Immortal Technique
A conversation with Nyika and Dávid Jancsó about their father Miklós, his legendary long takes, a hundred years of Hungarian cinema, and everything in between
THE TRACKING SHOT has become the extended guitar solo of filmmaking. It’s not totally clear when or how this happened; new conspicuousness was gained in the postwar period via expensive and sometimes hilarious experiments like long takes from the first-person POV (Robert Montgomery’s The Lady in the Lake or Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage, both from 1947; Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, the following year), or staggering displays of crane-enabled magic like the first twelve minutes of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil or the dazzling ballroom sequences in the films of Max Ophüls. Still, barring a few obsessive directors, the long tracking shot remained an exception for a long time, rather than becoming a rule: in addition to their wearying effect on casts and crews, they were constrained by the fact that one reel of 35mm film (a thousand feet of celluloid) added up to a maximum of 11 minutes. Given the more recent switch to digital, a long take can continue until the filmmakers run out of hard drive space, or until the “video village” runs out of electrical power. So the last decade has witnessed an explosion in elaborate long takes - some, still, from a character’s POV, but more often shot from a godlike, invisible, third-person perspective that floats behind a character as they move through space, like in the first 3D video games to hit the market in the 1990s (Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot.)
The long take can create drama when the humans in the frame are properly choreographed, yet also plays out in something approximating real time. This worked well in Gaspar Noé’s 2009 Enter the Void, where a character’s first-person POV becomes third-person after his death: a dark silhouette affixed in front of a gliding, floating image as he revisits scenes from his now-expired life. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) was “written” in long Steadicam takes stitched together digitally which, at least on first viewing, had a way of forcing you to forget about the cinematography as a series of choices - it became a rhythm, a running language. (Whether this nightmare-state is interrupted or intensified by blood spatters on the camera lens depends on the individual viewer’s suspension of disbelief - but it’s an important mystery of subjectivity.) At its best it makes you yearn for a cut, a reminder that what you are watching is not real. Recent films by Alejandro González Iñárritu (shot by the same cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki) elongated long-take scenes - a Native American attack on an encampment of fur pelters, or the accumulating slew of exasperating day-to-day bullshit facing a Broadway actor - to create a kind of roving hyperreality. (The dilemma of such exercises being “beautiful” in disproportion to their subject matter has a long lineage unto itself - see Serge Daney’s game changing dissection “The Tracking Shot in Kapo”, written about Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 concentration camp drama of same name, about which a whole other essay could be written.)
Locking the frame from behind a character/actor’s back can lead to a logical next question: whose perspective am I actually occupying? The answer is inevitably the filmmaker’s - so stories become less about characters or events and more about their own camera “penmanship”, pushing the medium further towards a series of displays of demo-reel virtuosity or “bravura filmmaking”. To my mind the combination of “masterful” long takes and traditional edits becomes self-defeating. A movie lover can be agog at how long the image is sustained without a cut, but by the end you’re straining to imagine the suffering of the cast and crew in pulling it off. A certain sportsmanship is, of course, built into moviemaking: Welles told the late Peter Bogdanovich that "Most of my close-ups are made because I'm forced to… It's always better to avoid them when you can. A long-playing full shot is what separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens." An added contradiction: a well-executed tracking shot may be “perfect”, but its essence can’t be boiled down to a single still frame for Instagram or Twitter, bucking the overall trend towards “One.Perfect.Shot” style fetishization which taxidermies films and denies them as breathing, moving objects.
The living master of the tracking shot - undisputed, at least, until Iñárritu and Lubezki’s miserablist frontier drama The Revenant swept the Academy Awards in 2016 - is Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, whose noirish tales of countryside poverty and desolation are told almost exclusively in 10+ minute roving long takes, shot in black-and-white. A year before that, László Nemes - a younger Hungarian filmmaker - won Best Foreign Language Film for his Son of Saul, a Holocaust drama set in an extermination camp, also made in long takes. Many praised the film’s stomach-churning proficiency while some connoisseurs accused Nemes of “biting” Tarr’s style, unaware the younger filmmaker had trained directly under Tarr. Tarr, in turn, was once a kind of apprentice to Miklós Jancsó (1921-2014), the storied filmmaker who put Hungary on the map of postwar cinema culture, and whose most famous films were made exclusively in long takes.
Jancsó’s long takes are fluid yet dreamlike, so the movies play out with a kind of surreptitiousness - creating an experiential realism that can run counter to the traditional Hollywood notion of identifying with a single character as they navigate a handed-down dramatic scenario. Jancsó’s most famous films are unrepentantly political: The Round-Up (1966) is about the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, wherein a ground of partisan guerrillas are imprisoned and psychologically tortured by Hapsburg officers on the desolate countryside. The Soviet-Hungarian coproduction The Red and the White (1967) dramatizes a troop of Hungarian soldiers conscripted to fight in newly Soviet territory during the Russian Civil War, on the defensive as Czarist guards continue to make gains in massacring civilians and soldiers alike who they suspect of being sympathetic to the Revolution. These are Jancsó’s' two best-known films out of eighty directorial credits, and both demonstrate the apex of long-take filmmaking - using the shot and its choreography not as showstopping gimmick but instead to make the viewer feel boiling political tension in their bones, to testify to bloody history.
It’s a glorious month for Hungarian cinema in New York City. Through the end of January, the Lower East Side’s artisinal boutique theater Metrograph is hosting a series (both in-person and streaming, via their membership program) spotlighting six films from Jancsó’s most famous period. It’s part of an initiative undertaken by distributor Kino Lorber, called “Master Shot”, to show the six films in North America - newly restored and officially sanctioned by the National Film Institute Hungary - for the first time in decades, with blu-ray set to come. (To better understand Jancsó in both historical and folk-traditional contexts, I recommend my friend Patrick Dahl’s incisive, ahem, round-up of the six films at Screen Slate.) Starting this Friday, uptown, Film at Lincoln Center is hosting The Films of Márta Mészáros, an equally essential Hungarian filmmaker of companionable - yet totally different - politics than Jancsó and who, it must be noted, was also married to the more famous director from 1958 to 1968. (The Mészáros retrospective brings, with it, glorious news that several of her most important works are now distributed by Janus Films, the world’s biggest for-profit distributor of classic international cinema.) I took this twin opportunity to speak with two of Miklós’ sons, Nyika and Dávid, about their father’s work, their own careers, and the last century of Hungarian film history. Our conversation - as winding, psychedelic and earth-shattering as one of their father’s signature long takes - has been edited for length and clarity.
Nyika, Dávid, we are speaking on the occasion of your father’s retrospective but you both make films in your own right. How would you like to introduce yourselves?
NYIKA JANCSÓ. I’ll be 70 this year, and so I pretend to be older than this young man over there. We’re brothers, “half-brothers” I guess, but that doesn’t mean anything in terms of emotions. We are connected by the same chain.
DÁVID JANCSÓ. My father started in film late in his life - he was born in 1921 and then a tiny thing called the World War happened; so he didn’t start in the business until he was considered an “old man” in filmmaking. Like you, Nyika.
N. Yes. The Round-Up was his first “hit” and that came when he was in his mid-forties.
D. I’m 40 now. I started in my twenties - I grew up with him already being a world-known director. Funny enough, I chose editing. His last wife, my mother, worked with István Szabó on Mephisto (1981), and that’s where I grew up, around film - although they tried everything to keep me away. I have a law degree! They sent me every which way to get me not to do film, but it didn’t quite work out. I ended up away from everybody, away from the camera, in a dark room…
N. I’m a cameraman, and I do theatrical design, music, opera, theater, that kind of thing, apart from feature films. I grew up in this film family just like Dávid, but I started much later in my life than he did. When time came that I had to make my mind up about a school, or a teacher, I didn’t know what I wanted. I loved that my father lived in this world but I wasn’t particularly interested in film. I took photographs - that passion came from Blow-Up. We all wanted to be David Hemmings, riding a Rolls Royce convertible in the streets of London, it was in the air. But of course it was just a dream, especially in Hungary.
So I joined a film lab, I was an apprentice for a year, then I was a helper on various films, became assistant cameraman, focus puller, a bit of film school in London and Scotland, came back, eventually I started shooting my own films in the early 80s. I have about 35 credits. My first job as a camera guy for my father was in Finland, photographing his TV documentary Jancsó Among Relatives in 1984. Later he asked me to join him in on a feature called Dawn, adapted from the book by Elie Wiesel. The film is almost unknown today, but it’s one of the most interesting films he ever made - for all kinds of reasons. After that, I did not work for him for almost twenty years. In the last stage of his life, he asked me to shoot his last two pictures, which I did, with Dávid there - doing editing, doing all kinds of things.
Metrograph is showing six films movies between 1966 and 1974: The Round-Up, The Red and the White, Confrontation, Red Psalm, Winter Wind and Electra, My Love - and this is not even a full chronological list of what he made in that period.
N. The early films are very profound political messages, not about morals but about power and the individual - you know, the struggle. Surviving through different waves of power. I was in my late teens when these films happened, and at this time he was being celebrated, traveling the world, spending time in the U.S. and in France. He had at least three different artistic phases; coming from this style he developed from the mid 60s into the mid-to-late 70s, and made some works which were more sophisticated in style, whose philosophy was less “catchable”, I wanna say. His second period was more subtle. In the third period - in which Dávid spent a lot of time with our old man - he made black comedies, basically unknown to the public outside of Hungary.
Why is that?
N. Because they are strange films: very funny, very different in style, a more freewheeling, handheld, fly-on-the-wall style. He returned a little bit to the old style, to bring his thinking full circle. I’m always surprised how brave he was. Free-floating, not paying attention to what other people thought of him. It’s absurdist theater, really. You may laugh at it because the characters are really funny, but it depends on your knowledge of recent Eastern European history. I find them hilarious when I watch them online - but I wonder if you would get it, Steve.
I doubt it.
D. The six being distributed by Kino were also the most influential in his own life. This is when he took a European language and transported it to a Hungarian setting, which became international. He made something local that could move around the world; the signs were there for everybody to understand. The later ones were more abstract, more highbrow - let’s say that. And his final film was hyper-local. Eastern Europeans would get it. It was after the fall of the Soviet Union, and everything became about the individual. It was always about the individual versus the power.
N. What I want to say is: apart from having seen my father’s work, the method he built up over the years - you’re not conscious when you see this dance. That comes much later.
The “dance” - you mean, the long take. The tracking shot.
D. (Laughing) Yeah. Now it has become a technical sport.
N. Money, right? That’s the thing.
I was lucky enough to interview Béla Tarr in 2016. He said, “a long take has a lot of cuts, but inside”. It’s about getting the cast and the crew in a kind of harmony - he compared it to sex, actually.
D. It’s always funny: why did my father marry an editor? It was because he didn’t know how to edit. In all seriousness, I work with Kornél Mundruczó who is also part of this crew, the next step of Hungarian filmmakers built upon the base of my father, of Béla. The long takes themselves, they are montages. You’re editing on-set. My Mom was always on set telling him, Speed up. Slow down. Béla’s wife was also an editor, on-set, also his right hand as director. For long sequence shots, I am pulled onto the set by Kornél. It’s editing. It might be twelve minutes but it’s an edited twelve minutes. With the choreography, with everything going into it - how you play with time, what pacing is, that’s where that happens. He understood this as much as Béla did or László does. They’re able to have the film in their heads, and my father was very brave in how he did this. He never shot in sequence, because there wasn’t really a script, but in his head he knew exactly at what point we were gonna shoot what. “We don’t have the actor today? Fine! We’ll do something else.” “No lamps? No lighting? Fine. We’ll adapt.” “Oh, look, a red helicopter - let’s use it!” It was ad hoc but he always had everything in his head.
This retrospective also spans the time he was married to the great Márta Mészáros. She’s receiving a partial retrospective at the end of this month at Film at Lincoln Center. She’s your mother, right Nyika?
N. Yes. Well, it’s even more complicated than that. If you go into the family history…
D. Good luck with that, Steve. (laughter)
N. Márta is my stepmom, and I grew up with her. I consider her my mother, of course - yes. I would love to hear Dávid’s voice on this. What’s interesting about the two people is, the experience our father had throughout the history of Hungary and Europe, and the absolutely unique history Márta has had - because she’s still around - with her own family. Márta and Miklós, when they came together after the revolution in 1956… their personal, political experiences of history, of losing family, must have been a very effective glue for their relationship. That said, the style, the approach, the aesthetic, the philosophy, the psychology of Márta’s films - all very different from the old man. Your turn, Dávid. (laughter)
D. Both of them were primarily motivated, politically, by decency. Doesn’t matter if you’re far-right, far-left, whatever; in the human faraway, you must have decency. Miklós was the most decent man I ever met.
N. He was a manicured, landed gentry sort. In a previous interview, Dávid and I agreed on this: what he hated most in people was meanness. The stupidity of meanness. We’re not just talking philosophically but verbally, physically.
Cruelty.
D. He was up in arms the moment he saw this new kind of Hungarian nationalism happening. This Orban, Fidesz government runs on nothing other than cruelty. Back then, I think their support for one another is how they influenced one another, both making short films earlier in their careers. After he moved to Italy and came back to Hungary, when I was born, in 1982 - they had a good relationship. Until the very end.
N. A kind of brothers-in-arms, in a way. I don’t have to tell you Stalinism, neo-Stalinism, the so-called Socialist era - it was always a gamble, to get through the rules and expectations of politics at that time. The agendas the Communist Party would be imposing on artists, writers, painters -
D. Getting films through a censor bureau.
N. It was very much a skill - first, surviving, but also, being able to make a film that is, at the end of the day, still good. Still interesting. You can spend a decade making political pamphlet films but they’ll never survive.
Her films are about women, about feminism, about community - but, crucially, they also tell the shortcomings of this supposedly horizontal, socialized system.
N. They considered her a suffragette, but she wasn’t. Never was. She was a vocal fighter for women’s rights at large, and a defender of a woman’s position within a family, someone who testified to the way men treated women in history. She was very strong: when asked to judge something from her own perspective, she could be very tough. In her ouvre, there are “feminist films”, stories of women, and there are films about her individual, personal story, about her father who was murdered in a camp in 1938, a mother who died of typhus. Growing up as an orphan in the Soviet Union, she was lucky enough to come to Hungary in 1956 as a teenager. Her mother tongue was Russian at that time - she spoke Hungarian, but that 10, 11, 12 years in the U.S.S.R made her a Russian speaker. And the disappearance of her father was, of course, a secret - nobody was allowed to talk about it and she was engaged in an eternal struggle to find out the truth, for herself. Her filmography has two significant periods. One is about women in general; the second, is her personal story, her relationship history - the Russians, the Hungarians, the Communists, the system, the lies.
In a 2003 interview at Kino-Eye, Andrew James Horton said your father had described himself as “ashamed” at not having taken up arms in World War II.
D. He was always very reclusive about those years. Probably, a lot of other people felt that same remorse at that time: What could I have done? And he worked his entire life to bring light to the dark side, of everybody - to portray justice. His films are about the human condition of betrayal. How could something corrupt an individual that much? That was his theme, and I’m sure as hell it came from that experience.
N. In March or February 1945, he was captured at the western border of Hungary by the Russians. He was taken as a war prisoner but released after a year, because he had tuberculosis. He was lucky. Some members of our family had to spend four, five, six years in Russian work camps. It’s very much in his films, that experience. The film he made before The Round-Up is My Way Home, an interesting film because it is his view on how Hungary turned into whatever it did at the very last second of the war.
D. You can feel The Round-Up coming in that film. Not only did we not talk about those times, but we both accompanied him to the retrospective he had in St. Petersburg. He was the guest of honor. They were taking us left and right, showing us the Summer Palace - and as they were giving us the tour, “This is the Summer Palace”, my father was just like: “Ah, yeah. I built that bridge right there.” The silence of the tour guide was… (laughs)
Damn.
N. Another piece of history you should know more about. Transylvania was always part of the Hungarian kingdom, until after the first World War. It should be known that Transylvania was, at that time, a multicultural, multi-ethnic place. Millions of Hungarians, Romanians, Saxons, Germans and others. But, as a reward for Romania’s participation in the First World War, it was given to Romania. Our father’s family came from a place called Aham. His father was a refugee, a government bureaucrat in the region. He had some problems and he had to flee Transylvania, so they moved to Hungary in 1920. This is where the old man was born - Vác, north of Budapest. All these refugees lived there in railway carriages. That’s the historical backdrop. So his cultural heritage is different from that of a mainland Hungarian and, at that time, Budapest was, in particular, considered an “international” place.
Help the reader understand his politics a little better: anti-fascist, working under Stalinism but anti-Stalinist, also someone with no interest in becoming American, or moving to Hollywood.
D. He was a proud European who wanted to stay in Europe - he never even tried to “go Hollywood”. They offered him citizenship in Italy, he said no. He understood how the world of cinema worked, operating out of the West. But it was more of the Polish who ended up in Hollywood. He never wanted to work there, ever.
N. He studied all kinds of history when he was young, which was very important during the prewar period, so he knew a lot about all of it. He also loved John Ford films. The strange remoteness of My Darling Clementine, or John Wayne in The Searchers - he loved the way John Wayne walked in those films, that shuffle. It was one of his favorite movements for his actors on set because he needed that - you know, a short, almost ballet-step. If you walk at a normal pace you’re going too fast for the camera. He had to tell them to slow down.
D. He basically created “Easterns”. In very strong relation to the cowboys and Indians of before. He transposed that to his own language, his own world - which is what you see at the end of the day.
It makes sense that the hook for this reintroduction is a pullquote from Béla, calling Miklós the greatest Hungarian filmmaker of all time.
D. Because it’s our family, it sounds so obvious - but today he is considered the father of Hungarian cinema. His apprentice was Béla. Béla came from György Fehér, somebody who nobody’s ever heard of (outside Hungary), who was very close to my father. They built upon each other - you would say László Nemes is built upon Béla Tarr, the same way Béla was built on Fehér, who was built upon my father. This type of film language has become a Hungarian feature.
N. Nothing is without a predecessor. Nowadays we can see everything: long-length shots, long-sequence shots - with what’s available today, technically, it can be done by anyone if they are patient. In those days, you could put 1,000 feet of film into a magazine, that’s ten minutes, and that’s it - so you can’t extend that time physically. Miklós had this incredible sense of how to use space, time, actors, people - the last film we did together, Dávid and I were in Austria, in a castle, a fortress - and we had this incredibly long shot, faces coming towards the camera, turning around, here and there. The old man came up from the video tent and said, “So how much of the space can we use here?” The first assistant turned to him: “Look, it’s only four feet by four feet. It’s not much.”
Even if long takes are prestigious, it feels like the overall trend is going in the other direction, heavier into montage - which gives directors more opportunities to cover their mistakes.
D. It’s just safer to put down a camera, shoot something from twelve angles and then figure out how you’re putting it together. Whereas this is a risk. But then again, you’re gonna have to answer to some commercial standard, as well.
It never happened that we, or his friends, his colleagues, crew members, would sit down with him and he would say, “Okay: we’re gonna do this like that because this shot will remind you of that” - no way. He never revealed these things for anybody. Decades later he might say, “Yeah, this was something about that.”
I’m haunted by this vintage New York Times piece written about Stanley Kubrick when he was making Barry Lyndon, which I’ll quote here:
There is a scene in Barry Lyndon for example, which in Kubrick's screenplay simply read, "Barry duels with Lord Bullingdon." Just that, nothing more. Yet what finally reached the screen is one of the most stunning sequences in modern film. The scene runs about six minutes and if little happens in terms of actual content--three shots are fired and Barry is wounded in the leg by his stepson--a great deal happens in terms of style. It took six weeks--42 working days--just to edit the sequence.
N. The way time is built up in that film is what amazes me actually. It’s old-fashioned, it’s like a Balzac novel - a 600 page novel from the 19th century. Music is going on, but not dramatically, as it would in a commercial, or a thriller. And you see two characters - Barry falling in love with a woman at a card game. And you start thinking: Holy baloney. What is it. Why is it so good? What did this guy do!? What’s good in it!? Many people try to impersonate this situation, and it just doesn’t work. I don’t know what to call it - “talent” or, “the eye”...
N. I would say he was profoundly influenced by some of Antonioni’s films in the early sixties - La Notte, you know.
D. He did move to Italy for ten years. In the 70s he lived there, his life became a brunch…
N. Antonioni was part of that. Miklós and Pasolini were good friends as well. He happened to know all of those guys at that time.
D. It was a small family. That’s how he described it. Everybody knew everybody, everybody influenced everybody. There were ten festivals around the world, and maybe a hundred filmmakers. People knew each other. Now both of those numbers are in the thousands.
N. It was a kind of aristocratic profession, in a way. Not in terms of money - Miklós received very little money. But in terms of belonging to a class of interesting people. It’s different now. The commercial expectations are a lot stronger. Hollywood film language has taken over, of course. On almost every film.
D. He had one life-long collaborator, his screenwriter, Gyula Hernádi. They were twins, basically, so they didn’t have to say to one another, “let’s do this” - they understood each other at half-word.
N. I remember the two sitting together, just, endless conversations. And they were always making jokes. They didn’t take themselves so seriously. All these little stories would be incorporated into the big picture of that film, brought from memories of the outlaws and bureaucrats of the 19th century. Like in The Round-Up: that fortress, on that plain, did not exist in Hungary in the real 1890s. But creating a camp, I would call it a concentration camp, doesn’t sound very good at first - it was just a morsel of a thought.
D. A good long sequence shot works if you don’t realize it’s a long sequence shot. Today you get things like Birdman, like every opening sequence of the past several James Bond movies.
N. Our father used to say: “After five minutes I can tell you what this film is about.” Not the story - but the intention of the filmmaker, the producers, to force you to understand the story. And I came to understand that too. I’m not a snob, myself. There are many new films today we do not see, because they’re not commercial enough, in the flavor of cinemas to make money today. You’ve got to: get going, get an over-the-shoulder, then a pan, jump up to the medium shot, keep it moving - that’s how storytelling goes these days. It’s about editing and sequencing in a more commercial way. Sometimes it doesn’t give me enough time to think as I’m watching the film. I need to select very carefully what I am going to see. That’s my experience with any of the online providers - Netflix, HBO, whatever. I can’t watch 90% of it.
D. The story is the story. There are great stories out there - even the worst-done films of all time could have a great story. In the world of YouTube, two minutes and thirty seconds is the maximum attention span you can get - how do you keep somebody sitting in front of a full length feature film? Why are television series on the up-and-up? Back then, the only place you could watch it was a dark, big room, with other people, together - a community thing. Hopefully the people at home at least have a TV when they watch Netflix instead of a laptop.
N. Or on your phone.
D. My kids don’t even go on Netflix. They’re on YouTube. That’s what they watch. My father’s films are of a different time, but a film connoisseur will appreciate that for what it is. It’s just not what is hip today. I wouldn’t say Kubrick is hip today either.
N. Even if you watch A Clockwork Orange, it’s an old-fashioned film - the cutting order, the storytelling. It’s one of his most embarrassing films but I love it. It doesn’t jump around, it’s not a bam-bam-bam.
On the one hand Miklós had this singular vision. On the other, he had a community of people who kept working with him…
N. There’s this book out now in Hungary - talking with many of his partners and colleagues, including us, alongside many people who have now passed away. They are talking about the way he made his films. The teamwork is always there, but. As we were approaching his final film, a crew meeting was a friendly, chatty-chatty, talky-talky affair. And we would brainstorm, together, how to solve this or that problem. But on set, when it came time to make the thing happen, he was very strict: “I want this and I want that.” No talk-back. He was never bossy, but he was absolutely the boss.
D. Filmmaking is a hiearchy, a military-type system.
N. Absolutely. Especially his.
D. Anybody could come to his sets and watch, be a part of the whole thing. Three quarters, if not all, of the Hungarian filmmakers show up in his work, just because they visited the set! He understood it as a collaborative process and he knew everybody’s name, down to the last technician. He had an incredible name-memory. People came to him with ideas and he’d say yes, or no. He stuck with his old partners. He didn’t switch up his crews very much. If you had worked with him before, you’d work with him ‘til the end. Maybe until that person fell out.
N. People would brave their lives to join his next picture, big or small. To work with him was an honor.
D. And the films were fun to shoot, too. There’s a line producer now working with Kornél who said, “I was lucky enough to start with your father. And now I’m mad because I thought that was filmmaking.” (laughter)
Many of the most famous films are set in a different time than when they were made but of course they comment on contemporaneous events. The Confrontation…
D. Still today, specifically, The Round-Up, every time you see it today, it just will appal you. It still stands today. It’s still true today. And they would still apply today. They were so general in terms of their message - about politics, power, betrayal, how they work.
N. He had a clairvoyant talent, I would say. The last films we were talking about, in those he was like a fortune-teller, a future-teller.
D. His last films predicted not just Hungarian politics, in general, but also Trumpism and all of that. He had a massive understanding of history, of how politics, society and the individual are connected. He’s seen a lot. Living through the second World War. Seeing the rise of Communism and the era of Socialism, then spending ten years in corrupt Italy, then a decade in Hungary after the fall of the Soviet Union, seeing how that corruption became part of an intrinsic system. Then he went to the States, to understand the base of democracy. He wasn’t only a clairvoyant - he understood. He didn’t just tell us the future; he lived through that future multiple times.
You’re referring to Orbanism.
D. A very strong and vocal opponent, from his very beginnings in politics - “this is a guy you have to watch out for.” He said, “If I were not a pacifist, I would shoot him.” (Laughs) It’s worse now than when Miklós died, in 2014. His last films are about what would happen in Hungary, very specifically so - and he was right. 2021 was his centennial and the state did nothing to honor him. Venice honored him, Cannes honored him. The National Film Institute, the archives - they are a pocket of the state and they do their best to honor Hungarian film and his role in that. But politically, he’s like a third rail.
N. That’s the thing. He was a classic liberal, or a classic liberal-conversative, I must say. In daily life, the older you get, the more conservative you get - I think. Because you need to understand and protect the values around you. First of all: respect life, respect other people, their lives and work. That is not considered to be good in this country anymore. His ouvre put Hungarian history through the looking glass. What is “Hungarian cinema”? What is going to be accepted by the state? That’s where the money comes from. Right now it’s going to a fairy tale version of Hungarian history, rewriting history to build up national pride - it’s a saga with no realistic foundation. This is what the government wants people to see on cinemas, on television screens. Especially kids.
D. Imagine if Fox News was financing films, and that was the only way to get a film financed. My father lived through the Socialist era where, again, he had to abide by the government - but they had a certain kind of understanding, at least, of what filmmaking was. I’m not saying it was a better time in any sense. But these guys are way worse.
Tell me more about the fairy-tale cinema.
D. Fake nation building.
N. There are films coming out where guys are doing interesting stuff - but that’s like two out of a dozen. The rest is mainstream, commercial ridiculousness, or, fake history. And this is gonna be the next big step: how to turn history into a picture book for children, which has not one single tiny little piece of reality.
If I’m not mistaken, László and Kornél receive state support. Are those the “two out of a dozen”?
D. It’s very hard to say no to these guys. Do they get support? They get semi-support. When they ask for X amount for their films, they are of course not going to get that amount. Hungary doesn’t really do coproductions. It’s a state studio system with a political agenda.
N. Which we had beforehand, of course - but it was far better for the art of cinema in the old days. Politics has a direct influence on filmmaking…
D. On everything in Hungary - every facet of life.
So what is it, ideologically, that prevents Miklós from being celebrated in Hungary today?
D. He had a very strong political voice during his life. Today’s problem is Trumpism. Hungarians have been living under Trumpism for the last, how long - fourteen years? Sixteen? I don’t even know.
N. It’s like James Bond but it’s not License to Kill, it’s license to steal.
Let’s juxtapose this present-day nationalism with the struggles of the postwar period. How did his unique family history shape Miklós’ notion of “Hungarian-ness”?
D. He fucking hated that term. If America is a “melting pot”, Europe is too - right? Fake borders left and right. He was born in the era when the “great Hungarian nation” was being split up, but first of all, it was called the Austria-Hungarian Empire. Which meant there was a first class of citizens, Austrians, and a second class, Hungarians. But there was also a third - not one third, but at least ten different “thirds”: Ukrainians, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Slovaks, Czechs. The Hapsburg Empire was the central European melting pot. What is a Hungarian? That’s the problem with this government, and its nation-building: they define themselves, and therefore ourselves, by what we are not. If there was a monolithic “Hungarian culture”, our father should be on top of the flagpole, waving. “This is Hungarian cinema.” The duality of what is and isn’t “Hungarian” - this is why he hated Orban. And they called him “un-Hungarian”, it’s the exact same rhetoric as your “un-American”.
Help me understand how a movie like Son of Saul could be, at once, an antifascist film in the tradition of Miklós and Béla, yet also the official Hungarian submission to the Academy Awards.
D. A Hungarian-American, Andrew Vajna, of Carolco Pictures, producer of some of the biggest movies of the 1990s; returned to Hungary, burnt out, and sold his soul. He became the film commissioner of Hungary. And he taught these guys how to use foreign bank accounts.
Which guys?
D. The hoodlums who are now running the Hungarian government. His passion was film, of course, so the state commission became his sandbox. He played studio executive, but he understood that film is not something you can order and then create. With Son of Saul, he was like, “Oh, not another Holocaust film.” But his second-in-command was a woman who had moved up the chain from line producer to producer. And she had been László’s short film producer. This is how László’s film was made. Because of the financial constraints in making Son of Saul, László used the language that was intrinsic to him - that was the Vajna era. Vajna was at least strong enough to hold everybody off until he died. After that, the chaos we have today.
Béla used the word “shame”. He said: “Donald Trump is the shame of the United States, Marine Le Pen is the shame of France, Victor Orban is the shame of Hungary. Et cetera.”
D. They are just indicators of how bad a certain part of society is, why and how these people can rise to power. After the fall of the Soviet Union, people thought it was a time for paradise - reality came and, with it, so-called liberals who are anything but liberal. They brought back “socialism” in a modern coding.
N. What we’re experiencing in Hungary is, on the one hand, the old rhetoric of socialism, of influencing the press. It’s the math of the old Communists. Meanwhile, on the other hand, in the jungle, you get turbocapitalism, because people don’t realize how much they are paying for their day-to-day lives, barely getting any support for anything. They don’t realize that we are running into Victorian Hell, in a way.
D. In a 2004 New Yorker bingo card game, Jon Stewart called it the “post-communist kleptocracy”. That’s what it is.
Last question. Let’s say (not pretend) you’re speaking to a curious, but ignorant, American audience. How do you introduce Miklós Jancsó? Which film do you pick, and why?
N. You first, Dávid.
D. Thanks… This is a hard one.
Or - is there a favorite for Hungarians, and a different favorite for the “global audience”?
D. There is definitely a favorite for the Hungarian crew: The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest is something so special and so unique in its form, language and historical context… Even kids today in their teens are watching it and quoting it, in Hungary. That is a film that became very unique, very specific.
N. It became a cult film.
D. For everybody who wants to understand cinema, The Round-Up is something you cannot go around. One of the most appalling films ever made. I’m not speaking as his son when I say that, but as a filmmaker. The method he used is incredible - but then, that’s true for The Red and the White… It’s too hard!
N. You have a second chance, Dávid.
What’s interesting is, among Baby Boomer cinephiles who know his work - some would cite The Round-Up as the gateway drug; others, The Red and the White, or Red Psalm…
D. But Nyika, the one you did - Dawn - it was never seen in its intended, most glorious form, because the producer basically ran off with the money and never paid for the rights. That film is still being boxed up. It stars Michael York and Philippe Léotard! It’s an incredible piece, about the British and Palestine. Such a great film. Now I’ve cited films from all three creative periods.
N. Three choices. Alright - selfish enough, I must pick Dawn, the first big thing of his that I shot. It was very hard on me to be okay on set. I keep telling people: when I sat down behind that camera, I thought, “Boy, you should forget about everything that you had in hand before this.” And it was true. It was so demanding. That’s a personal thing - I also liked, I loved the finished film.
My second choice, from 1998: The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest: I loved that period of his. Even if his films seem, at times, impersonal, having no personal-psychological message to deliver to the one who watches it, Dávid and I know what these films are about. If the challenge is to pick one from each of these three phases, My Way Home would be the one - but there is no chance for your readers to see that, so we’ll go with The Red and The White.
Is My Way Home lost?
N. We have a friend in London who has a small DVD label, Second Run - they released it.
D. My father’s first restored film was Private Vices, Public Virtues. His first blu-ray ever.
The erotica years. In fact, Dávid, we first made contact after I saw the restored Round-Up at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival; I wanted to show it at Spectacle the following year but you told me the Film Institute was “hell to deal with”. The next year, Mondo Macabro asked me to consider programming the Private Vices restoration at Spectacle. I like the movie but of course my thought was, “Where’s the rest?!”
D. Well, you know - he linked up with Tinto Brass… What can I say. (laughter)
N. Another story. I visited him a couple times in Italy but I never had a chance to see that one - it disappeared from the screens in Italy, it was banned. I saw it in London’s West End, in 1982. My first time seeing the film - a midnight bill at a porn theater.
Thank you both for taking the time to do this. It’s been a journey.
N. We have time enough. I have time enough.
Special thanks to Nyika and Dávid Jancsó, Kate Patterson, Courtney Ott and Patrick Dahl.
uP nExT . . . . . .
Note on “Chris Marker - 100”, a centennial exhibition of photography held until late January at Peter Blum Gallery, in Manhattan.
Current Mood: Stunned 🤯
Current Music: Drexciya - Vampire Island