György Báron

The Old Man in Pince-Nez

Márta Mészáros: A temetetlen halott (The Unburied Dead).

"What we can do, though, is remember
the hurt, reluctant, hesitant man
who nonetheless soaked up
anger, delusion
and a whole nation's blind hope."
György Petri*

When the Communist regime fell, we could be forgiven for thinking - if such matters entered our mind at all - that a whole series of landmark works about the 1956 Revolution would now see the light. The Revolution was, after all, a magnificent story, not unlike Greek tragedies. Under János Kádár's regime, anything even remotely relevant about the Revolution and the ensuing savage retribution was absolutely taboo. With this original sin casting its shadow over his regime, the tyrant and his lackeys never managed to expunge its memory, something like the futile attempts of Shakespeare's royal murderers to rid themselves of the bloody apparitions of their victims. Even the finale proved worthy of a Shakespeare's pen: the benign murderer died an incoherent senile old man on the very day that his victims were posthumously rehabilitated by the Hungarian Supreme Court.
Fifteen years later, it is a surprise to find that hardly any films have been produced about 1956, none that are good and a handful of bad ones. This is all the more surprising as Hungarian film-makers had done quite a bit to advance the cause prior to the regime change. They had gone all the way to the limits of the permissible and they had managed to push those limits further out. Yet the films they made during an era of censorship without mendacity or equivocation did not and could not have 1956 as their primary subject (suffice to mention István Szabó's Father, Ferenc Kósa's Ten Thousand Suns, Zoltán Fábri's Twenty Hours, all made in the 1960s). Or, they showed the uprising from the point of view of the private person, from below, as it were (Károly Makk's Philemon and Baucis, Pál Sándor's Daniel Takes a Train, or Péter Gárdos' Whooping Cough, from the 1970s and '80s, come to mind here). These film-makers found a way of speaking honestly in a dishonest time about something that could not be honestly discussed. Perhaps it was this concealment, this hiding-and-seeking, that lent their works sufficient form and aesthetic weight. Conversely, it may be the lack of any such pressures, the euphoria of taboos lifted, that accounts for the failure of later films addressing this subject. There are probably more substantial reasons as well lurking beneath the surface: the intellectual surrender of the fifteen years that have passed since the advent of democracy, one of the most severe symptoms (if not the most severe symptom) of which is precisely the disintegration of the consensus about 1956 and the rampant greed displayed by various political groups as they appropriated its intellectual and moral legacy.
For all these reasons, there have been few movies about 1956 since the regime change of 1989, and all of them seem to reflect the troubled spirit of the times (I shall not discuss the indispensable
documentaries on the subject, for the documentary genre can hardly be accused of not meeting its obligations in this respect). Ferenc Kósa's The Other Person, a cinematographic family novel shot during the last days of the ancien régime, was the first film with 1956 at its heart, the story of the son. Although a courageous work, neither distorting nor dodging the truth, it already foreshadows the danger that the great story is subordinated to the goal of legitimizing the powers that be. Two film dramas focusing on the Revolution - Károly Makk's Hungarian Requiem and András Sólyom's Pannonian Fragment - turned out to justify fears in this respect. It is hardly by chance that the weakest part of Márta Mészáros's remarkable Diary trilogy is its last instalment, made after the regime change and thus no longer subject to censorship. It is sad but true: the films made by Szabó, Fábri, Sándor and Makk under the Kádár regime give a more authentic, more interesting and more human picture of 1956 than those made around the time of the regime change and thereafter.
Back then, however, we did not even have time to feel disappointed. Already, the new generation had arrived. Its cult movie, Moscow Square, takes place in the fateful summer of 1989, when Imre Nagy was reburied. It contains a single sentence about Nagy: "Who the fuck is Imre Nagy?" asks the protagonist, a boy at high school, turning to his grandmother as she incredulously stares at the television screen on June 16, the day that Nagy was ceremoniously reburied.
André Bazin writes that a politician's life can be represented in a film only "if his life becomes fully identical with History, if the biography itself becomes History." What is needed, in other words, is time and the perspective that it gives, allowing processes to take on a discreet shape so that virtue and guilt, the essential and the incidental might separate.
It is hard to tell whether that moment has arrived yet. In any event, Márta Mészáros' film, The Unburied Dead is the first post-1989 work on the Revolution and its martyred prime minister that merits critical attention. It is a celebratory film with all the virtues and drawbacks that entails. It can be recommended without hesitation to elementary school pupils, because it tells in a truthful manner what we already know but which nonetheless bears repeating for all those young people who may still ask, with the teenager in Moscow Square, "who the fuck is Imre Nagy?" The appropriate response is not outrage but rather: a clear answer. For a start, show them Mária Mészáros's movie. Once they have the basics covered, they can move on to the intermediate and to the advanced lessons - that is, they could move on to those lessons if someone had written them, but thus far noone has. In sum, The Unburied Dead is a celebratory film, and the very fact that it is not an instrument of political legitimation is a considerable feat, especially in a country where, both before and after 1989, even the 1848 revolution was subjected to cinematic treatment reflecting the mandatory party lines of the day. The Unburied Dead tells the truth without regard for day to day politics, even though it does not exactly plumb great depths in the process. Those familiar with the historical facts will not learn much that is new. Nonetheless, an unadorned, unequivocating narration of the story as it actually unfolded is something we should welcome.
The film does not so much tell the story of the Revolution, for the revolution is merely the background, the point of departure; it tells the story of Imre Nagy. It confronts us with the hero and martyr as a "common man," much as he is now portrayed in recent statues. The dramaturgy of the film dispenses with a detailed rendering of the historical events and of the moral-political conflicts that determined the course of Imre Nagy's life. Familiarity with the events (which are alluded to in passing) is simply assumed, whereas presenting the dilemmas would burst the confines of a film focused on the last one and half years of Nagy's life, between the crushing of the Revolution on November 4, 1956 and his execution. The preceding events are merely hinted at in the form of brief, intermittent summaries and flashbacks evoking crucial episodes from his life: World War I, captivity as a prisoner of war in Russia, and the last peaceful family gathering in a wine cellar in Somogy, the county where he was born. All these recollections appear as schematic allusions. We never learn how and why Nagy became a Communist; how he survived the darkest years of terror in the Soviet Union; how in the 1950s he became a reformist leader of the Hungarian Communist Party, who was first appointed to a high position and then, as the atmosphere became less permissive, reduced to the lower ranks; and how he became first the leader of reformist Communists circles and then, finally, the Prime Minister and the very symbol of the Revolution. It is with this last turning-point that the story really commences.
To that extent, it is understandable that the film does not deal with the sharp turns and conflicts that had previously marked his extraordinary career.
More troubling is the ultimate failure of the film to examine why Imre Nagy, in captivity in Snagov in Romania, rejected Kádár's attempts at making a deal, why he chose imprisonment instead, and why he - unlike some of the other accused - refused to co-operate throughout the interrogations, consciously taking upon himself, it seems, the mantle and destiny of the martyr. All these things simply happen to him, but we are never witness to the moral struggles that led to these momentous decisions. It is one of the lamentable failings of Márta Mészáros' film that it voids one of the most dramatic figures in modern Hungarian history of drama. Neither historical facts nor the moving representation of the final tragedy can make up for this absence. To be sure, Nagy's drama unfolds inwardly, within the darkness of solitary confinement, where he has only the interrogator and the prison physician with whom to share his thoughts. Yet the film does not even attempt to circumvent these obvious dramaturgical difficulties. Flashbacks and the angry, often sullen gestures of the protagonist do little to compensate for this shortcoming.
"You were impersonal, too, like the other leaders, bespectacled, sober-suited," writes the poet György Petri (translated by Clive Wilmer & George Gömöri). Yet if we look at photographs from the time, the figure of Imre Nagy stands out from the uniformed ranks of apparatchiks. A pince-nez and a hat, an umbrella or a walking cane (none of the other leaders walked around with an umbrella in those days, given that they always had bodyguards to hold one above their heads until they reached their cars): the very image of an orderly bourgeois, straight out of a novel by Krúdy or Mikszáth. Is it only in retrospect that we project upon him such a tenaciously bourgeois, grandfatherly posture? Jan Nowicki becomes one with his role in a rare feat of transformation as he shows how the portly figure of Nagy takes on a severe, gaunt appearance. Now and again, however, Nowicki's performance is marred by declamatory moments. Given the solitude of the scenes, the strong lighting and the close-ups, there is no need for any broad gesture, laborious facial expression, or histrionic rendition. More sensitive, more restrained, and therefore more credible performances are given by Jan Frycz, playing the interrogator, and György Cserhalmi, who plays the prison doctor. The latter has only a few minutes in the film, yet his struggling, broken figure epitomizes the weight of the moral-psycho-logical conflict more successfully than the "old man in pince-nez" played by Nowicki, who seems to have stepped off the pages of a history textbook.
Seamlessly joining documentary and fiction, reality and play, Márta Mészáros's new film does have a pure and harmonious integrity. The director guides us gently from the present into the past, reaching the true fables of fiction via documentary images. With the same sensitivity and efficacy, in the finale she leads us back first into the reality of the recent past, and then into the present, the standpoint from which we watch with fascination as the drama of the Revolution is being distilled and stylized into history before our very eyes.

György Báron
is a film critic. He has published several books on cinema and teaches at the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest.