In the meanwhile, he was getting more and more commissions from theatres in the provinces, and by the mid-80s Orosz had emerged as a trend-setting poster designer, especially through the series he designed for the annual shows of the Young Artists' Studio. Then, after half a dozen animated films, traditional and experimental, Orosz felt the need to combine his fatal attraction to Escherinvented impossible spaces with the animation language he developed. This time he was the script writer, the graphic designer and the animator. Mind the Step is a sort of Hundred Years of Solitude of the genre-a local story of universal importance. In a little over six minutes, the film encapsulates the bleak and uninspiring world of Communist dictatorship: first the oppressive, then the "soft" versions, with the 1956 Revolution in between. He uses a small boy (conspicuously resembling himself), a ball, and the narrow, dark space of the inner courtyard of a traditional Budapest block of flats, one of the thousands on the Pest side. Orosz is delving into the world of descriptive sociology fully armed in his craft as a graphic artist, with each frame of the film masterful in its execution. The plot moves forward smoothly, with fewer and fewer elements of horror and more and more touches of absurdity. The boy finds his way more and more naturally in the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the courtyard, a space of improbable configurations, as he is helped by a congenial harmonica on the soundtrack. This film is nothing short of an Orwellian Hungary condensed into a dense visual image. In the last shot the boy gathers the courage to kick the ball down the rectangular staircase. Which is an impossible staircase, of course. The ball is bouncing around, a perpetuum mobile as it were. Frustrating, but also safe and familiar, as the dictatorship seemed to be in its later, milder, years. The film was completed in 1989, the year communism fell, or rather withered away.
In his later films, Orosz returned to his own self-created universe. Time-sights (2004) is a marvellous point in his animation work, needless to say produced without recourse to computer wizardry. (Clips from his films can be downloaded from www.utisz.hu)
Never particularly interested in politics, István Orosz created the poster which was to become the emblem of the changeover in Hungary. A friend passed him a commission by the Hungarian Democratic Forum he could not resist: a poster for the first free elections in 1990. The result was a fat-necked Russian officer seen from behind. The caption was two words, one in bold printed Cyrillic letters: "Tovarishi" (i.e. comrades, in Russian) and a light-hearted yellow, hand-written note across: "adieu" (goodbye, in French).
Then party strategists asked for a "tiny" change: they persuaded him to replace the word "adieu" with the Russian word "koniets" (the end), implying, "Comrades, it's over!". The Democratic Forum won the elections, and the poster was later used in the Baltic states and Ukraine-it was even rumoured to have been smuggled into Cuba. No Hungarian poster has ever had a larger print-run.
András Török
is a critic and lecturer in urban history. His books include biographies of Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde and Budapest: A Critical Guide, which is now in its fifth edition.
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