András Gervai
A Screen Moralist
József Marx: István Szabó. Vincze Kiadó, Budapest, 2002. 434
pp. Illustrated.
Apart from Miklós Jancsó, István Szabó
is the Hungarian filmmaker best known abroad, showered with festival awards
and prizes. Still, the surprising yet revealing fact is that the last time
a book was written on him was nearly a quarter of a century ago. Since the
publication of that tiny volume, only a collection of his interviews has been
published, in 1995. Therefore, József Marx's large and lavishly illustrated
book, which comes complete with ample notes - printed on the margin of the
large pages - stills, family photos and documents, etc., and lists Szabó's
short films and works for television as well, fills a huge gap. He traces
Szabó's career film by film, discussing the stories, the conflicts and the
personality of the main characters, to reveal the hidden connections between
the different films and motifs that enrich one another much as a dialogue.
In order to enable us to understand the intellectual and professional milieu
in which the films were made, and the forces that opposed or helped him, Marx
has placed Szabó's career and works in a broader context. He provides an overview
of the Hungarian social, economic and political conditions and interconnections
that determine the artists' maneuvering space, providing a detailed picture
of the problems and power relations in the movie industry.
Marx knows this world inside out, as he has worked in it for several decades.
For a while he was a scriptwriter at Budapest Stúdió, one of the workshops
within the single Hungarian movie com-pany producing feature films; next,
between 1975 and 1986, he headed Objektív Stúdió, before being appointed as
deputy director of the film company; after that, for a time, he was in charge
of the Film Institute. He knows Szabó intimately, they worked together for
twelve years. Marx was the Hungarian producer for Mephisto and Szabó was deputy
director of Objektív Stúdió right until the early 1990s. (He resigned, because
he disapproved of management methods; in specific, he objected to the way
in which young directors were denied real opportunities to make films.)
The author's earlier positions and his close association with Szabó do not
provide only advantages. Marx appears to feel obliged to demonstrate his unequivocal
(and somewhat biased) loyalty to Szabó. All those who have ever written or
said anything unflattering about Szabó or his films (mainly critics but also
some influential directors in days of old) come in for their share of vitriolic
comment. Still, this is a very useful book, regardless of the occasional apologies
and biases; it reveals a great deal about Szabó's work and about the history
of filmmaking during the Kádár era and the period following the democratic
transition.
Earlier Szabó had declined to provide details of his private life, which makes
everything that we now learn about his childhood and youth all the more important.
He was born in 1939. On his mother's side, he descended from a family of Austrian
Jews bilingual in German and Hungarian. His father's family, the Szabós, moved
to Tatabánya, a mining town near Budapest, from Nyitra in the old Upper Hungary,
now in Slovakia. His doctor grandfather introduced healthcare in that region.
His father, who practised as a surgeon in the same town, died at the end of
the war. Their death, especially the death of his father, was a prolonged
trauma for Szabó, which left a mark on his films.
He was admitted to the Academy of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts immediately
after finishing secondary school - along with eleven others out of 800 applicants.
Some of his classmates went on to become prominent in the Hungarian new wave,
among them Judit Elek, Pál Gábor (Vera Angi), Zoltán Huszárik (Szindbád),
and Ferenc Kardos. They had an outstanding teacher in charge of their class
in the person of Félix Máriássy. He instilled in them good taste, the right
attitude and high morals. For Szabó, he was something of a surrogate father.
(It shows the warm and undying feelings he had towards his former teacher
that, in 1989, when on Ingmar Bergman's invitation he became one of the twelve
directors founding the European Film Academy, he proposed the name for the
Europe Film Award: it is the Felix.)
His career had an unusual start. Thanks to János Herskó, who was the director
of the studio where Szabó spent his apprenticeship, the film company made
an exception in his case and waived the ten-year period during which young
directors had to work as second and first assistants before their first opportunity
to direct a movie. In 1964, at the age of 25, he directed The Age of Daydreaming,
admittedly not without some complications, as only the fifth version of the
script was approved. Lyrical in tone, the film, which was about the young
generation's problems in settling down and starting out on a career, and also
about the inflexibility and wrong-headedness of the older generation in opposing
them, and which was heavy with history, shared the Silver Sail Award at the
Locarno Film Festival.
The director's private mythology and his own generation's experiences are
explored in Father (1966) and Love Film (1969-1970). The former earned him
the Special Award of the Locarno Festival and the Grand Prix at the Moscow
Film Festival, as well as a prize in Acapulco, where it competed against works
like Luis Buńuel's Belle de jour and Antonioni's Blow-Up. The tempestuous
history of the 20th century is captured through the memories and dreams of
ordinary people in Fireman's Street (1972-1973) and later in Budapest Tales
(1976). In Marx's opinion, one ought to notice something that the contemporary
critics tended to overlook: in these films Szabó consistently portrayed Jewish
characters, stories and motifs. In Budapest Tales the signs of fatigue and
repetitiveness began to show; the initially original and inspired themes and
style become spasmodic and rigid. The psychological chamber piece set in the
Second World War - in the words of a critic who discovered something very important - "is
not only a summing up but also a step forward..., because it opened the way
for a more concise and more logical interpretation of the world."
With his next work, the Academy Award
winning Mephisto (1980-1981) a new period began for Szabó. The decidedly personal
tone, which had been so appealing at the start of his career, was replaced
with the legends of private history, the episodes from Hungarian history,
broad and spectacular tableaux and a treatment of East-Central European traumas
presented through personal lives. From that time onward, Szabó examined various
aspects of the same problem, delving deeper and deeper into the human soul.
He is interested in the relationship between individuals and the authorities,
trying to pinpoint the moment at which an honourable compromise ends and opportunism,
even when it is justified by seemingly reasonable arguments, begins: in other
words, how a person loses his autonomy.
The first part of his trilogy, Mephisto, documents the process in which a
talented and thoughtful man in Nazi Germany, an actor named Hendrik Höfgen,
renounces his integrity step by step in an effort to move up in the world,
until he reaches a state of complete moral decay. The true talent of Colonel
Alfred Redl, an intelligence officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, was for
blind obedience, which guaranteed him continuous and swift promotion. His
tragedy - if it can be called a tragedy at all - lay in the fact that he served
a system that was willing to sacrifice him without a moment's hesitation.
The film Colonel Redl (1984) had a mixed reception in Central Europe. In Germany
it received the Bundesfilm-Preis, the award for the best movie of the year.
In Austria, by contrast, it provoked a scandal: several periodicals accused
the film of bringing the country into disrepute - just as Redl had done earlier
on - and one of the co-producers, the superintendent of ORF, disclaimed all
connections with it. Through his extrasensory perception and telepathic, clairvoyant
and hypnotic powers, the hero of Hanussen (1987-1988) makes a brilliant career
in Germany going Nazi. According to Marx, Höfgen is an opportunist, Redl is
a subordinate and Hanussen is a presumptuous person "who, unlike the
other two, doesn't fall; he simply destroys himself."
The Oscar he received for Mephisto brought instant fame for Szabó, launching
his international career. After that he only made one other Hungarian film,
although some of his movies had a Hungarian partner among the western investors.
Szabó has proven to be attractive to producers, because his films can be distributed
in any part of the world with a profit. He can do something that most of his
Hungarian colleagues cannot - for reasons due to either professional snobbery
or aristocratism or lack of talent. He can entertain people at a high standard,
mediating values, orienting and forcing people to form an opinion.
In one of his interviews he revealed that he wanted to engage in public therapy
through his films, which he regarded as different ways of making people feel
secure. This aim is apparent from works produced around the time of the democratic
transition in Hungary. In his Meeting Venus (1990) he was interested in the
sacrifices individuals and the community as a whole had to make for the common
goal; he also explored the ways in which democratic systems function and the
final moment when they break down. The location is the Europe opera house
in Paris, which is at the same time concrete and manifoldly symbolic. As well
as being the microcosm of an intellectual and artistic workshop full of contradictions
and conflict, the opera house is the symbol of the - anything but smooth -
cooperation between the members of the European union, a term very much in
the focus of public interest.
The film is based on Szabó's experiences at the time when he directed Tannhäuser
in the Paris Opera. The artists and the technical staff were on strike and
Christoph von Dohnányi, the conductor who had originally singled him out for
the task, walked out on the project before the premiere. (Incidentally, in
the 1990s Szabó directed Boris Godunov in Leipzig and Il Trovatore in Vienna,
the latter of which sparked off a scandal by its actualisation. Also, at the
end of the decade, he directed Three Sisters, an opera by Péter Eötvös in
the Budapest Opera, who had composed the score for his first movie and who
subsequently made his name internationally.
In 1991 the first time after more than a decade, Szabó again chose a Hungarian
subject. Two young female secondary school teachers of Russian have to undergo
"retraining", and depicting their ordeals Szabó shows the life of
those who became the losers in the great changes this society underwent. Sweet
Emma, Dear Böbe - Marx simply calls it a masteriece - is perhaps the most
moving report on the moral and existential consequences of the changes. The
film won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival.
The most momentous project of the 1990s was Sunshine (1998), which received
three Felix awards. It tells the story of a Jewish family's social assimilation,
their successes and private lives over three generations. Through individual
lives, the film in fact examines the assimilation of Hungarian Jewry, ending
in its 20th-century tragedy, but also the question - one that comes up in
almost all of his movies - of how far one can go in surrendering one's integrity
in the process of self-realisation and identification with the existing regime.
Szabó remains a Hungarian filmmaker through and through, as his statements
and, even more importantly, his subjects and approach reveal. Although he
was existentially unaffected by the Hungarian movie industry's structural,
financial and moral crisis after the changes, he, too, felt the effects. (The
film studios faced grave financial difficulties: in 1992 litigation was started
against their largest and most important base, the Róna [formerly Lumumba]
Street studio. By the middle of the decade, the studio of documentary films
had been abolished; today, there is a bus terminal in its place. The Pasarét
Street studio was also pulled down, where Alexander Korda had once shot his
early films. The distribution of films also changed fundamentally; American
movies flooded the market and the audience turned away from the Hungarian
cinema: within a decade, they lost 99 per cent of their audience.)
Although Szabó's suggestions were ignored, and although he received no invitation
at all to work in Hungary throughout the 1990s, he took no offence. Instead,
he stayed away from the professional in-fighting and mud-slinging while preserving
his commitment to his colleagues and the cause of the Hungarian cinema. Whenever
he was able to persuade his producers, he shot his movies partly or entirely
in Hungary (for example, Sunshine).
Szabó managed to go through a successful transformation halfway through his
career: he was able to convert his talent without selling out his principles.
For a while now, he has been listed among the finest directors. In Marx's
opinion - and it is not difficult to agree with his judgment - his art constitutes
one of the most characteristic and yet loneliest values in Hungarian culture.
András Gervai
is a journalist, critic and editor. In the early 1990s he was a correspondent
for The Jewish Chronicle of London. He is the author of three volumes of interviews
and one of essays.
A radio and television programme maker, he also has one documentary movie
to his credi
