never accurate analyses of given periods. Nor are they historical
reflections. They're not concrete analyses of anything, rather sequences of
visions, or, let's say, sermons. Fake ballets. Their point of departure is
the denial of oppression, presented in a somewhat utopian manner.
What was the rationale behind what was perhaps the principal mark of your
films, the long takes?
I used long takes because I wanted films without cuts, I'm simply inept at
cutting. I always hated flashbacks, empty passages and cuts. Each shot took
as long as there was material in the camera-ten minutes. All my films were
made up of eight, ten, maximum sixteen shots. It was also cheaper, and we
finished shooting earlier. Good actors, anyhow, prefer being left to talk
and act uninterrupted. Long takes let me get from one action into another;
the empty spaces could be filled with masses, horses or naked girls. (In the
eighties video monitors were introduced, which were inside the frame and which
expanded space and time. The video inserts of course partly interfered with
the story, and partly left the space between the two actions unfilled. Empty
spaces are cut out of films today.)
What was the meaning of the most controversial of your symbols, nakedness?
It varied from film to film. Sometimes it represented vulnerability, sometimes
freedom and abandon.
After 1989 you expressed enthusiasm about the changes in various interviews.
What is your attitude now?
I found what happened in Hungary and Eastern Europe incredible. It was incredible
that as an old man, two steps before being scattered in the wind, I should
see the collapse of an empire. I felt rejuvenated. I was enthusiastic about
the Russians leaving the country, about freedom of speech. But I also lived
to see a growing number of the underprivileged. The poor have grown even poorer
than they were in the Kádár era. Nobody cares about anything, only to get
their hands on a slice of state property, once they get close to it. Most
politicians are only interested in making their own pile. The "greatness"
of the transition lies in that it opened up our eyes: showed us the world
as it really is. Eighty per cent of humans live under the poverty level, the
rest, twenty per cent, own and control everything. Under the previous regime,
we did not have a chance to experience this in its raw brutality. Intellectuals
were actually also in a different position, on both sides of that bipolar
world: they were listened to. Today intellectuals, film directors included-provided
they are intellectuals-are treated according to their real value, they are
ignored.
