 Film poster 64 KByte |
The title refers not only to the relation between tales and films, but also to the real experience: human memory is not geared to keep more than seven pieces of data at the same time. Nevertheless, in these seven years the audience has been shown almost one hundred films at these film weeks, while a mere one quarter of them made it into the movies later on. (Excluding the simultaneous Jarman, Leigh and Bille August oeuvre-presentations.) Among these seven years, there was a meagre one, when only 7 films were presented, yet mostly both the audience and the organisers had to cope with a superabundance of works, like the last time when 18 films were on beside the test films selection of the British Film School. It was not the quantity, however, that gave importance to the event. One needs to think only of the premieres of Godard's, Kieslowski's, Kusturica's and Wenders' films. That was where one first got acquainted with Manchefski (Before the Rain) Lars von Trier (Europe) Todorofski (Love) Jan Sverák (Kolya), as well as with Attila Janisch and Tamás Tóth, representatives of the new generation of film of the 90s, or the Europe of the same decade. Budapest Film endeavoured to achieve the same goals as did Lettre Internationale, whose Hungarian version was launched just then. Their goal was to provide audiences with an overview about what contemporary intellectuals and artists in Europe were busy thinking about. Writing is for eternity, while only a quarter of the films produced were actually distributed. A further question - of course - is how much of even that will be remembered. The overture is Godard's Germany Nine (New) Zeroes; an epoch-making film. Through being a post-modern version of Rosellini's oeuvre of a similar theme and title, it is a reference to the past, just as the end of World War II, the collapse of the Berlin War and of socialism meant the beginning of a new era for both Germany and Europe. The film is also a reference to the future, to the doubts that are juxtaposed against contemporary euphoria, and to the questions of self-orientation and identity, i.e. whether the West can be an alternative option for Eastern Europe. Later developments seem to have justified Godard. The magic of the new became the reality of the common day, and illusions that created false hopes about Hungary's and Eastern Europe's smooth accession into the Western European system proved ungrounded. Likewise, hopes that we were warmly welcome there, that Western Europe was the world of unconditional happiness were lost, too. Apple Trees, Krapatchouk, Salmonberries, In a Stork's Stand. It is an allusion to the fact that the past, the ideology of Marxism, the philosophy of socialism and the hopes in its success can only with difficulties be forgotten. The Promise. That the system-shift liberates only the best in individuals and nations. That artists can continue to pose under the auspices of counterculture, - or Western culture. Before, a film could be in opposition without making any impact whatsoever, without an accountability regarding the impact of its critical attitude. The first years saw the return of banned films, thoughts that have been kept secret, artists that have been in exile. They were the years of rehabilitation. That is when an adaptation was made of Kundera's excommunicated novel, the Joke. Similarly, Pintilie's Oak, or Nemec's: The Glow of Royal Love. The surrealism of the latter two - which are hardly ever tolerated by dictatorships - equalled a rehabilitation of style. Another typical phenomenon of rehabilitation was the fact that the guest-speaker of the second Film Week in 1992 was Yvette Bíró. (Parade and/or Parody) It was she who first said that Europe is still coming to consciousness, but no one knows what she suffers from. Another significant remark of hers was that there is nothing to negate - e.g. genres, styles - as action has never been what was important. Since then, one has been able to identify in these films the reasons for the sufferings of this latest age. Just look at what was screened at the previous Film Week. Jerusalem came first. We have known Bille August's passion for the grand novel since Pelle the Conqueror This time he made a grand film of nearly three hours of Selma Lagerlöf's novel, written at the turn of the century, where he adjusted the time of film to the structure of the novel attempting thereby to preserve the novel's dramatic tension and concentrated focus. He integrates reality, story and mysticism in one. The film tells the story of a young couple, Ingmar and Gertrud, as well as a local community, in parallel. Even the beginning is laden with conflicts and hardships. The village community wants a new church and a new priest. The congregation is threatened by schism, caused by the authoritarian preacher. Even natural disasters hit the villagers. During the felling of trees for the construction of the church, Ingmar's father meets his death as he saves two children in the river. He leaves it to his son to become the leader of the community and the manager of the estate. As the old Ingmar enters the water to save the children, while others are trying to keep him back from the shore, is a significant sequence. As others, also he believes in what he does, and for a life spent with fighting the elements of nature one needs to be fearless and one needs to have a faith - as well as the solidarity of human relationships. His father's will is too much of a burden for Ingmar. He would need to adhere to traditions and live his own life at the same time. This is the contradiction that his love with Gertrud falls prey to. Ingmar moves in with the girls' parents, as he is chased away from his parental home by the husband of his sister Karin. Having wasted his paternal heritage away, he suffers an accident during the construction. Love evolves between Ingmar and Gertrud as if God himself had created them for one another. Their joy at Midsummer Night is interrupted by a storm. Their storming emotions and natural events are entirely in line, which is followed by further parallels. The "Saviour", Hellgum who comes from the new world, appears right in the crisis situation. The preacher of magic force, who works wonders and chases Satan out of people separates fathers from their sons, brothers from their brothers and lovers from their lovers. With this separation, a new parallelism is built into the thread of events, that of overheated fanatism and emotionless rigidity. The boy's sister, joining those of the "new faith" emigrate to the Holy Land and sells the estate to farmer Persson. This forces Ingmar to marry the daughter of the new owner, thereby fulfilling his father's wish and preserving the estate. This also loses him his lover, who also joins those of the new faith. Gertrud's desperate disillusionment soon turns into an adoration of God, and religious ecstasy takes the place of her sensuality. In her hallucinations, she sees Jesus appear on Jerusalem's via Dolorosa. She, however, never becomes happy, realising that one cannot live according to the teachings of Jesus in the Holy Land, that she cannot help others, and unquestioning faith endangers life, as Karin lost her children. Neither does Ingmar's fate offer an alternative. He pays too high a price for his estate, which becomes his at his step-father's death. Divorce would mean salvation for both of them, if Ingmar returned to Gertrud. But in vain does Ingmar go to the Holy Land, only mutual disappointment is what awaits them. He unmasks the false prophet, claiming that there is no Saviour and there is no Redemption. No solution is offered by the encounter of parallels either. Karin loses her child caused by her unquestioning faith, while her brother becomes a father as is dictated by the laws of nature. The mother tries to hide the new-born baby, fearing that she has delivered a blind child to the world. With pride does the returning Ingmar hold his son at the baptising ceremony. The film and the novel tell the story of the most puritanistic and most orthodox Protestant environment, where the individual is entirely sacrificed on the altar of an illusory community. This is an environment with no room for individual ideas, for individual interpretations of faith, where the only possibility is the total acceptance of the only true religion. Fanatism and fundamentalism are symptomatic of the conflict between identity and individuality. Puritanism, forcing the human soul into the rigidest of forms, propel spiritual doubts in the direction of ecstasy and the irrationality of mysticism - leading it to the Holy Land -where one can look in the eye everything that unquestioning faith is, as well as what programs of redemption may bring with themselves. The heroes of Jerusalem - if they are searching for God - find their way to him not through the Universe, but by circumventing the world and sinking into themselves. That, however, is laden not with the soul's godly substance, but with the emptiness of the world and with its decayedness. The question that this film - and the others - attempts to answer is whether a searching for God beyond Nature, - i.e. a sinking into ourselves or a secularised turning to the outside - is a suitable method for the depiction of the current change of epochs. As before. When charismatic prophets, (Hellgum) - the gods/politicians rising after the death of the Gods - felt entitled to shape the passive world and society around them. This model of action carried its own justification. No individual interpretation of its messages was required, as it was based on a religious principle that was incompatible with rationality. What we see here, - and in other films - is that the human soul is not immortal, is not of God, and does not carry the internal objective of its development in itself. Its basic quality is its finality. (Its very life buds from decayedness). Man may believe in the immortality of his soul, but will hardly find any evidence of it. Evidence shows only its transitoriness, its rottenness. The proof of this is the psychedelic process. But this proof is delivered by other films. Stella Does Tricks - Coky Giedroyc's first film - is rich in events that not only happen to the protagonist, - she often calls for these troubles himself. She is looking for trouble as she cannot be indifferent. The teen-age girl leaves Scotland, her parental home in order to liberate herself from her depressing childhood. She goes to London, where an old match-maker, Peters, provides her - and other girls of the same age - with accommodation and "employment". Soon, however, she is to leave this "hotbed of pleasure", as she has taken revenge on the attacker of her female friend, the drug-dealer, who is tied to Petters through personal interests. Petters punishes Stella by having her raped by three men. Stella finds herself at Eddie's in a state of nervous shock. Returning to Glasgow, she goes to meet her father and takes revenge for her childhood grievances. Then it is Peters' turn, whom she humiliates in public. Back in London Stella turns over a new leaf, works at a flower stand, rents an apartment and attempts to free Eddie from his drug addiction. Eddie's addiction, however, takes unprecedented dimensions by now, and he is ready to sell Stella for a fix. Stella reluctantly lets herself into the deal, paying for her last present to Eddie with her body. Then she starts drinking and swallows pills.. The film seems to be reminiscent of romantic stories of love, - as well as such deeply anti-romantic ones as Trainspotting. The newly-made director, however, endeavours to avoid imitations, observing not patters, but characters and their behaviour. He asks how one can fight the big sins (prostitution, drugs) if we are part of them (in body) - if we can't prevent them, only take revenge for them. How long can the soul resist the afflictions of the body, and can the two be separated? What strategies can be identified and operated against decay - beyond a sense of desperation. Becoming conscious of decayedness is becoming conscious of finality - this is how long Stella comes. And finality means mortality - this is how long the film comes. A sea of afflictions brings no redemption. Instead of salvation, one sees only stations of the Cross. (Nenette and Boni, Sara) Even such success-smelling stories as Frears' The Van offer no salvation, only worldly success instead of happiness. Another British film, Photographing Fairies, approaches the problem from quite a different angle. Director Nick Willing reflects on Anglo-Saxon philosophic traditions when he investigates the relationship between existence and perception. He, however, turns Berkeley's thesis “Esse est percipi” upside down, questioning it, and finally putting the latter into brackets. This film is based on a novel by Steve Szilágyi as well as on a photograph. The photograph was made by two young women in Yorkshire in 1917, in which fairy-like beings are clearly discernible. The protagonist of the story, photographer Charles Castle - himself making pictures of persons no longer alive, - becomes suspicious. In vain do experts and the spiritualistic theosopher Conan Doyle - who believes the beings in the picture are harbingers of another world - accept the photograph as credible, the mystery is eventually unmasked. This is the story that is embedded into the photographers honeymoon, where he tries to pull his wife out of a glacier precipice. This is what one sees at the beginning as well as at the end of the film. This double story is an allusion to the multi-layered problem investigated by the film, as these two stories are in their turn imbedded into a further one. This framework is the limitations one faces, beyond which one has no control. A further problem is posed by how to define that which is beyond, which can be called what there is not as well as what there is. Which, rendered to what there is not means existence as it is. The film exposes where existence prevails, where the borders of existence are, but this is not what the film documents. The enlarged pictures show not this, but become fossils of mediation, simulation, virtuality, - meaning that beside the documentation of ephemeral visions, the visible is not always existent. This is what is depicted by Jacques Doillon's most recent film, Ponette. The main character, Ponette, is a four year old girl, whose mother dies in a car-crash. The absence of her mother becomes increasingly unbearable for the girl, who is wanting her, looking for her and talking to her with greater and greater resolution. People around her are unable to convince her that she is never going to find her mother (“God has not been created for us”- she is told by her father). Ponette goes out to find her mother's grave, where she meets her in a spiritualistic scene. The director, whose previous film was the Little Thief - now draws a credible portrait of a child's inner world, portraying imagination and the capability of empathy, which fights finality, limitations and death. Doillon, weaving the fantastic quality of fairy tales into the story of childhood suffering, crosses a border, which at the same time is the border of the insecurities of one's visual perception. One shall never be able to accept that one only has the visual world of phenomena to fall back on. Continuously accumulated knowledge do not shape development along a necessarily linear line, and knowledge acquired does not proportionately increase the existing pool of the same. Every new piece of knowledge is only an appraisal of one's whole knowledge, it is an approximation only to a certain extant, while this eternal process has no closing point. Understanding is provoked by the conflict of facing something, therefore this is an understanding that is painful, and this pain one tries to avoid or at least postpone. Fairies have already been mentioned, so it is time to say something of fairy-tales, too. The Austrian Robert Dornhelm's Der Unfisch reminds one of magic stories. The magic potion that not only gives shelter to those that seek refuge but also fulfils their wishes - while making love - is the late successor of the biblical whale. The magic deeds, e.g. turning a man into a dog - serve the purpose of the improvement of human relationships and the remedying of communications disorders. The profane presentation of the internal parts of the whale is an attempt at recreating the sacred space of ancient times, and at the same time an allusion the archaic cultures and post-modernised stories. Through the benevolent whale, one thinks not only of the biblical story, but also of the counterexample of the American sharks-series, juxtaposing the humanity of traditional European mythology with the mythology created by American film. (Which by no means implies that European mythology talks only of positive qualities.) Martin Sulík's Orbis pictus, a book of moral stories, refers to folk-tales as well as to the traditions of Czech film. The abandoned railway station, where "tightly controlled trains" no longer stop, loses its function. Just as clothes, fashions and customs (healings, marriage ceremonies), they do not serve human happiness any longer. And nor does motherly advice. The protagonist, a teen-age girl, is unable to put her mother's advice to any use, - which is the case with the new generation of film, too (?). The director remembers not only Menzel and Chytilova, but reflects upon himself as well. In his last film, In the Garden, he concentrated the universe, while this time he has broadened it to the extant it is customary in fairy-tales, where real and absurd elements intermingle in a tragi(comic) manner. As a result, in this absurd word - where the opposite of something is at the same time its integral part - nothing is the way it should be. (Although his last film came to the very opposite conclusion, in an ironic way.) Things are even more confused in Jakubisko's film, whose very title is a reference to the same: An Ambiguous Report About the End of the World. It is a story of horrors of the end of the archaic world in time and space. The characters, - exactly like in fairy tales and in ballads, - live in a God-forsaken place as did their forefathers, worshipping their gods and fighting external and internal natures. This is the sterile world where the director portrays the undesirable impact created by the conflicts of tradition and modernisation. This film is reminiscent of the vexed atmosphere of ballads, as well as of his former films. Its embeddedness into timeless times does not bring us closer to the events that had taken place and had been kept in secret. His painting like images that are as overcrowded as the Baroque style contribute not to enlightenment, but to secrecy, and omissions. This is coupled with a large number of cross-references, which make the film narcissistic and of a routine quality. Here it is not the world that creates the work of art, but the artist who recreates his already well-known world. With Ademir Kenovics, it is the world that creates the work of art. i.e. an even more horrifying story, The Perfect Circle. Its director, the screen-play writer of previous films by Kusturica - had an easy position to start from, as the "topic has been lying on the street". In the streets of Sarayevo, where death is more easily got than a glass of water. Where not only the city itself lies in ruins, but the intellectual-philosophical structure that defined life and death, light and darkness, good and bad, etc. , and that always preferred the first item of the two. The image-world of the film is proof of this, when its dark tones, naked and deformed vases, deconstruction, buildings in ruins, people and animals shot dead all point to the direction of death. The Sarayevo hunt after people was soon turned into a hunt after special effects. First the media discovered it, then the arts. Sarayevo proved to be an excellent location for the presentation of the Requiem, where world famous performing artists demonstrated that the Muses do not keep silent, be it even war. It is very probable that weapons were kept silent during the concert, and that the local theatre held performances at times other than the cease-fire as well. Artists answer the question what to do next ? all in their individual ways. The well-known playwright Tom Stoppard once said that if someone saw that injustice was being committed under one's window, then the least use of that is to write about it. (The American philosopher A. Danto cites him approvingly in his main oeuvre.) Kenovics wrote and later directed a film of a poet who no longer was able to write poems. All he did was drawing circles, more and more perfect ones all the time. When given the chance to escape from the encircled city - where in theory there was peace, - he makes his family escape, but himself is not left alone, either. He preserves his human contacts, which preserve him as a human being. He takes care of Adis and Kerim, the half-orphaned Bosnian children that broke into his house - or perhaps escaped to him? While searching for food and the children's relatives, a loving relationship is established between them that makes the children reluctant to leave him. They even make new friends, as they save a dog shot at by snipers, and who - as a result of his lameness - learns to handle a wheel-chair. Sarayevo here is not only a necropolis, but a symbol of vitality and multiculturedness. The Muslim child, amidst a rain of bullets, catches fish in the river with his hands. This gesture is more than a cultural or religious symbol. The boy is deaf, and - being unable to hear the bullets, - he only perceives the air-pressure. Perceiving the stimuli of the world as a handicapped person is something that reaches beyond this film. Surviving this disastrously exaggerated level of stimuli is only possible with a handicap. The same boy survives, kills the unmotivatedly murdering snipers, and draws a circle onto his brother's grave-post - an almost perfect one.... The Crazy Stranger approaches the problem of multi-culturally from quite different angle. Director Tony Gatlifs' previous film, Latcho Drom, also investigated the life of the Gypsy population. Gatlifs' films attempt to describe the phenomenon of a multicultural society, surveying a people as the subject of the investigation that face the hardships of two identities, (a national minority, and a transnational Diaspora), both aggregating the difficulties of finding an identity, while at the same time trying to give an overview of the Gypsy populations' situation, where different ethnic and cultural groups have interacted with each other and with other peoples. And the model of melting together local and regional cultures into national ones takes shape, defining national cultures against other national cultures and defining its symbolic borders as if against the cultures of the people living inside and outside the geographical borders. The film presents a special, Eastern-European group of Gypsies and the view that ordinary people have of the Gypsies. Its heroes turn up unexpectedly, as if they came into real life from some forgotten world. How does Stephane, a Western European Gypsy, find his way to Vlachie, the land of music-playing Gypsies in an unknown country? (in fact, Romania)? He is looking for a song and a singer. He is supported by the old man Isidor, leader of the local Romas, with great authority in the community. Isidor's son is carried off into prison at the same time when the "crazy Starnger" arrives. Isidor defends the boy against the suspicions and xenophobia of his clan. Staphane eventually finds the song and the singer in a way different from what he had originally expected. But he is comforted by Sabina's love, as well as the chaotic world of the Romas. And here the cultural heritage comes to his help. It may be for the impact of Western symbolic thinking that the depiction of the Gypsies in European art and culture has always been characterised by a double identity. The Gypsies represent freedom and a life free of cares, but also homelessness. Romanticising the extra-historical and extra-political state of the Gypsies suited the yearning for an idyllic world, according to the romantic and bucolic philosophies. (A romantic portrayal often supported exclusion). For their autonomy, the Gypsies have been idealised, while for their deviancy they have been feared. These two motifs appear alone or in two in works of art. In this case, the Gypsies stand for an earlier phase of psychological and social development, as they are the living allegories of archaic social conditions as well as of an alternative structure of living. At the same time they are the continuation of the fairy-tales - albeit of a different kind. They are magic characters, with supernatural energies, as the main character of the Time of the Gypsies, or the hero of Jakubisko's film already referred to. Living beyond history, they bring an element of timelessness into the story, disturbing the well-known narrative, the common day, with their stealing and running away with young girls. They cause a void, an amnesia, and they reshape our cultural memories. They are Orfeusian, being presented as the metaphor of arts (song, music, pastoral), referring to the origins of mythology and culture. All this, as well as the films, present us with the key of something more than just the Gypsy question. There is a reference here to how multiculturality (as well as multiterritoriality) may become the very basis for the cultural identity and development of communities and nations, which cultural identity wishes to differentiate itself from other identities by presenting itself as integrated and unique. How much this integratedness is an illusion which is paid for expensively, - how much it is fostered by a common fear of racism remains a question. The line between those parts of this identity that have been forced upon the population and that have been accepted is not always sharp. Their attitude to a uniform and homogeneous culture is decisive. Such a culture, however, is itself a threat, just like racism is - this is proved by the Spanish Bwana and the German Engelchen (Little Angel). The root of the anguish is the sense of guilt and responsibility for the fact that some cultures have been forcefully excluded from European culture. From this angle, Gypsies have been the first victims of European modernisation and cultural colonisation. Their superstitious world-view was in sharp contrast with the enlightened rationalism of modern Europe. Rational enlightenment took the place of the comprehensive unity of Christianity. Its humanity became the ground for every one of the human rights, as well as the new modes of communication that grew out of them. Humanism, however, became subject to criticism, by identifying man with the European man, with the civilised man. It soon became a repressive category, suffering no special traits within itself, and humanity thus became a tool of intolerance, as well as a tool of deforming the world by undertaking to construct the European social order. That Europe is only one beside the many other cultures is a consequence of the growing contemporary consciousness of relativity. So far, film weeks concluded that Europe was culturally not uniform, that it was neither better nor worse than other cultures - it was just different. That realising this may later grow into an enthusiasm for anti-ethnocentrism is the conclusion of the films at this film week. European film weeks provide us with a tool of navigation that helps us both redraw our cultural map and find our way in it. |
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 Maria Bonnevie (Bille August: Jeruzsálem, 1996) 79 KByte | |
 Ulf Friberg (Bille August: Jeruzsálem, 1996) 74 KByte | |
 Pernilla August (Bille August: Jeruzsálem, 1996) 133 KByte | |
 Coky Giedroyc: Stella ügyletei (1996) 59 KByte | |
 Jacques Doillon: Ponette (1996) 29 KByte | |
 Martin Sulík: Orbis pictus (1997) 89 KByte |
