Erzsébet Bori
Alive, Alive-Oh
György Szomjas: Vagabond • Csaba Bereczki: Életek éneke
(The Song of Lives) • András Péterffy: Brassói pályaudvar
(Braşov Railway Station)
In the early years of the last century, Bartók and Kodály (and later Béla Vikár) explored the musical treasures of the peoples of the Carpathian Basin. Yet, it was not enough to raise folk music into high culture and base a pedagogical method on it. In vain were Bartók's folk song arrangements and works of his that draw on folk-music motifs played all over the world; in vain had the Kodály method spread widely in schools and in the choirs, for that same folk-music tradition has been given up for dead more than once since it was discovered. The twentieth century saw two political systems in Hungary that ignored Bartók. The increasingly right-wing Horthy régime left him no honourable choice but to emigrate, while his triumphant post-war (posthumous) "return" was soon cut short by Stalinist cultural policies. Socialist Realism (or schematism, as its critics would have it) was in principle the great friend of the people and the people's arts, but, in practice, the dictatorship and censorship led to a pitifully hollow and oversimplified "fakelorism". The modernism that made itself felt even in East Europe went on to reject a folk culture that had by then been vitiated and corralled into the museum and archive.
With all this in the background, what was called the "dance-house movement" hit Hungary in the Seventies like a bolt from the blue. It started with a small group of young musicians performing musical settings of verse, chiefly the work of classic living poets, in amateur forums, youth clubs and camps. From this "folk song" emerged as a new metropolitan genre with the performers starting to research and delve ever deeper for the melodic treasures that they could use.
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Several recent films have dealt with this folk-music renaissance.
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György Szomjas has a series of popular full-length feature films to his credit that deal with the heroes of popular culture, or urban folklore. For a while, he deserted fiction to make documentaries about folk music, dance and folk musicians before returning to features employing dance and music to provide a new dimension to his story. Vagabond (2003) is about a fictitious young man named Karesz, a child care case who is living between two worlds. A wide road leads from truancy, minor and not so minor misdemeanours, drink, drugs and crime towards prison, but he meets a girl, joins a dance house, and options of a quite different nature open up.
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Csaba Bereczki likewise made his start by tracking down living folk music in documentaries-in his case a nine-part series for Duna TV-in which he had the editorial assistance of László Kelemen, an acknowledged expert, to sketch a comprehensive picture of the Transylvanian heritage. That series aroused such interest both in Hungary and abroad that it has (so far) been re-broadcast twice in the home market, and the featured musicians have been able to put on highly acclaimed "allstar" concerts both in Hungary and abroad. It was from recut material from that series that The Song of Lives was put together as a 100-minute version for the cinema screen.
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It is quite plausible to suppose that Bereczki obtained his inspiration from a live performance which he recorded as the film Braşov Railway Station. The performance was based on the brilliant idea of showing up what has been Transylvania in song and dance at a natural venue for bringing alive the life and soul of the jumble of nations that inhabited, nurtured and built the region.
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Erzsébet Bori
is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular film critic.
