István Szabó

The Luring Image

 

The moving picture - whether in the form of film or television - has become tremendously powerful, burdening everyone involved in its production with immense responsibility. Film-makers must never allow their camera to become weapons in the hands of politicians; and viewers must learn how to see what is behind the images, just as they had to learn how to read between the lines in the twentieth century.
Many years ago I had a film project which made it necessary to go through all the Deutsche Wochenschau newsreels released between 1933 and 1938.
It took several weeks. Early on, maybe in the summer of 1934, the crew accompanied hundreds of railway workers on their vacation in the Baltic states. You see them waving from the windows as the carriages roll through the Baltic landscape; they were clearly having a good time. A few years later a similar newsreel was released. This time, if I remember correctly, the railway workers went on vacation to the Black Sea. The following summer saw them travelling through France to Marseilles. And all of a sudden I was thinking, what a perfect way to prepare for war in the heyday of railway travel: to travel along transportation lines with experts, to check the condition of stations, rails, switches. These were just the imaginings of a director, of course. What a good story it would make if we put together the jigsaw puzzle of this archival material about vacationers and tourists.
A film never documents truth as such; it only captures a segment of reality chosen by the observer holding the camera. It only documents what the person standing behind the camera wants to document.
When I was starting as a director it was one of my tasks to go through newsreels from the fifties. I was astonished to find that some of the well-known victims of Stalinist show trials were later removed from this film material. I came across original photographs of historical events, later reproductions of which were doctored, with the inconvenient faces being removed and replaced with others. Thus I realised that some pictures usually considered as documents were in fact false.

Of course, in every age there are political interests that require falsification, the deception and manipulation of the public. Seeking to transform art into a vehicle of ideology, politics is always a seductive and corrupting force for artists; and there are always artists who need the protection of politics to attain success. Today, art as well as politics are mostly out to influence the masses, to seduce and indeed, if need be, to rape them.
I used to wonder if film has a special power that no other art form possesses.
I have seen more than once the famous footage where Stalin delivers a speech in the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to the delegates attending the Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. It shows Stalin in one long close-up: he speaks slowly, with emphasis, and he repeatedly reaches for a glass of water. Upon repeated viewing, the footage reveals something uncanny: Stalin is struggling with that glass. Barely has he put it down and uttered another sentence, and his gaze already returns to it. He reaches for the glass, but then he probably realises that drinking after every single word would make him look ridiculous, so he does not take it after all. With anxious eyes, he turns to his audience, but in the next moment his gaze is once again, obsessively, drawn towards the glass. How come nobody noticed that the country was run by a obsessional neurotic?
In Triumph of the Will we see and hear Hitler deliver a number of speeches. Each time, his arrival is announced in advance and preceded by the jubilant roaring of the crowd. When he finally arrives he does not begin to talk right away. The camera shows his face: he is waiting and trying to absorb the emotions of his audience. He waits until he gets a feeling of how best to begin: in a low voice gradually increasing in volume or with a shout followed by a lowering of his voice. For a few moments he appears to hesitate, yet one can also see his eyes light up with the desire to seduce, to wrestle you to the ground and rape you. And then, always unexpectedly, he begins to speak.
The film footages of Stalin and Hitler, though originally intended to enhance their glory, actually show an anxious paranoid and a perverted rapist. We must learn how to read the eyes looking back at us from the television screen.

...
In order to feel secure it is crucial that we find a companion, someone who feels as we do, someone who has the courage to say what we do not dare to say, someone who can be a model for us, someone who can express what we want. The face of this figure is different in each and every age, as are the challenges facing us and, consequently, our secrets and fears.
Greta Garbo became important to viewers at a time when uncertainty and fear of the future led millions to hide themselves behind uniforms, where they could feel as though they were protected and as though they belonged somewhere. Hiding behind ostensible shared goals, they forgot themselves and their own desires. Yet, deep down inside, they would have still liked to remain themselves and to keep their backbones straight, just as that exemplary woman remained herself in every single role, regardless of whether she played Queen Christina or the Soviet party secretary Ninochka, retaining her integrity even in the most intimate moments of passionate love. But as the dance atop the volcano became more and more reckless and the war was approaching, another female figure took on an increasingly prominent role in the public eye, a woman who embodied danger, seduction, vertigo - Marlene Dietrich. The war arrived, it devastated the world, and human beings learnt that their lives were worth precious little. It is thus best to enjoy life as long as possible, to take pleasure in the body, in the sun and in wine and beauty. Audiences thus forgot the intangible mystique of Marlene Dietrich and began to rave for Marilyn Monroe, who embodied the attractions of nature, femininity and the living body. But then feminism entered the stage, glorifying women who demanded an active role in shaping the future of the world. With flags raised high, they demonstrated for women's rights and took leading roles in the anti-war movement, representing various political groups. And, lo and behold, new faces appeared on the screen: Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave. In just a few years, we find women in ministerial positions and in the highest echelons of banks. A new type of woman appears on the screen, beautiful but tough, smart and implacable: Fay Dunaway, Catherine Deneuve. And slowly, a debate unfolds about the role of women in the new world, about the working woman and the mother, can she take the lead in society and keep the family together - a debate touching on family planning and sexual liberty, condoms and morals. Everything became confused, to the point where today one would be hard pressed to name a single female star who represents women in the same way as Garbo or Monroe did once. Maybe a handful of karate-fighting women and perhaps Julia Roberts still draw sizeable audiences, but by and large viewers go to the movies to see the men.
Let us have a look at the men, then. The tanned, sinewy cowboys of the pre-war era - John Wayne, Robert Taylor, Clark Gable - who fearlessly confronted evil and always stood on the right side, defeating robbers, wild animals, tempests, and mighty cliffs. They went to fight in the war, faced death and killed other men. And when they returned they could not find their place in society because they could no longer solve their problems with guns. They lost their bearings in the world; the directness of their gaze vanished and their faces began to express insecurity, anxiety and confusion. James Dean became the new hero. The end of the war, however, also brought increased responsibility for America, and this responsibility called for a new way of thinking, for a greater role played by intellectuals. Suddenly university teachers found themselves in government positions. Not surprisingly, the new hero was a real intellectual, Anthony Perkins.
Then came the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. Audiences began to sense that university teachers were not going to protect them; they needed men who were smart, who had feelings, but who could also fight back without thinking too much: Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffmann, Gene Hackman. But this era would not last long. The next hero wields a gun coldbloodedly, ready to take on the world all alone: Sylvester Stallone. It is only when the camera comes very close that you notice the fear of loneliness in his eyes as he furtively glances around for companions, recalling those lost children who drift around in underpasses and train stations. But soon the computer age ushers in another sort of hero, the technologically engineered fighter on whom no weapon can inflict a wound: Arnold Schwarzenegger. He survives every battle without a scratch, without bleeding, without breaking a bone. His clothes are never torn; he does not even get dirty.

...
It is often asked why we Europeans cannot make such powerful movies as the Americans.
The most frequent answer blames the lack of money. Unfortunately, this is not true. I think the difference lies in our heroes. Good film-making is based on lived experience, and our experiences - just like those of our grandparents - are born of wars, crushed revolutions, ideological dictatorships, political regimes that tear through private lives, humiliations, compromises and mean stratagems of survival. The heroes of our greatest films are losers. Whether in The Last Man, in Tin Drum, in Bicycle Thieves, in Rome, Open City, in La Notte, in Viridiana and The Round-Up, there is something wrong with these heroes; they fail or their sacrifice turns out to be futile. The message of the European film has to do with the circumstances under which I must live, with the ideas to which I must conform in order to be left alone, and with the inability to envision a future. American films, by contrast, speak the message: you are on your own, and your goal is to be rich and powerful. So go ahead, fight and prevail. Obviously all this is very superficially said, and you will have realised that I am putting all this ironically. Nonetheless, the playful contrast does raise a thoroughly serious question: what sort of future is Europe capable of envisioning?
We should not expect film to give us positive heroes. What is needed first of all is a vision of the future that has not been compromised yet, and for the sake of which the heroes of cinematic tales can sacrifice themselves. For two brief hours spent in a dark room, film is a secret source of solidarity and consolation. In this dark room, we can be alone with someone we can identify with, and do so without the risk of others finding out. Film is an exchange of intimate human touches. The language it currently employs, the language of "intimate human touches," emerged as a result of the persecution that forced a score of talented people to immigrate from Europe to America. Remember the makers of the Berlin film Menschen am Sonntag: Siodmak, Zinnemann, Billy Wilder. Béla Balázs lived there, and so did Alexander Korda, Béla Lugosi, Ernst Lubitsch, Erich von Stroheim, Marlene Dietrich, and Sternberg. Otto Preminger worked in Vienna; Michael Curtis a.k.a. Mihály Kertész, the director of Casablanca, Ferenc Molnár, Pál Fejős, Adolf Zucker, the founder of Paramount, Vilmos Fried, later to become famous as William Fox, who founded 20th Century Fox, in Budapest. They did not want to leave. In a café in Los Angeles in the 1930s, Michael Curtis and Béla Lugosi were talking in Hungarian. They must have been making a lot of noise because after a while Billy Wilder, who sat at a nearby table, told them: "Enough Hungarian, boys! You are in America, so you should talk in German!"
They all left. They did not speak English, but they were full of stories that they were eager to tell. So they invented a language of their own, the language of simple human feelings, which consisted of gestures of love, jealousy, hatred, joy, fear and determination, and which operated with fleeting looks and touches rather than words. The human touch. This is still the language of American film. The difference between their cinematic language and the one predominant today is that they still had a European culture, openness, tolerance and self-restraint. This is probably the crucial element. They were never arrogant and reckless because they had absorbed self-irony at the universities of Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Cracow, Budapest or Trieste, or perhaps on the marketplace of a small village in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, where merchants, if they wanted to sell their products, had to speak at least three languages and address their customers according to the customs of three or four religions.

 

István Szabó
This is a translation of the Oscar-winning film director's opening address at the 2004 Salzburg Festival, given on 23 July.