Judit Pintér: In the Current of History – and of Images

The life and art of Sándor Sára were exceptionally rich and varied. As a director, his oeuvre embraced forms ranging from experimental études to lyrical sociographies, from satirical contemporary parables to feature films protesting against historical and more recent social injustices, as well as taboo-breaking talking-head reportage documentaries. His work as a cinematographer was equally diverse: each collaboration with a different director resulted in the creation of a distinct visual style. To this body of work – significant not only artistically but also in terms of public life – also belong his photographs capturing the faces of the “downtrodden”, not only in Hungary but also in India, as well as the “cinema” of Duna Televízió (lit. Danube Television, a Hungarian public television channel founded in 1992 with a cultural mission).

Sára’s first work for which he wrote, photographed, directed, and edited everything himself was the experimental short film Virágát a napnak (lit. Flower to the Sun, 1960). The allegorical story of a flower, condemned to wither in the shadow of an impenetrable fence but surviving through the shafts of sunlight filtering in through tiny cracks, symbolises not only Sára’s art – socially committed, combining formal experimentation, an exceptionally powerful visual sensibility, and a defiant will to act – but also that of an entire generation, and indeed of the “new Hungarian cinema” of the early 1960s, which attained international standing. While they could not tear down the fence (or, to borrow the symbolic title of András Kovács’s 1967 film Falak [Walls / The Lost Generation]), unlike in the 1950s they could at least try to widen the cracks that had appeared in it.

Choosing a Vocation in the Shadow of Socialist Realism

“The history of Hungarian cinema has been one of endless cycles of surrendering standards under the pressures of pandering to audience taste, commercial considerations, and the dictates of narrow-minded censorship. And these circles do not resemble the soaring flight of the eagle along the vanguard path of art, but the downward-sucking rings of a whirlpool” – thus did István Szőts (1912–1998, Hungarian film director) characterise the past in his Röpirat (lit. Pamphlet)[1], published in April 1945 in the hope of a new beginning. Yet even in the period of democratic transition after the Second World War he experienced bitter disappointments. First he was excluded from the reorganisation of the profession, and then, on the eve of the Communist takeover in 1948, his film Ének a búzamezőkről (Song of the Cornfields, 1947) – which depicted the fate of Hungarian peasants with rare expressive force – was banned by direct order of Mátyás Rákosi (1903–1971, Communist leader, head of state from 1949 to 1956) as one of the regime’s first measures, casting life in every sphere back into the “downward whirlpool” of political dictatorship. Instead of yielding his principles, Szőts turned voluntarily to documenting folk customs, tolerated as remnants of the “sinful past” – for example in the village of Tura, where in 1951 he encountered the young Sándor Sára, already photographing with an interest in film.

Since Sára’s later vision as cinematographer-director and his public commitment were already evident in his photographs taken during the darkest years of the Rákosi dictatorship, it is worth examining the “soil” in which the seed of his talent began to germinate.

In February 1951, on the occasion of the Second Congress of the Hungarian Working People’s Party (the ruling Communist party between 1948 and 1956), a “representative” picture book entitled Magyarország új arca (lit. The New Face of Hungary) was published.[2] Every painting and photograph in it served the regime’s agitational-propaganda purposes, presenting a country and a “new socialist man” who could never be depicted as tired or suffering, nor in a form unintelligible to the masses. Between 1948 and 1953, the nationalised film industry was likewise restricted almost exclusively to political and agitational themes. For photographers and fine artists, the prescribed subjects included portraits of leaders, “works depicting the ‘glorious’ moments of national construction and the reorganisation of agriculture, portraits of ‘happy’ workers and working women in sunlit, idyllic settings, and carefully staged genre scenes with modelled poses”.[3] Any manifestation of free choice of subject – and with it, of artistic and personal sovereignty – was persecuted.

It is well known that a good photograph (painting, or film) depends on subject matter, composition, the use of light, and the effort to render three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional image. The photographers of the above album ignored the most elementary rules of photography, for example the golden section. Committing the most common error of beginners, they invariably placed the subject in the middle of the image, for their sole aim was to convey the “message” imposed by the dictatorship. Even natural landscapes were condemned as “self-indulgent” by the censors, and were tolerated only when used as backdrops for the new achievements of socialism, or behind the industrious and cheerful people of the agricultural co-operatives (the kolkhoz-type collective farms introduced in Hungary from 1949 onwards, known as termelőszövetkezet).

Nor did they heed the other basic rule of photographic composition: the use of pictorial planes. Instead of perspective representation, emblematic figures or groups were set against schematic backdrops. The chiaroscuro technique that intensifies dramatic effect and creates the impression of depth was rejected, for works were permitted to convey only the sense of perpetual happiness. Shadows are almost entirely absent from these schematic photographs, and the placement of figures is contrived and artificial. Natural gestures or figures seen from behind are virtually non-existent. Almost every face shines with joy, for it was forbidden to convey any other emotion or thought.

In place of unique works that reflected the creator’s personality and vision, authentically portraying reality, the supported culture of the dictatorship produced serial products conforming to the prescripts of socialist realism and to mass taste. From Impressionism onwards, every current of Western art was branded as formalism and slated for eradication.

In 1952, at the height of the dictatorship and before he had been admitted to the Academy of Drama and Film (today: University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest), Sára produced his first photographs, relying only on instinct, a few photographic manuals, and the advice of István Szőts. They immediately stood out, first, because they met none of the thematic or formal expectations of socialist realism – indeed, they seemed created in conscious defiance of them. Second, because they foreshadowed Sára’s later – and the Hungarian New Wave’s – most important aspiration: the cleansing of stories and images from falsehood. In place of the emblematic figures of building socialism, facing the viewer and almost invariably smiling, Sára photographed old men with bowed heads and tormented faces, old women wrapped in black kerchiefs, burdened with heavy bundles, ragged and toothless; children with injured fingers, dirty faces or bare feet, often in profile or even seen from behind. His Ebédelő aratómunkások (lit. Harvest Workers at Lunch, 1952) gaze not towards a radiant future but into their meagre bundles. Sára also devoted several photographs to his native Galga region, a wooded landscape north-east of Budapest, applying expressive and compositional devices banished by socialist-realist arbiters. In his early works – sometimes balladic, sometimes poetic, sometimes sociographic in tone – he deliberately applied, or at times deliberately broke, compositional rules. Unlike the period’s botched products, his photographs abound in unusual perspectives, diagonal or geometric structures, the use of depth of field, backlighting, detail highlighting, and framing – all devices he would later employ as cinematographer and director. Yet these very qualities led to his works being “rejected from a student exhibition in 1953, on the grounds that some were too formalist, while the others falsely depicted the workers’-peasants’ (and allied intelligentsia’s) power, particularly by portraying one of its foundations as a barefoot destitute”.[4]

As Károly Kincses (1944–2020, Hungarian photography historian and curator) wrote of Sára’s 1952 photograph Szilvát evő fiú a turai piacon (lit. Boy Eating Plums at the Market in Tura): “The boy, sitting on a sack, was eating plums from the basket beside him with such relish that even his big toe tightened with the bite. This was irreconcilable with the overzealous teacher-functionary’s ideologised image of the village.”[5] We might add that the boy was not placed in the middle of the frame but in the first third; he sat not against a freshly whitewashed but a crumbling wall that diagonally bisected the image; not facing us but turned slightly to the right, his eyes shaded by his cap. And, as the crowning offence, in the upper right corner of the picture another hand can be seen holding a basket.

Sára graduated from secondary school in 1952. It is hardly surprising that with such photographs he was not admitted to the Academy. After this unsuccessful attempt he spent a year travelling the country, photographing with even greater determination the “humiliated and downtrodden” people of swept-clean attics and wretched Gypsy hovels.

Starting Out in the Year of Thaw

In March 1953 Stalin died, and through the cracks that appeared in the fence of socialist realism the first rays of vitalising sunlight filtered in. György Illés (1908–1998, Hungarian cinematographer and professor) and Éva Szőllősy (1920–2000, Hungarian film historian and editor), Sára’s chief “mentors” alongside István Szőts, could now admit him to the Academy of Drama and Film – not least on the basis of the photographs of rural reality, diverging from the dominant ideology, which appear at the end of his first autobiographically inspired film Feldobott kő (The Upthrown Stone, 1969), floating in a pickle jar. Sára’s Budapest photographs, too, were marked by bold subjects, unusual framings, dynamically geometric and symbol-laden forms, compositions making full use of depth of field, and powerful effects of light and shade. Many must have been among the works rejected from the Academy’s student exhibitions, for Sára consistently chose forbidden subjects. Such was also the theme of his 1954 examination piece, the staged photo-étude Alkoholista (lit. Alcoholic): the first picture shows a man holding a glass, his expressionist shadow cast on the wall; the second depicts him collapsed at the end of a table covered with toppled flasks and glasses, rendered in perspective foreshortening.

Between 1954 and 1956 artistic creativity gained greater space in filmmaking. In 1955 István Szőts returned to work, and Sára frequently visited the set of Kövek, várak, emberek (lit. Stones, Castles, People). That year also saw the making of Zoltán Fábri’s Körhinta (Merry-Go-Round, 1956), which – alongside Frigyes Bán’s Talpalatnyi föld (Treasured Earth, 1948) and Szőts’s two feature films (Emberek a havason [People of the Mountains, 1942] and Ének a búzamezőkről [Song of the Cornfields, 1947]) – he took as a model, owing to its authentic representation of peasant life and environment.

In addition to Szőts and his favourite professors at the Academy, as well as visual artists sidelined during the Rákosi era from whom he also learned of modern Western art, Sára discussed his photographs and projects with his closest friends – István Gaál, Zoltán Huszárik, and Imre Gyöngyössy – and formed working partnerships with them. Before shooting their joint graduation film (at first rejected on 21 October 1956 but finally approved in early 1957), Gaál and Sára (as cinematographer) took countless motif photographs. Their experimental four-minute étude Pályamunkások (Section Gang, 1957), reviving European (especially Soviet) avant-garde traditions, became one of the forerunners of the Hungarian New Wave. In both content and form, the film marked a revolutionary departure from schematic depictions of work and workers; its shot composition, unusual perspectives and framings, dynamic variation of shot lengths, rhythmic and musical editing, and the meaningful interplay of sound and image make it a textbook example of constructivist montage to this day.

In 1957 Sára joined the Híradó- és Dokumentumfilm Stúdió (Hungarian News and Documentary Film Factory). He continued photographing prolifically, while dreaming of experimental films, most of which remained unrealised except for still images.

As a feature film cinematographer, he made his debut in 1960 with Imre Fehér’s Asszony a telepen (lit. Woman on the Estate), and in the same year he created his experimental film Flower to the Sun (1960), deploying a multitude of close-ups and extreme close-ups, tricks that depicted the flower’s growth in non-real time, the expressive use of both colour and black-and-white, planar static versus dynamic camerawork, free-associative montage, and zoom effects.

Unfolding in the “Exceptional Period” of the Balázs Béla Studio

Following the crushing of the 1956 revolution and its bloody reprisals, there began – in parallel – the ambivalent consolidation of the Kádár regime (1956–1988). To legitimise the system, the authorities needed “diversity”; from the early 1960s, therefore, the policy was no longer one of two “Ts” (banning, ‘tiltás’ and supporting, ‘támogatás’), but of three (banning, ‘tiltás’, tolerating ‘tűrés’, and supporting, ‘támogatás’) – the so-called “three Ts” (három T). Yet with the slogan “he who is not against us is with us”, and with the gradual improvement of living standards, the regime’s true goal was the depoliticisation of society. Cultural policy, meanwhile, sought to lure artists closer by means of gestures previously unimaginable, while at the same time using the “three Ts” and a divide-and-rule strategy to set generations and groups of differing outlooks (urban vs. folk / populist) against each other within a few years. In the early 1960s, however, both established figures (Zoltán Fábri, Károly Makk, Miklós Jancsó, András Kovács, János Herskó, etc.) and younger groups of filmmakers of divergent approaches found common ground in their belief – or their will to believe – in the possibility of change. Hence while the New Waves of Western cinema offered disquieting diagnoses of alienated heroes estranged from each other and from society, the films of the Hungarian New Wave featured active intellectuals who, after enforced amnesia, saw a chance to present their generation honestly, to reinterpret their fathers’ histories of suffering, and to combine classical and modern visual languages. Closer ties were forged with other branches of contemporary Hungarian art, and significant works also emerged in the spirit of returning to tradition, to the “clearest springs” (tiszta forrás) advocated by Béla Bartók. The re-evaluation of Bartók’s oeuvre – split in the 1950s between banned “bourgeois” and supported “folk” tendencies – was already underway, thanks in part to the work of András Szőllősy (1921–2007, Hungarian composer and musicologist), who wrote music for all of Gaál’s films, for several by Sára, and for works by Ferenc Kósa.

The internationally recognised Hungarian New Wave of the 1960s, primarily auteurist, might not have emerged at all without the Balázs Béla Studio (BBS), today remembered as legend. At the beginning of its “exceptional period” of ambivalent Kádár-era consolidation, in 1961 – with the approval of György Aczél (1917–1991, chief ideologue of Kádár’s cultural policy) – began the first great era of this “experimental workshop” for young filmmakers. Among the founders of BBS were István Gaál, Sándor Sára, and Márk Novák, as well as the “Máriássy class” of 1961 (István Szabó, Ferenc Kardos, János Rózsa, Judit Elek, Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács, Pál Gábor, Zoltán Huszárik), soon joined by Ferenc Kósa. This generation – often fatherless – had not been active participants in the Rákosi dictatorship, yet remembered the horrors of war and, above all, the legal abuses of the 1950s; several paid dearly for their involvement in 1956. For a time, however, the possibility of change and the sense of common goals concealed the stylistic and conceptual differences arising from distinct traditions and personal temperaments within the BBS. They assisted each other selflessly, and learned everything from directing and cinematography to editing. Close creative ties formed not only among those of similar roots (Gaál–Sára–Kósa–Huszárik) but also between artists of different backgrounds. Later, Sára shot István Szabó’s trilogy about his own middle-class, urban community: Apa (Father, 1966), Tűzoltó utca 25. (25 Fireman’s Street, 1973), and Budapesti mesék (Budapest Tales, 1976). As cinematographer, Sára deployed an almost inexhaustible repertoire of film styles and expressive devices – from the subjective camera of the New Wave, through myth-making (or myth-demolishing) lyrical intimacy, documentary authenticity, and the surreal world of imagination and dreams, to symbolic and allegorical imagery.

Perhaps the most revolutionary innovation at the BBS was retrospective censorship. Members could dispose freely of their annual budget: they themselves debated the projects and decided which should become films. The censors saw only the completed works; even if they ruled a film unfit for public screening, they could no longer prevent its existence. It was here that Sára, with Gaál as cinematographer, made his courageous, pioneering work Cigányok (Gypsies, 1962), which radically broke with the propagandistic-agitational style of schematic documentaries. The film was the first to depict with genuine empathy – through both sociographic and lyrical means – the archaic customs and miserable condition of a marginalised minority whose “integration” was addressed only in empty policy declarations, with no real hope of a humane life. In the same year, under the protective aegis of István Nemeskürty (1925–2015, Hungarian writer, literary historian, film theoretician), Gaál and Sára shot Oda-vissza (To and Fro, 1962), portraying with similar bold authenticity the exhausting lives of workers commuting to the capital. Such subjects would later be revisited in the 1970s by the next generation of BBS filmmakers (Pál Schiffer: Fekete vonat [Black Train, 1970], Faluszéli házak [lit. Houses at the Edge of the Village, 1979], Cséplő Gyuri [lit. Gyuri the Thresher, 1978]), whose harder-edged style reflected the waning of faith in improving the lot of commuters and Roma (not to mention today…).

In 1962 Sára shot another Gaál short, Tisza – Őszi vázlatok (Tisza – Autumn Sketches, 1962), a film-poem about the river (and the people living on its banks), serving also as a preparatory study for their first feature film Sodrásban (Current, 1963/1964).

In 1963 Sára directed several short films of varied style: as director, the documentary Egyedül (Alone / Solitude), about the urban individual; as cinematographer, Férfiarckép (Portrait of a Man) with Imre Gyöngyössy, and Groteszk (Grotesque) with Zoltán Huszárik, both short films on human solitude. In the same year he also photographed László Nádasy’s Éva A5116 (1963), the first Hungarian feature-length documentary on the Holocaust.

At the BBS, Sára directed Vízkereszt (Twelfth Night, 1965). Since Géza Perneczky’s (1936–2015, Hungarian art historian and critic) overly strict critique [6], though with greater nuance, the film has been analysed by many, including Lóránt Stőhr in 2009 [7]: “Perneczky’s criticism targets Sándor Sára’s documentary Twelfth Night, in which, he claims, balanced visual harmony is intended ‘to imbue the process of change with the beauty of folklore. But this beauty, in itself, functionless, does not exist, and its application may lead to gratuitous ornamentation.’ [8] He cites as an example the ‘hymn-like radiant’ closing image, a wide shot of young boys skating with their backs to the viewer, opening themselves to the sun, gliding about the frozen lake with ‘angel wings’. Perneczky is undoubtedly right to point to the contradiction between this beautiful closing image and the sombre, empathy-arousing caption (‘one million Hungarians live on farms’). Yet the earlier sequences of Twelfth Night do not conceal the hardships of farm life: trudging through mud, impassable roads, the burdens of feeding domestic animals.”

Sára’s last BBS film, the montage Pro patria (1970) – combining his own photographs with contemporary archival material – contrasted the false heroism of First World War memorials with the suffering of individuals exposed to history.

Ferenc Kósa also worked with Sára at the BBS on Öngyilkosság (lit. Suicide, 1967), a short dramatic film inspired by the poetry of Attila József (1905–1937).

The Artistic Fulfilment of the “Bartók Model” in the 1960s

“We thought in images, and we wanted to express everything in images” – emphasised Sándor Sára at the opening of István Gaál’s photographic exhibition in 2007.[9] Above all, it was the continuation and fulfilment of the Szőts tradition – a commitment to peasant culture and its high-level visual representation – that characterised three outstanding works of the trend referred to by critics as the “Bartók current” or “Bartók model”: István Gaál’s Sodrásban (Current, 1963/1964), Ferenc Kósa’s Tízezer nap (Ten Thousand Days, 1965/1967), and Sára’s own first feature film as both cinematographer and director, The Upthrown Stone (1968).

In Gaál’s first feature film with a contemporary subject, the Tisza landscape played a role equal to that of the human figures in the story of young people compelled to maturity by an accidental tragedy. The collaboration of Gaál and Sára (with Zoltán Huszárik as Gaál’s assistant and Imre Gyöngyössy as script consultant) resulted – with great success both at home and abroad – in the further perfection of an autonomous, modernist film language independent of literature, already characteristic of their earlier works: a visual poetry marked by expressive use of environment and landscape, and the creative and conscious handling of composition, camera movement, rhythm, montage, and so forth.

Sára was also cinematographer for one of the most ambitious peasant-themed undertakings of the 1960s, Ferenc Kósa’s Ten Thousand Days. Conceived with the contribution of writers Imre Csoóri and Imre Gyöngyössy, the film epic began as a collective project of the BBS – commissioned, indeed, by György Aczél, chief ideologue of Kádár’s cultural policy. Its task was to depict the revolutionary transformation of peasant life from the 1930s to the 1960s. From this collective enterprise there emerged instead an auteur debut: a tableau of three decades of peasant history under successive political systems, conveyed with form-shaping visual invention and rare courage – a political commission turned political scandal. Kósa and his collaborators did not embellish the chronicle of peasant life’s revolutionary transformations: they included the euphoria of land reform, the tragedy of collectivisation, and, above all, the truly revolutionary event of 1956, here for the first time named a “revolution” in the history of Hungarian cinema. The film was shelved for two years, and reached Hungarian audiences only after a successful Cannes screening (where it received the Best Director prize), and then only with certain alterations – but with the word “revolution” left intact. Yet from then on, the works of the Csoóri–Kósa–Sára trio – whose common feature was the articulation of social, ideological and political conflicts through personal and/or generational experience, and the release of inner tensions caused by the unspoken, unresolved traumas of historical and social pasts – were most often placed in the “tolerated” category of the cultural policy’s “three Ts”.

Already in his early short films, but also in most of his cinematographic work, Sára primarily undertook to present rural life in both sociographic and lyrical terms. The Upthrown Stone was the synthesis of all this. Its taboo-breaking scene of the forced washing of Roma children recalled the world of Gypsies: here Sára’s alter-ego protagonist not only sympathises with the vulnerable but identifies with them – and even defies the police in order to document their humiliation with his camera. Given the political circumstances, it seems unjust, looking back from today, to demand of the film an even more ethically radical stance, as Andrea Pócsik (Hungarian film historian and critic) does,[10] since it is hard to imagine that anyone could have ventured further at the time.

Current surely provided Sára with experience in depicting the dramatic process of coming of age, while Ten Thousand Days did so in portraying the vicissitudes of ordinary rural people. The atmosphere of Twelfth Night was rearticulated in the grandiose sequence of an open-air screening in the rural hinterland. This visually powerful series of shots, built on the dynamics of long shots and extreme close-ups, also symbolised continuity in the depiction of the peasant world, in multiple senses. On the screen erected in the fields, Treasured Earth – set in the Horthy era (1920–1944) – flickered, but in its long-suffering peasants the rural audience of the 1950s (and 1960s) could also recognise themselves.

The protagonist, Balázs Pásztor, is denied admission to the film academy because of his father’s imprisonment, and so works for a year as a surveyor on the construction of a rural centre and a hydroelectric plant – precisely during the ominous years of the Rajk trial (1949 show trial against László Rajk, Communist interior minister, a landmark of Stalinist repression) and the forced collectivisations. These experiences not only matured him but strengthened his resolve to record, on behalf of those unable to speak, the human tragedies he had witnessed – the peasants so often persecuted, the well-intentioned Greek Communist refugee destroyed by mistrust of authority, or the Roma condemned to hopelessness. The film was saved from banning only by its necessarily “optimistic” epilogue: we bid farewell to the protagonist – who, like Sára himself, is admitted to the Academy – as he begins to shoot his first film recording his experiences.

“They will call you to account for history – and they will be right. Call history to account for man – and you will be right”: this is the motto of the film, and also Sándor Sára’s credo, to which he remained faithful throughout his career.

Cinematographic Masterpieces and Directorial Explorations in the 1970s

The necessarily “optimistic” conclusion of The Upthrown Stone may in part be explained by the fleeting reform hopes of its year of creation, 1968. Yet the regime feared even more than reforms those works that approached revolutionary themes in a manner diverging from either schematic propaganda or the romantic historical perspective of the Jókai adaptations (films based on the novels of Mór Jókai, 1825–1904, one of Hungary’s most popular 19th-century authors). This was signalled by the fierce debates provoked around such stylistically and ideologically divergent works as Miklós Jancsó’s Fényes szelek (The Confrontation, 1969), or the 1968 project of the Csoóri–Kósa–Sára trio for a film on Dózsa’s peasant revolt, as well as by the banning in 1969 of Agitátorok (Agitators), reflecting the revolutionary imagery of the emerging new generation represented by Dezső Magyar, Gábor Bódy, and Péter Dobai. This generation sought – in the spirit of the manifesto Szociológiai filmcsoportot! (lit. Sociological Film Group!) – to probe the depths of contemporary reality scientifically, with a documentary sensibility, rejecting even tacit compromise with power. For that very reason, the authorities obstructed by every means the continuation of their thematic and formal innovations, rekindled generational antagonisms, and thereby exerted a negative influence on the further development of Hungarian cinema.

Following the controversy over The Confrontation, Jancsó continued his parabolic depictions of the struggle between violence, recurrent in history, and the individual who confronts it – a mode ever more remote from popular taste. Kósa’s Ítélet (Judgment, 1970), released at the time of the Brezhnevian neo-Stalinist “restoration”, was subjected to attempted suppression by cultural policy; even later, the censors rarely permitted the realisation of films that, with merciless honesty yet in more accessible, epic form, sought to address “the merciless heritage of Hungarian history”.[11]

Despite the worsening political and social climate, the 1970s proved fruitful for Sára (and for Hungarian cinema), yielding outstanding results. Between 1970 and 1980 he worked on ten feature films – two as both director and cinematographer, eight as cinematographer. In the latter role he won three times the prize of Hungarian film critics for cinematography (Szindbád [Sinbad], Nincs idő [Beyond Time], 25 Fireman’s Street), while the sweeping plainscapes of the Alföld (lit. Great Hungarian Plain), simultaneously expressing boundless freedom and utter vulnerability, and the poignant close-ups of suffering children, surely contributed to the Grand Prize awarded to László Ranódy’s Árvácska (Nobody’s Daughter, 1976) at Karlovy Vary. We have already noted the importance of his work for István Szabó’s films. His lyrical montage and framing techniques, painterly and musical qualities of microscopic close-ups, first developed in Flower to the Sun, were brought to perfection in Zoltán Huszárik’s Sinbad (1971), creating its uniquely rich and suggestive Art Nouveau imagery.

In response to the altered situation, the “films of action” of the 1960s were replaced by works projecting the great moral and ideological questions of the present into the past, adopting parabolic or symbolic-allegorical forms. Ferenc Kósa’s three films of the decade all belong to this type, while their distinctive visual worlds were primarily Sára’s achievement. In Judgment (1970), critics praised above all Sára’s creation of “vision-like and dynamically seized crowd scenes”.[12] In Beyond Time (1972), set within a prison that is at once concrete and allegorical, the visualisation of the conflict between a humane governor and his dictatorial deputy revealed Sára’s sensitivity to satirical and grotesque stylisation.

In Hószakadás (Snowfall, 1974), a moral parable set during the Second World War (or indeed any war), the mountainous landscapes – evoking the visual expressiveness of István Szőts – and the balladic mood helped the director to convey the mystical unity of man and nature.

The concrete socio-political reality of the 1970s, however, lent itself far more to an ironic-satirical perspective than to ideological, moral, or mythical representation – had it been permitted. For the paranoid, humourless authorities, this outlook harboured unpredictable dangers. Proof lies in the long “freezing” of Péter Bacsó’s generally supported satire of the Rákosi dictatorship, A tanú (The Witness, 1969), in the near-suppression of Sára’s contemporary parable Holnap lesz fácán (Tomorrow Pheasant, 1974), and in the outright banning of Bástyasétány ’74 (lit. Bastion Promenade ’74, 1974), Gyula Gazdag’s operetta parody representing the new generation.

Although satirical representation was far removed – at least judging by his realised works – from Sára’s directorial and cinematographic vision, he accepted the challenge of portraying the present in such a tone, with the collaboration of Géza Páskándi (1933–1995, Transylvanian Hungarian writer, who “escaped” to Hungary in 1974). Tomorrow Pheasant is set on a seemingly peaceful island isolated from the world, where a middle-aged intellectual couple retreat, only to have their hoped-for tranquillity and rest disturbed by unexpected events that expose their estrangement both from the petty representative of manipulative power-madness and from the younger generation, so distant from their ideals. Sára’s biting criticism and sharp irony spared no one, not even his own generation. Photographed together with Péter Jankura, the film abounds in witty inventions of dialogue and image, in visual jokes. The censors’ obstruction, however, discouraged Sára from further contemporary subjects – though a re-viewing suffices to show how valid the film remains today.

Sára once more turned towards the past, and in 1978 he made 80 huszár (80 Hussars), a film that demanded enormous effort both as director and cinematographer. Comparable above all to the historical frescoes of Polish director Andrzej Wajda, it unfortunately proved a path without continuation.

“History fulfils its task, becomes life’s teacher, only if it not only lists the bloody battles and coronation dates of kings, but – amplifying them – continues to proclaim and keeps alive the message of moral deeds, of true men who bravely professed their ideals, of silenced martyrs,” wrote István Szőts in the foreword to his script G. B. L. Gróf Batthyány Lajos főbenjáró pere és vértanúsága (lit. The Capital Trial and Martyrdom of Count Lajos Batthyány).[13] “Instead of a fine, orderly recitation of the historical lesson, we wanted to release from the depths of memory that choking feeling which unsettles and haunts us not only in this one story, but seems to accompany almost every great initiative in our history: plunging headlong, unprepared, into the swirling deep waters of action.” These are the words of Sándor Csoóri, in connection with the film 80 Hussars, which he co-wrote with Sára.[14] The tragic fate of the hussar company, struggling through the Carpathians under inhuman conditions to aid the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848–49, symbolises – like that of the martyred prime ministers – the struggle of those clamped in history’s vice: between duty and conscience, military oath and patriotism, the recurrent dilemmas of the Hungarian fate reaching to the present. In the film’s awe-inspiring images the verdant valleys, bare rocks, peaks shrouded in mist, and the horses whose destinies mirror their masters’ are as much actors as the outstanding cast of male performers.

Sára and Csoóri also wished to make a similar historical film about the Siculicidium (madéfalvi veszedelem of 1764, when Habsburg troops massacred Székelys in Transylvania), but their plan was repeatedly rejected on grounds of lack of funds.

The Decade of Taboo-Breaking Historical Documentaries

Since for such films there was not only no funding but no political demand – the mere choice of a Transylvanian subject could have offended many sensitivities – Sára responded not with idleness or compromise but with a defiantly courageous turn. “After I realised I could not make this spectacular, large-scale film, I decided: very well, I will simplify filmmaking, and I will make the cheapest possible films. The simplest kind of filmmaking is when a man sits before the camera and speaks”, he declared.[15] Thus was born the most influential Hungarian documentary trend of the 1980s: the so-called talking-head films, in which visual austerity was offset by the shattering testimonies of interviewees – men and women with tormented faces reminiscent of Sára’s early photographs. Alongside Sára, it was above all Judit Ember, the Gulyás brothers, Lívia Gyarmathy and Géza Böszörményi, the duo of János Erdélyi and Dezső Zsigmond, and Pál Schiffer who made long-form documentaries in which, for the first time, some of the gravest tragedies of Hungary’s recent past were addressed – not only absent from feature films but even compulsorily silenced in social science research.

Sára’s first major venture tackled one of the greatest taboos of earlier decades – partially lifted since István Nemeskürty’s 1972 book – the ordeal of the Hungarian Second Army on the River Don in 1942–43. (A “by-product” of this project was Néptanítók [lit. Village Schoolteachers, 1981], the first work to shed light on the trials, human resilience, and moral integrity of Hungary’s “labourers of the nation”.)

Sára tracked down survivors of the Don bend across the country, and succeeded in persuading to speak the elderly men long persecuted and intimidated as “Hitler’s last accomplices”. From the vast material he assembled came the strictly chronological, 25-part television series Krónika (lit. Chronicle, 1982). By having several participants unknown to each other recount the same event, he authenticated it. From the perspectives of army commanders, staff officers, chaplains, forced labourers, doctors, veterinarians, cadets, and rank-and-file soldiers, he created a choral epic of collective memory. After a few episodes, the television broadcast was banned, and the cinema version Pergőtűz (lit. Rolling Barrage) was shown only briefly in a single cinema – yet their impact on contemporary public thought was extraordinary. From today’s vantage point, of course, it is easy to demand of these films a comprehensiveness inconceivable at the time.

“Beside those who speak stands always the moral credibility of the victims. The creators succeeded in breaking through the wall of silence; they restored to the soldiers their past. This is the film’s great merit. They strove to remain apolitical, drawing out the human dimension of the stories. It is this approach that makes the work enduring, regardless of the narrative frameworks and emotional commitments that can be subjected to criticism”, writes Réka Sárközy,[16] countering recent doubts about the “historical realism”[17] of Chronicle.

Between 1984 and 1985 Sára made a multi-part documentary about the world-famous Bábolna State Farm (Bábolnai Gazdaság), including a portrait of Róbert Burger (1930–2015, agronomist and director), who, defying the Soviet model, tenaciously followed world-leading agronomic standards, achieving success never seen before in Hungary (especially since the regime change in 1989).

In 1987 came Sír az út előttem… (The Road Weeps Before Me…), a four-part balladic cycle on the suffering of the Székely people of Bukovina (Romania), whose ordeal began with the Siculicidium (the madéfalvi veszedelem massacre of Székelys by Habsburg troops in 1764), when survivors fled first to Moldavia and then to Bukovina, and took another tragic turn during the Second World War, when they were forced to leave Bukovina as well. Hungarian authorities encouraged them with promises of a homeland, but in 1940 the “homeless”, with elderly and children and all their movable belongings, were settled in the houses of expelled Serbs in the southern borderlands of Hungary – the “road of armies” (hadak útja). For this they had to endure a terrible “via dolorosa” until the end of the war and their “homecoming”: 42 men were abducted and murdered by Serbian partisans, while the others trudged in snow and frost, hungry and exhausted, back towards Hungary, exposed to the cruelties of German, Romanian, Serbian, Russian, and Hungarian soldiers alike, and what hurt even more, to the indifference or hostility of civilians. During forced collectivisation, as they clung to their land even more than the “native” peasantry, they were treated with still greater harshness.

Even after tearing down fences, walls, and taboos, Sára continued with unshakable resolve to prise open the “black boxes of history”.[18] He made films on the innocent Hungarians deported from the Bereg plain (north-east Hungary) in the months before the territory’s annexation to the Soviet Union, who perished in Soviet camps (Csonka Bereg I–II. [Fractured Bereg I–II.], 1989); on Béla Keményfi, crippled yet kept for years in a Siberian labour camp, his only “crime” being that he had been taken westward as a levente (Hungarian paramilitary youth) (Te még élsz? [Are You Still Alive?], 1990); on the similarly silenced sufferings of those – mostly also leventes – captured in Western Allied captivity (Lefegyverzett ellenséges erők I–II. [lit. Disarmed Enemy Forces I–II., 1991]); on the ordeal of innocent Hungarian women and girls deported by Soviet and Hungarian authorities after the war (Magyar nők a Gulágon I–III. [lit. Hungarian Women in the Gulag I–III., 1992]); on the tragic fate of the inhabitants of Csurgó (a town in south-west Hungary) during the Communist dictatorship and the reprisals after the 1956 revolution (Aki magyar, velünk tart I–II. [If You Are Hungarian, Join Us I–II., 1993]); on survivors of the Gulag, both women and men (Nehézsorsúak I–XIV. [lit. The Afflicted I–XIV., 2004]); and finally on a still-living woman, a member of a family victimised by the violence of the “liberating” Soviet army (Memento, 2006). All their fates serve as a “memento”, a protest of exceptional force against every war – past, present, and future.

Although these films played an important role in public discourse in the years preceding and following the regime change of 1989–90, since then they have “gone out of fashion”, while today’s audiences – above all the young – can scarcely imagine the hell their great-grandparents and grandparents endured. Yet these personal testimonies could (and should) contribute more than history books to processing our tragic past and to avoiding the “blind alleys” of Hungarian history – which now threaten their own future.

In the 1980s Sára also shot films for two old friends: with Ferenc Kósa, A mérkőzés (lit. The Match, 1981), about the presence and dramatic consequences of violence in a rural town in the summer of 1956; and, finally, his last masterpiece as a feature cinematographer, the transformation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into a vision at once archaic and modern, in István Gaál’s extraordinary opera film of 1985.

With Tüske a köröm alatt (Thorn Under the Fingernail, 1987) – scripted by Sándor Csoóri and shot by Sándor Kurucz – Sára painted a disturbing picture of rural Hungary in the late Kádár era, already foreshadowing the conditions of “wild capitalism” after the regime change. The landscape once so familiar to him had changed: the peasant houses not yet demolished were now inhabited by intellectuals fleeing the capital with the illusion of “returning to nature”. Yet the impotence before the still-surviving dark shadows and dictatorial practices of the past irrevocably deprived them of the hope of escape, of action – of freedom.

“I was brought up to believe there are tasks one is obliged to undertake”

The euphoria of 1989 – of belief in radical change and in freedom finally gained – was soon followed by disappointments and political events that increasingly divided the country. The gulf between “warring camps” deepened into an ever more unbridgeable chasm. Sándor Sára, however, stubbornly continued along his own path. Despite waning public interest, he persisted in the 1990s with long-form documentaries and directed three feature films about the tragic fates of ordinary people helpless before the cruel forces of history – with the same commitment and stylistic rigour that characterised his entire oeuvre.

Two of these works were based on novellas by Miklós Domahidy (1914–2002, Hungarian writer in Swiss exile, published in Hungary only after the regime change). Könyörtelen idők (lit. Merciless Times, 1991), photographed jointly with his son Balázs Sára, depicted deserters struggling to survive the last days of the war. Its consciously composed black-and-white wide shots set off in the viewer an associative chain of the “hunted animal”. By contrast, Vigyázók (lit. The Vigilants, 1993, cinematographer: Balázs Sára) evoked the atmosphere of fear and suspicion penetrating even the most private recesses of life during the Rákosi dictatorship through its emphatic use of close-ups of faces, glances, and gestures.

Between 1993 and 2000 Sára undertook another major venture: he accepted the post of director of Duna Televízió (Danube Television, Hungary’s first public satellite channel). Despite relentless “media wars” (the politicised battles over Hungarian public broadcasting in the 1990s) and chronic lack of funding, he established this unique channel, which in 1999 was named the world’s best cultural television station. Yet in early 2000 his contract was not renewed.

During his presidency he made only one feature film, based on a tragic family story recounted in Hungarian Women in the Gulag. A vád (The Prosecution, 1996, cinematographer: Balázs Sára) was received with extremes of opinion – reflecting not only legitimate aesthetic objections but also the country’s political polarisation. Its sometimes brutally naturalistic depiction of violence may be explained not only by its intent to confront (for the first time) the long-silenced atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers against women and by victors against the innocent vanquished, but also by its protest against the contemporaneous brutality of the Balkan wars.

Sára cherished several further film projects which he never realised. Chief among these was Transszibériai álom (lit. Trans-Siberian Dream), intended as the conclusion to his Gulag-themed cycle. Another was a film about the great Hungarian orientalist Sándor Kőrösi Csoma (1784–1842), which led Sára to Darjeeling to visit the linguist’s grave. Although the film was not made, his travels in India left a profound impression and bore fruit: Indiai képsorok I–V. (lit. Indian Sketches I–V., 1997), followed by a three-part portrait film in 2001 about Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941, Indian painter of partly Hungarian ancestry) – in place of a planned feature film on her life.

Photography always held decisive significance in Sára’s career, yet his passion for it – partly out of necessity – flared anew in his last one and a half to two decades. In India he always carried both still and motion picture cameras, but often, struck by the many interesting faces, he would lay down the cine camera and photograph instead. “The street was my terrain. Complete public space. One could photograph in the street, despite occasional protests. The street belongs to the downtrodden, the poor, the defenceless. In closed spaces, in wealthier surroundings, where I scarcely ever found myself, I would have had no desire to photograph”, he confessed around the millennium.[19] He thus thought and acted in exactly the same way as in 1950 – and ever since. Always.

Since 1993, his Hungarian and Indian photographs have been admired in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad; in summer 2015 he was preparing yet another major exhibition. And although in an interview after receiving the title Nemzet Művésze (“Artist of the Nation”, a state honour awarded to leading Hungarian cultural figures since 2013) he expressed the wish for a “more peaceful, calmer, more humane Hungary”,[20] when asked whether, as a man who had lived more than eight decades, he was happy, he responded with the defiant dignity always characteristic of him: “Yes, in fact I am. Yes. There are one or two films I would have made, but which did not come together and never will, yet this does not fill me with sadness or bitterness, for I have made those films within myself.”[21] It is an irreparable loss that others will never see them.

[1] Pamphlet on the Cause of Hungarian Film Art. Budapest, 1945, p. 81.
[2] Budapest, Szikra Publishing House.
[3] http://mek.oszk.hu/01900/01906/html/index4.html
[4] Károly Kincses: A fényképező Sára (lit. Sára with the Camera). In “Feledheted-e ezeket az arcokat?” Sára Sándor fényképei. (lit. “Can You Ever Forget These Faces?” Photographs by Sándor Sára), ed. Magdolna Kolta), Hungarian Museum of Photography, 2003, p. 29.
[5] Károly Kincses, ibid.
[6] Géza Perneczky: A szépség mítosza, a harmónia széttörése, a köznapok költészete (lit. The Myth of Beauty, the Shattering of Harmony, the Poetry of the Everyday), Filmkultúra, 1968/6, p. 28.
[7] Lóránt Stőhr: Elégiák. A hatvanas évek dokumentarizmusa (lit. Elegies. Documentarism of the 1960s). In BBS 50 (ed. Gábor Gelencsér), Budapest, Kunsthalle, 2009, pp. 88–89.
[8] Géza Perneczky, ibid.
[9] Képekben gondolkodtunk. Kincses Károly beszélgetése Gaál Istvánnal és Sára Sándorral (lit. We Thought in Images. Károly Kincses in conversation with István Gaál and Sándor Sára). In Sodrásban. Gaál 80 (lit. Current. Gaál 80), eds. Judit Pintér and Gabriella Shah, Budapest, Hungarian Academy of Arts, 2014, p. 179.
[10] Andrea Pócsik: A Sára-életmű korai darabjainak szerepe a filmemlékezetben (lit. The Role of Early Works in the Film Memory of Sára’s Oeuvre. In Pro patria. Sára 80, p. 197.
[11] Sándor Csoóri – Ferenc Kósa: Kíméljük-e magunkat az igazság súlyától? (lit. Shall We Spare Ourselves the Weight of Truth?). Filmkultúra, 1968/5.
[12] Miklós Almási: Ha a hit az egyetlen fegyver… (lit. When Faith Is the Only Weapon…). Filmkultúra, 1970/3, p. 82.
[13] Magvető Publishing House, Budapest, 1987, p. 18.
[14] http://dia.pool.pim.hu/html/muvek/CSOORI/csoori00246a/csoori00449/csoori00449.html
[15] Judit Pintér: Képek sodrásában. Beszélgetés Sára Sándorral (lit. In the Current of Images. A Conversation with Sándor Sára). Metropolis, 2000/1.
[16] Réka Sárközy: A Krónika humánuma. (lit. The Humanity of Chronicle). In Pro patria. Sára 80, p. 370.
[17] Lóránd Dombrándy: Emlékezés egy negyedszázad előtti krónikára. A 2. magyar hadsereg katonáinak vallomása az 1943. januári harcokról és a történeti realitás. (lit. Remembering a Chronicle of a Quarter-Century Ago. Testimonies of the Soldiers of the Hungarian Second Army on the Battles of January 1943 and Historical Realism). Military History Review (Hadtörténeti Közlemények), June 2011.
[18] István Zsugán: Fekete dobozaink. (lit. Our Black Boxes). Filmvilág, 1988/2.
[19] Sándor Sára: India, a szépség koldusa (lit. India, Beggar of Beauty). Budapest, Hungarian Film Historical Photographic Collection Foundation, 2009.
[20] Ákos Jezsó: „Békésebb, nyugodtabb, emberibb Magyarországot szeretnék." Beszélgetés Sára Sándor filmkészítővel (lit. “I Would Like a More Peaceful, Calmer, More Humane Hungary.” A Conversation with Filmmaker Sándor Sára). Yearbook of the Hungarian Academy of Arts 2014, Budapest, MMA, 2015, p. 74.
[21] Ibid., p. 77.

Budapesti mesék

Válogatás alkotásaiból