András Szekfű: The Career of Sándor Kardos

Sándor Kardos (b. 1944), recipient of the Kossuth Prize (the highest Hungarian state award for cultural achievement) and the Balázs Béla Prize (the main Hungarian award for film artists), and holder of the title Nemzet Művésze (Artist of the Nation, a state honour recognising lifetime artistic achievement), is best known as a cinematographer. His name is associated with the cinematography of films such as A kis Valentino (Little Valentino, 1979), Egészséges erotika (Sound Eroticism, 1985), Glamour (2000) and A Hídember (The Bridgeman, 2002). As a film director, he mainly created so-called experimental films, which remain undeservedly little known, such as Hymnus (lit. Hymn, 1988), Résfilm (Slitfilm, 2005) and Átváltozás (Metamorphosis: Immersive Kafka, 2009). His private photography collection, the Hórusz Archívum (Horus Archive), is the richest archive of its kind in Hungary. Lastly, we should also mention his later-life passion: the study of Biblical Hebrew. These are extraordinary achievements, signs of an extraordinary versatility. How does one become Sándor Kardos, we might ask – what genetic inheritance, what events and experiences, what forms of socialisation, self-education and training lead to such a career?

That Kardos was born at all, and survived the first months of his life, was nothing short of a miracle. In the Budapest Ghetto (established by the fascist Arrow Cross regime in 1944–45 for the confinement of Jews), only the extraordinary presence of mind of his mother saved her and her baby from being shot dead by an Arrow Cross gunman.

Kardos’s mother had previously been a globe-trotting dancer, and was also an accomplished photographer. “My father was a true Váci road working-class kid. He never had any formal schooling. Later, however, he rose very high in what was called munkásművelődés (workers’ cultural self-education),” Kardos recalled in 2019.[1] Gyula Kardos even founded a photo agency in the interwar period, though at that time he himself did not yet know how to take photographs. “Without a single year of elementary schooling, he eventually became Árpád Szakasits’s (Hungarian Social Democratic politician, later President of Hungary) substitute representative in Parliament. …If [Szakasits] had been ill for two months, it was my father who would have taken his seat.”[2]

After the communist takeover in 1948, Kardos’s father refused to join the Communist Party. From then on, his parents could not find any regular work and lived in deep poverty, surviving on occasional piece-work. Eventually, his father learned the photography trade and worked as a “ghost photographer,” i.e. an anonymous worker producing photos under a master’s name. They would travel to the countryside, photographing the local population; from these photographs they would prepare colourised versions, often adding a deceased sibling into the group portrait – a customary practice at the time. Young Sándor sometimes accompanied his father on these trips.

Early Steps Before Film School – The ELTE Amateur Film Club

After a year working as an unskilled labourer, Sándor Kardos was admitted in 1964 to Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) to study Hungarian language and népművelés (a now-obsolete term referring to community cultural organisation and public education). There he met Nándor Mertz (a promising filmmaker who died young) and András Jeles (later a prominent Hungarian film and theatre director). The three close friends joined the ELTE Amatőrfilm Klub (ELTE Amateur Film Club) together.

At the time, the Egyetemi Színpad (University Stage), operating in the former (and today once again) Piarist Chapel, had gained nationwide significance with its diverse and high-quality programme of performances. István Nemeskürty (1925–2015, literary historian and film theoretician) held a special seminar on film aesthetics, while the Filmtudományi Diákkör (Student Film Studies Circle), the film screenings at the University Stage, and the activities of the ELTE Amateur Film Club together created a unified film-cultural atmosphere. Kardos still recalls that, as a student, he gave a lecture on Sergei Eisenstein to an audience of 350 people as part of the seminar’s screening series.

Having accompanied his father on photography assignments from an early age, Kardos had learned to use a camera as a schoolboy. It was thus entirely natural for him that, in the Amateur Film Club, his friends would direct the films while he served as cinematographer. Together with his friend Nándor Mertz he made two amateur films (Hídavatás [lit. Bridge Opening]; [lit. Diptichon – Diptych]), and with András Jeles three (Levél az Újvilágba [lit. Letter to the New World]; Énekek éneke [lit. Song of Songs]; the title of the third has been lost). Since the entire archive of the ELTE Amateur Film Club from the 1960s has disappeared, these films are now preserved only in the memories of their viewers – among them, the author of these lines. As far as memory serves, the films by Jeles, Mertz and Kardos stood out among the amateur works of the period, both for their direction and for their cinematography. Kardos’s images were characterised by deliberate composition and, at times, by striking beauty.

The Road to Professional Filmmaking

Sándor Kardos and András Jeles were admitted to the Színház- és Filmművészeti Főiskola (Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest, today University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest) at the same time: Kardos to study cinematography and Jeles to study directing. Their admission was likely helped by the fact that János Herskó, a member of the admission committee, had served on the juries of numerous amateur film festivals and was familiar with their work. The four years at the Academy, however, left few deep impressions on Kardos. Like many of his fellow students at the time, he considered the art history lectures of Andrásné Szöllősy especially inspiring, while Emil Petrovics’s (1930–2011, composer) lectures on music history were also memorable.

At the Balázs Béla Stúdió (Balázs Béla Studio, BBS – an experimental film workshop founded in 1959 within the Hungarian state film industry, which became a centre of avant-garde and documentary filmmaking), young directors and cinematographers were able to make fiction, documentary or experimental films with relative creative freedom. Kardos shot his first fiction film there immediately after graduating from the Academy.

Segesvár (1974)
Directed by his classmate András Lányi, Segesvár deals, with subtle yet sharp satire, with the false Petőfi cult (he state-sponsored hero-worship and idealisation of 19th-century poet Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849), often used to serve political or ideological aims) of the Compromise Era (the period after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867). Even at the time, the choice to shoot in black and white represented a kind of stylisation, and within this Kardos experimented with the spatial structure of the image. Human vision perceives space according to the laws of perspective – the foreshortening of vertical dimensions and the convergence of parallel lines are all part of this. Kardos deliberately introduced false perspectives into the set design so that the entire film image, including the movements of the characters within it, would radiate a sense of unspoken tension.

Kisamerika (lit. Little America, 1975)
Kardos’s first documentary film was also shot at BBS. He collaborated with director László B. Révész, whom he had known from their days together in the ELTE Amateur Film Club. By this time B. Révész had already been working for the Hungarian Television for several years. Kisamerika (lit. Little America) portrays a workers’ housing estate built in the 1930s in Ózd (a major steel-industry town in northern Hungary), consisting of small, modest flats without modern amenities and inhabited by poor working-class families. (There was also a Nagyamerika – “Big America” – a residential district higher up the hill where the senior officials lived.) The film, informed by the principles of “empathetic sociology” (with sociologist Gyula Kozák as expert consultant), sought to depict – rather than externally criticise – the living conditions.

“…We once set up a shot from the hillside overlooking the row houses that made up Kisamerika. From a distance, using a telephoto lens, I created a strong, compressed perspective that condensed the entire long space into a single frame. We set up the camera at two o’clock in the morning; opposite us were the outhouses – because each apartment had one or two non-flushing toilets, outside. People had to go out to use them. In Nagyamerika, by contrast, there were proper toilets inside. The economic director and the engineer had only to take a few steps within their homes, but here it was just as it had been under Horthy [Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, 1920–44] – nothing had changed. I compressed the space [with the lens] into a single long shot. We set up at 2 a.m., and by 3 people started coming out of their doors, in pyjamas, barefoot, in dressing gowns, going to relieve themselves. It looked like a dance of the dead around a grave, with more and more people appearing, eventually moving in groups, crossing over, returning after urinating. After a while, the women had to go out too. I think it was a fantastic shot, one that perfectly captured the situation and the vulnerability.”[3]

A látogatás (1983)

With a brief chronological leap, we should mention A látogatás (The Visit), a documentary directed by László B. Révész and produced at the Budapest Filmstúdió (Budapest Film Studio), headed at the time by István Nemeskürty. The film follows Edit Bruck (b. 1931, Hungarian-born Italian-language writer and Holocaust survivor) as she returns to the small village in northern Hungary from which she was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and to which she had never returned as a survivor. The cinematographer’s task here was crucial: to capture several moments that would happen once and could never be repeated – images that remain vividly etched in Kardos’s memory.

“Edit Bruck came back to the small northern Hungarian village for the demolition of the house where her parents had once lived. They didn’t just demolish it – they flattened it. They bulldozed everything, leaving nothing but level ground. Old women came up to her and embraced her: ‘Dear Editke, how terrible your fate was. I’ve brought you this little cast-iron pot. Your mother gave it to me when they took her away.’ I don’t need to explain this too much, do I? For me, this was the most powerful moment in the whole film – when, driven by a belated sense of guilt, many people tried to reframe what had happened as an act of generosity. I’m not judging anyone, but it was deeply shocking.”[4]

The film’s closing sequence is a key moment: an excavator bites into the walls of the house, tears out the window, and reduces the building to rubble. This is also shown from above, filmed from a helicopter, creating a symbolically charged dramatic image. The impact is heightened by the absence of people from the scene – we see neither the machine’s operator nor any onlookers. This is one of the first examples of the “high-angle shots” for which Kardos later became renowned.

Directed by András Jeles, Cinematography by Sándor Kardos

Kardos had already shot Jeles’s student films while they were both still at the Academy. Less well known is the fact that two student films directed by Kardos (Énnálam egy boldog óra nagyon ritka vendég [lit. A Happy Hour Is a Rare Guest in My House]; Olajbányászok [lit. Oil Miners]) were photographed by Jeles. It was therefore natural that, when Hunnia Film Studio (the state’s main feature film production company) accepted Jeles’s first feature project, the two would once again collaborate. As Kardos recalled, there was never any need to discuss in advance what Jeles, as director, expected of his cinematographer: their years of friendship and constant collaboration had created such a level of harmony – and mutual trust – that no explicit direction was needed. Between 1979 and 1983, they made three feature films together.

A kis Valentino (Little Valentino, 1979)

“Little Valentino is about a working-class boy who embezzles a large sum of money, spends it over the course of a single day, but ultimately realises he cannot buy himself a better life,” writes Wikipedia. To this we should add that, at the end of the day, the boy enters a police station and turns himself in. Yet such a plot summary is about as illuminating as presenting a living person by means of a full-body X-ray – it shows the skeleton, but the “soft tissue” is missing. The “soft tissue” of Little Valentino lies in the turns of its episodes and characters, its locations, and – not least – in its cinematography. Kardos not only shot the film but also contributed personal material: one of the scenes, involving an old woman in flames, was inspired by his childhood memories.

The film was shot on black-and-white film stock – already something of a rarity at the time. Kardos sourced a special emulsion from the British Ilford company, and the production succeeded in obtaining it as negative stock. The Ilford material made it possible to render shades of black even in dimly lit rooms, preventing areas where the eye could still perceive gradations from merging into a single dark blot. The entire visual world of the film is infused with Kardos’s distinctive style – simultaneously realist and ironic – which is inseparable from Jeles’s approach to directing actors. (Nota bene: all roles are played by non-professional actors; so is the role of the protagonist himself.)

At the film’s end, there is a three-minute long take that stands as a worthy successor to the extended handheld sequences of the French New Wave. At night, the protagonist arrives at the police station, speaks briefly with the duty officer, then walks down a corridor with several turns. We lose sight of him as a young man comes out; the camera now tracks backwards before him. The young man hands in his pass, exits, walks to the tram stop, buys a bouquet of flowers from a woman, boards the arriving tram, and takes a seat. That is all. In the pre-Steadicam era, achieving such an unbroken shot required considerable ingenuity: Kardos climbed onto a film studio crane without being harnessed, then stepped onto a dolly (camera trolley) to follow the protagonist, shifted his focus to the departing young man, returned, stepped back onto the crane, and from there stepped onto the tram – following the young man in the moving vehicle from a stationary position. Kardos himself became the Steadicam. It is worth noting that, over the course of these three minutes, the street, the entrance, the corridors, the stop and the tram are all lit with beautifully nuanced night-time interior and exterior tones.

What is the significance of such an acrobatically executed long take within the film? Kardos explains:

“It offers a space for reflection – apart from the acrobatic achievement, that’s not the point. The point is that we keep moving, changing places, and you’re invited to think about how easily you, too, could find yourself there – in any of those roles.”[6]

Álombrigád (Dream Brigade, 1983/1989)

In this film, the members of a socialist workplace brigade decide to stage Prémium (Bonus), a play by Soviet playwright Alexander Gelman. When the script was first approved, many believed the film would treat this situation earnestly. Ferenc Kőhalmi, the chief state film director at the time, even summoned Jeles and told him how much “the socialist system needs a film like this now,” and that “this is the film we’ve been waiting for, for a very long time.”

Jeles and Kardos, however, created a wildly absurd satire, with the events narrated – in gold paint – by Róbert Rátonyi (1923–1992, a hugely popular operetta star of the age). The film was not officially banned, but it was locked away and could only be screened in 1989, during the political transition.

“…We were fiercely anti-system at the time and tried to portray that social environment with biting irony. We used the most extreme techniques. (…) There was a brigade meeting – the dialogue was never scripted, only the topic was given. We filmed it with a 16 mm camera, which we hung with a strong rope from a secure bracket attached to a tavern’s main beam, just behind head height. We calculated how far it would swing if I gave it a good push. And it swung randomly throughout the scene. I didn’t care what would end up in frame – whatever appeared on film was fine, as long as they said what they needed to say. In that sense, we pushed our methods to the wildest extremes.

When the brigade leader watches television at home, I placed the camera inside the television set itself. We looked at the scene from inside a gutted TV, as if the ‘system’ were watching everyday life through the screen. My favourite scene in the whole film is when the brigade performs the play. Attila Kovács, the production designer, built a set in deliberately false perspective, which was completely distorted and ‘held together’ incorrectly.”[7]

Angyali üdvözlet (The Annunciation, 1983)

As a form of compensation for the suppression of Dream Brigade, Jeles was offered the opportunity to direct another film that same year. In Angyali üdvözlet (The Annunciation), Imre Madách’s classic verse drama Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man, 1861) is performed by schoolchildren. The cinematographer’s task was crucial: to ensure that audiences could take the drama seriously despite the actors’ age.

Production designer Attila Kovács drew inspiration from the visual cultures of ancient civilisations, designing the settings as a stylistically unified continuum. Kardos used the most economical means to create visual magic: for example, he embedded small shards of mirror at calculated intervals in a clay wall so that they would catch the light and glimmer as the camera passed.

The friendship and artistic collaboration between Sándor Kardos and András Jeles remain among the most luminous moments in Hungarian film history. They speak of one another with sincere – if not uncritical – respect. Their collaboration, however, ended after The Annunciation.

Four Films and a Series with Géza Bereményi

Géza Bereményi (b. 1946) was one of the most successful screenwriters in Hungarian cinema around the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Of his six scripts, two became major hits: Veri az ördög a feleségét (Rain and Shine, dir. Ferenc András, 1977) and Megáll az idő (Time Stands Still, dir. Péter Gothár, 1982). According to studio insiders, Bereményi turned to directing because he no longer wanted to entrust the success of his stories to others.

Kardos has openly stated that he had to assist Bereményi with certain basic filmmaking techniques (such as maintaining shot continuity and avoiding visual mismatches), but he always added that the dramatic strength of the narratives, the taut, historically authentic dialogue, and the psychologically subtle direction of actors were Bereményi’s achievements.

The four feature films they made together were A tanítványok (The Disciples, 1985), Eldorádó (Eldorado / The Midas Touch, 1989), A turné (The Tour / On Tour, 1993) and A Hídember (The Bridgeman, 2002). Their television collaboration was the series Régimódi történet (An Old-Fashioned Story, 2006), based on the novel by Magda Szabó. Of these, three films will be discussed below.

A tanítványok (The Disciples, 1985)

Bereményi’s first feature film unfolds on two temporal planes: one set in the 1930s, the other in the present of the 1980s. Kardos achieved the authenticity of the 1930s scenes by matching the look of the feature film shots to contemporary black-and-white newsreel footage. For instance, when the young protagonist travels to the capital by train, Kardos incorporated a few shots from Emberek a havason (People of the Mountains, 1941, dir. István Szőts) and adjusted the newly filmed material in terms of lighting and tonal quality to match them. Kardos later remarked that such effects would be child’s play to create using digital techniques today – but at the time, they had to be achieved entirely through lighting and laboratory processes.

Eldorádó (Eldorado / The Midas Touch, 1989)

Timeframe: 1945 to 1956. Main setting: Teleki tér (Teleki Square) in Budapest’s 8th district. The story is woven from family recollections and the director’s personal memories, which become legend. Kardos’s cinematographic art perhaps reaches its zenith in this film. Each episode of the legendary narrative is marked by a distinctive visual idea – dazzling and imaginative, but never gratuitous. Kardos explained that for the sequences set during the 1956 revolution, he aimed to shoot as the contemporary newsreel cameramen (among them Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács, who later became world-renowned cinematographers in the United States) would have done. He used outdated black-and-white film stock and had the laboratory repeatedly copy it back and forth until the finished material blended seamlessly with the original, repeatedly duplicated archival footage. The camera movements, too, were modelled on period newsreels.[8]

The heightened dramatic tone and mythic nature of the story invited unusual visual solutions:

“When the son-in-law arrives in Eldorado, I wanted to make the whole scene magical, so I hid a light inside a pot of lard – it was absolutely unrealistic lighting, but [Bereményi] allowed it. On another occasion, when Péter Andorai is telling a story to the child on his knee, I imagined it as a fairy-tale scene: the entire kitchen was enchanted – there was a light behind every bottle in the kitchen cupboard, each with a red filter. The cupboard glowed red. (…) With few exceptions I was never so impressed by myself that I accepted everything I did. (…) I have a theory that if you get the first light right, it pulls all the others into place.”[9]

A Hídember (The Bridgeman, 2002)

If Eldorado represents the peak of Kardos’s “wild” period, then The Bridgeman, made thirteen years later, is the pinnacle of his “composed” period. The film follows the life of István Széchenyi (1791–1860, statesman and reformer known as “the greatest Hungarian”) from childhood through the Reform Era, the failed War of Independence of 1848–49, to his final years and death in the asylum at Döbling. Kardos’s camera captures the quiet dignity and beauty of Hungarian Biedermeier culture, while also finding the visual language and movements to express the characters’ intense romantic emotions and the often dramatic clashes between the historical figures – flesh-and-blood figures whose names today survive chiefly as street names.

The funeral of Széchenyi, set in the park of the family estate at Nagycenk. Behind the coffin walk the widow, relatives, a few admirers, and some villagers. A subtle touch of Bereményi’s is to include Széchenyi’s youthful friend Count Clam-Martinitz, by then a general loyal to the Habsburgs, in the procession. Kardos conveys the gravity of the moment by shooting from above, from a crane, almost vertically down onto the cortege – the perfect image for a historical moment.

During the filming of A Hídember, Kardos experienced the greatest moral conflict of his cinematographic career. The lead actor insisted that Széchenyi must not commit suicide in the film. The historical consultant, unwilling to endorse such a falsification, had his name removed from the credits. Kardos was determined to do the same – he could not, he said, photograph a distortion of history. Ultimately, director Bereményi resolved the situation: the film shows neither Széchenyi being murdered by imperial agents nor the act of suicide itself. Kardos’s name remained on the credits.

A Versatile Cinematographic Oeuvre

According to data from Hungarian Television, Sándor Kardos worked as cinematographer – and in a few cases as director – on several hundred television programmes, short films and segments. These cannot be covered here, as they would far exceed the scope of this essay. According to the records of the National Film Institute Hungary, Kardos shot 82 studio-produced films and collaborated with 43 directors. To illustrate the versatility of his cinematographic art, let us briefly highlight just a few of these.

A szeleburdi család (A Harum-Scarum Family, 1981)

Filming A szeleburdi család (A Harum-Scarum Family), a family comedy directed by György Palásthy (1931–2018), was a special experience for Kardos. A cinematographer steeped in the world of art cinema, he was here introduced to the workings of mainstream commercial filmmaking:

“He was utterly professional. He knew he was making a children’s film – he would come in each morning with a sheet of paper listing nine or twelve shots. It might not have been the height of genius, but he made good children’s films. This one is still watched today – my grandchildren enjoy it enormously. He always knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish that day, and nothing more. Sometimes we were done by two in the afternoon. We shot the film using half [the raw stock we were allocated], that’s how professional Palásthy was. What I really liked was that when I asked him, ‘Here’s all this leftover stock – shouldn’t we shoot something else?’ he replied, without a hint of irony, that some Hungarian art film would use it. There was no sarcasm in that – he genuinely believed that others might need more, and he was content with what he had.”[10]

Egészséges erotika (Sound Eroticism, 1985)

Péter Tímár, a first-time director who had started his career as a special-effects cinematographer, was just as obsessed with extreme, artistic ideas as Kardos – and the two quickly found common ground. The filming of Sound Eroticism was done in reverse order and then screened in the correct sequence. The resulting grotesque movement of the characters had a frenetic impact, serving the film’s biting satire of the late Kádár era (the final decades of Hungary’s state-socialist system under János Kádár, 1956–88).

A három nővér (1991)

In A három nővér (The Three Sisters), directed by Andor Lukáts, the titular sisters are portrayed as relatives of the occupying Soviet soldiers, longing to return to Moscow. The film was shot in an abandoned Soviet barracks in Szentendre, where countless small objects were still scattered about. Kardos incorporated some of these items into the mise-en-scène to enhance the atmosphere of the location.

Zsötem (Je t’aime, 1991)

In Zsötem (Je t’aime), directed by András Salamon, a petty conman takes two street prostitutes with him to Vienna, alternately promising each of them love – but in the end, both end up in the sex industry.

“It was at that time that the Western world opened up for us too. So for me, and for the entire crew, it was just as fascinating as it was for the three protagonists – and you can see that in the film, in the way we, too, looked with wonder at this underworld, because that was all we had a view of.” – recalled Kardos.[11]

Priváthorvát és Wolframbarát (lit. Private Horvát and Friend Wolfram 1993)

The main aim of Priváthorvát és Wolframbarát (lit. Private Horvát and Friend Wolfram), directed by Frigyes Gödrös and Dr. Putyi Horváth, was to break into the world of studio feature film production. Gödrös, then fifty and twenty-two years out of film school, had done every kind of job in the industry. This semi-experimental film features the two directors themselves in the title roles (though dubbed by actors) and essentially tells the story of their lives and friendship, incorporating old amateur film footage shot by a grandfather. Kardos succeeded in creating distinct yet harmonising visual worlds for the film’s various stylistic layers and for the inserted amateur film material.

Glamour (2000)

After the success of Private Horvát and Friend Wolfram, Gödrös immediately began work on his next project – a large-scale, semi-autobiographical family drama set during the vészkorszak (lit. “time of peril”, the Hungarian term for the Holocaust period, 1944–45). However, financing problems meant that filming had to be completed in stages over six years. The story follows the marriage of a Hungarian Jewish man and a German Christian woman, and the birth of their son. The film’s greatest strength is its portrayal of the Jewish-Hungarian bourgeois milieu stretching back to the fin de siècle – a portrayal that brought Kardos the greatest professional recognition of his career: the Grand Prize for Cinematography at the Madrid Imagen Film Festival.

Own Feature and Experimental Films

Are films directed by others not, in a sense, also a cinematographer’s own films? Of course they are. Yet, since the film industry traditionally credits works under the director’s name, Kardos has only one “own” feature film – and even that was co-directed. As for his so-called experimental works, Kardos dislikes the term, but all three of the films discussed here are genuine experiments – and successful ones.

Telitalálat (Direct Hit / The Winning Ticket, 2003)

A young man approached Kardos with a short film script and the promise of financing. The story follows a man who wins a fortune – a suitcase full of banknotes – on the day before the 1956 Revolution, only to become embroiled in chaos when the uprising breaks out.

“He came to me asking me to direct his film. Later, during a production meeting, he told me we would be co-directing – he was the one who had secured the money. Given my work as a cinematographer, people might have expected something highly unconventional. As a cinematographer, I had plenty of original ideas. It turned out, though, that when I had a story of my own in my hands, I was very conventional. I was surprised myself. But I think the film isn’t too bad.”[12]

Hymnus (lit. Hymn, 1988)

Kardos’s idea for Hymnus (lit. Hymn) was to construct a literary text – word by word – from fragments of existing film footage. Writer Mihály Kornis suggested the text of Himnusz (Hymn, 1823), the Hungarian national anthem, as the basis for the project. Over several years, Kardos and his collaborator collected individual words – even syllables – from diverse sources, assembling them into the complete text of the anthem. Some words came from newsreels, others from feature films or any other kind of footage they could find.

A particular challenge was the phrase “Bendegúznak vére” (“the blood of Bendegúz”), for which the word Bendegúz had to be sourced from the television comedy Indul a bakterház (The Stationmaster Is on the Move). Because newsreels were among the sources, it was possible to include fragments spoken by historical figures themselves: Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi’s speeches, for example, provided the words “freedom”, “does not”, and “bloom”. Hungarian admiral and regent, interwar leader Miklós Horthy’s wife also appears, as does Communist leader János Kádár, and there are snippets from comedies starring Gyula Kabos.

The diversity of source films and speakers gives Hymn a symbolic universality: the “whole” Hungarian society speaks here, from the birth of sound film onwards. A striking tension emerges between the elevated, literary and historical weight of the text and the colourful variety of those who utter it – including politicians of many kinds. The very technique of word-montage simultaneously deconstructs and elevates the hymn’s lofty text. Through the use of montage – one of cinema’s most fundamental tools – Hymn connects to the avant-garde literary tradition of “word magic”. It is an unrepeatably original concept, realised with extraordinary brilliance.

Résfilm (Slitfilm, 2005)

Kardos had long been fascinated by the way space is mapped both in the human brain and on film. While the human eye and brain perceive the world through a single mode of projection, the camera is capable of many. Kardos enjoyed working with wide-angle lenses or – as seen in Little America – telephoto lenses. The réskamera (slit camera), originally developed for scientific purposes, operates without the standard 24 frames per second: instead, the film runs continuously behind a narrow slit. “The slit camera records space in time,” explains Kardos.

Résfilm (Slitfilm), inspired by The Handkerchief, a short story by Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927), explores – in a broadly interpreted way – the clash between Eastern and Western cultures. The visual result is completely unconventional, almost impossible to describe in words, yet extraordinarily stimulating and intellectually exciting.

Az átváltozás (Metamorphosis: Immersive Kafka, 2009)

Just as Résfilm was inspired by the slit camera, Az átváltozás (Metamorphosis: Immersive Kafka) was inspired by the new technology of the gömbkamera (spherical camera). This device records in every direction except one – itself – which appears as a white spot in the image. When Kardos saw a demonstration of the camera, he immediately thought of Franz Kafka’s novella Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915), in which the protagonist transforms into an insect. The spherical camera perceives reality in a way reminiscent of an insect’s eyes. Kafka himself had wanted his readers not to imagine the insect, but to imagine what the insect sees. Kardos and his team mounted the spherical camera on a remote-controlled base and hid themselves, since the camera “saw” in every direction.

What raised this film beyond the level of a mere technical experiment? Kardos explains:

“It’s obviously not about someone turning into an insect. This young man supports his family – he’s a travelling salesman. The story begins with him being unable to catch the train for work. I think the whole thing means that, for some reason, he can no longer bear the pressure or the mentality of that life. But his family says, ‘If you don’t support us, you’re a disgusting worm – know that.’ That’s what it’s about. He doesn’t become one – they see him as one, and it kills him if he refuses to make money for them. (…) That’s why I thought there had to be something at the end where he was loved or respected, where the fundamental experience wasn’t that you’re a disgusting worm if you don’t earn money for us.”[13]

The Hórusz Archívum (Horus Archives)

“Horus was one of the most important Egyptian gods, and the depiction of his eye was one of the most popular amulets – symbolising wholeness and completeness. The choice of name refers primarily to the magical, unexpected surplus meaning that images, devoid of any deliberate intention, can sometimes acquire. As Kardos puts it: ‘the finger of God touched the image’.”[14]

Kardos began collecting “photographs taken without artistic intent” – including discarded images – while still a student. For viewers of the feature films shot by Kardos (including, no doubt, readers of this essay), the connection is clear between the cinematographer’s distinctive visual approach and the grotesque world of these “found object” photographs. Over the decades, the Hórusz Archívum (Horus Archives) has grown to an immense size – perhaps as many as one million images. In the 2020s, with the help of grant funding, work began to digitise the archives and make it available online, where it is already freely browsable today.

Postscript

Sándor Kardos turned 80 this year. Two days a week he teaches at the university. On two other days, he and a colleague work on the digitisation and online publication of the Horus Archives. In his free time, he studies Biblical Hebrew and pursues biblical studies.

References

[1] Series of interviews with Sándor Kardos, 2019–2020, published in: András Szekfű: Így filmeztünk 4 (This Is How We Filmed 4), p. 191. (MMA Publising House, 2023). Here I must confess that I have been friends with Sándor Kardos for sixty years. (A.Sz.)
[2] Ibid., p. 199.
[3] Interview with Sándor Kardos, MMA, 2024.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Of the 28 films listed in the 1979 filmography, only three were shot in black and white: Októberi vasárnap (A Sunday in October) by András Kovács – a historical reconstruction set in 1944; Orvos vagyok (lit. I Am a Doctor), a documentary-fiction hybrid by Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay; and Little Valentino.
[6] Interview with Sándor Kardos, MMA, 2024.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Interview with Sándor Kardos, MMA, 2024.
[9] Series of interviews with Sándor Kardos, 2019–2020, published in: András Szekfű: Így filmeztünk 4, p. 191. (MMA Publishing House, 2023).
[10] Ibid., p. 210.
[11] Interview with Sándor Kardos, MMA, 2024.
[12] András Szekfű: Így filmeztünk 4, p. 226. (MMA Publishing House, 2023).
[13] Ibid., p. 230.
[14] https://www.horusarchives.com/tortenet

[2024]

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