The selection prepared for the Budapest Spring Festival provides an insight into the yield of the past twenty years; continuing the series screened for full houses, this year we recommend only magic movies. Almost each one of these is a memorable, award-winning representative of the genres of popular art film, popular author's film or the form-breaking feature film.
The back-bone of the series is made up of the Hungarian myths of the late Kádár-era, i.e. the beginning of the 80s, a time when the magic “three T's" of the cultural government and the “flower language" (a term invented by István Szabó) were about to lose their significance, and when the usage of a magical-metaphorical set of expressions in itself no longer made Hungarian film politically interesting and exciting for foreign viewers.
A typical last example of the blooming of historical parables is The Fortress, (1978) a film by Gyula Hernádi and Miklós Szinetár which is intellectual in a bizarre way. But the sunny satire It's Rain and Shine Together (1977) by Ferenc András-Géza Bereményi-Lajos Koltai already forecasts the new era. The film portrays with emotional irony as well as the accuracy of documentaries the anomalies of village-life, the preposterousness of local party-functionaries and their narrow-minded selfishness rooted in a paternalistic favouritism.
The great directors, who in the 60s and 70s became professional, continue to write their own private mythologies. As part of the vogue which evokes the 50s, in Péter Bacsó's Oh, Bloody Life (1983), even Lucie Sziráky is carried away in a large black car and Comrade Bástya himself appears.... In Pál Sándor's Daniel Takes a Train, (1982) which portrays the revolution of 1956, the young protagonist of tragic fate, Gyuri Angeli, hands out the bread of Ede Minarik, the legendary laundry-man of Football of the Good Old Days, and even loses his coat, which, among other things, calls to mind the team-myth of Deliver Us from Evil. Péter Gárdos's Whooping Cough (1986) belongs to this group not only due to the theme but also because of its professionalism. This film has been one of the greatest box-office hits ever and, according to the director, it records “that high number of slaps in the face which smacked around October-November in 1956". In this film we see the events of the Revolution through the eyes of a teen-ager boy, out of the closed world of home with its pyjamas and slippers.
The duo of Gyöngyössy and Kabay have been portraying the sufferings and the reoccurring human fates of minorities, the excommunicated, POWs and women forsaken in wars in folklorist-surrealistic film-visions since the 60s. (Palm Sunday, Legend of the Death and Resurrection of Two Young Men, Sons of Fire, Expectations, etc.) The Job's Revolt (1983) made in Hungarian-West German co-production takes place during the deportations; we see the desperate struggle of a Hassidic Jewish couple for maintaining the continuity of life in a small village by the Tisza.
The tradition of the 60s, i.e. the social-critical realism that criticises sometimes through jokes and sometimes with vitriolic truthfulness is still strong
- especially in films made about the 50s - when one of the most poetically-minded Hungarian director, István Szabó, who won world acclaim abroad with his first new-wave films as early as the 60s, turns towards grand epic formats and linear narration. During the period when films discussing the 50s are in vogue he makes his Oscar-winning trilogy that depicts three intellectual characters subordinated to the structure of power, i.e. the turn-coat actor, the subject-spy, and the visionary-artist, starring Klaus-Maria Brandauer. (Mephisto, 1980, Colonel Redl, 1984, Hanussen, 1988). All three were nominated for Oscar, and Mephisto won the award. Colonel Redl, the film of the Szabó-Dobai-Koltai trio, prepared with the greatest artistic care searches for the key of "Central Europeanism" in the garrison world of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy i.e. why, when, and what made the subjects of the empire lose their most basic sense of security and identity.
The documentarism, which blossomed during the 70s, in the middle of the decade was coupled with experiments in a new narration of the film language which by the 80s crystallised into a new way of expression with a non-professional attitude. This, scrutinising the impoverished strata and loose elements of society under a magnifying glass, was putting together the picture of the absurd and ironic reality of Hungarian working days with the help of a quasi-damaged visual world, using the dramaturgy of crime-stories and Western films with improvisations and documentarism. Films made by György Szomjas - Ferenc Grunwalsky, such as Junk Film (1992), are examples of this rejuvenating perspective which established schools.
Post-modern new sensibility shoots out of Gábor Bódy's, Szomjas', Grunwalsky's, Dóra Mauer's and others' Studio K/3, - a group of people who also established Sociological Film Group in 1969, - their experimental film-paintings, their underground sub-culture as well as such traditions of film-poetry as Huszárik's Sindbad and Makk's Love. János Xantus portrays the sensation of disruptedness and fragmentation through the reinterpretation of clichés of the thriller in Room with a Cry and of melodrama in Eskimo Woman Feels Cold (1983). The “star" of his film, Marietta Méhes - thanks to Gábor Bódy's Dog's Night Song - advanced to become one of the fateful demons of Hungarian film, in line with Karády and Edit Domján.
Gyula Gazdag and especially Ildikó Enyedi are two directors who continue the noble traditions of the historical-philosophical approach of New Narrativity and Experimental Film, hall-marked by the names of Bódy and András Jeles. They create a new kind of stylisation making use of the playful integrity and holistic unity of the tale. Gazdag's A Hungarian Fairy Tale (1986) focuses on the incidental existence of the tale and the miracle which is more real than reality itself. Ildikó Enyedi's films of simultaneous narration, mixed with a time-machine “out of order", are original and encyclopaedic descriptions of the prognostic symptoms of an age - our culture - bent on doing away with itself. Behind her charming, frivolous and forgiving view of history we find the mythic bitterness of eternal tragedies of fate and yet a cosmic belief in good. Her time-machine is looking for the “wrong" side-tracks of history and dreams back the past according to the dramaturgy of the miraculous. My 20th Century, The Magic Hunter (1994).
At the turn of the 70s and the 80s, parallel with Szomjas and his group, two first films appeared, rooted in the traditions of documentarism, which have since lost nothing of their topicality and still continue to set the trend of film-making, i.e. András Jeles' Little Valentino and Péter Gothár's A Priceless Day (1979). These two films make the absurdity of the world understood in a way which instead of documentarism and external circumstances focuses on the internal, the spiritual and existential predestination, and unlike Szomjas and his group, make no allowance whatsoever for popularity. In Gothár's films Lajos Koltai's manual camera with its super-close-ups and distorted optics captures the moments when budding emotions turn into grotesque grimaces on a face, when everything is all the same. Each film directed by Gothár is proof of a searching for new forms and new ways, from Time Stands Still and The Division to Letgohang Vaska. After Melodrama, the ultimate point of this grotesque stylisation, Gothár intensifies the depiction of this absurd world not by stylising but by mirroring it. (The Division, based on a short story by Ádám Bodor), then in his Letgohang Vaska (1996) we see the ancient myth or genesis of what may at any time happen in this region East of the Elba and West of the Ural Mountains - even in the future.
