László Kelecsényi: The Career of Géza Bereményi

Short story writer? Lyricist? Screenwriter? Novelist? Playwright? Film director?

Who is Géza Bereményi? Which is his true field of expertise – film, theatre, or literature? At first glance, it is difficult to name anyone who, over the past four decades, has pursued such a wide-ranging artistic career in Hungary. Any attempt to place him within a single genre quickly proves futile, for there is always another in which he has made an equally significant contribution.

His song lyrics written for Tamás Cseh (Hungarian singer-songwriter, one of the most influential figures of urban Hungarian chanson in the 1970s–80s) offered a precise snapshot of a bygone historical era. His films stand as indispensable milestones in the history of Hungarian cinema. And this is without even mentioning the powerful short stories with which he announced himself in Hungarian literature, or the plays that achieved well-deserved success on the nation’s stages.

Who, then, is Géza Bereményi? In retrospect – and with the benefit of later categorisation – he belongs to the so-called “great generation”, perhaps even its most significant representative. As his works and interviews make clear, the defining experiences of his life date back to the 1960s. It is impossible to say precisely who first used the term “great generation”, or when – but more than two decades later Bereményi himself wrote a film script under this title, A nagy generáció (The Great Generation), which was turned into a successful feature film by Ferenc András. The label has stuck to this cohort ever since.

There is no doubt that a spirit of rebellion – constantly suppressed yet persistently resurfacing – characterised the youth of the 1960s, and artists in particular. While Hungarian film production (into which Bereményi would enter a decade later) was achieving worldwide acclaim and Western trade journals were writing about the Hungarian education system, the domestic underground culture continued to flow like a hidden spring beneath the surface. Gábor Bódy (Hungarian avant-garde filmmaker, 1946–1985) and Bereményi were close friends, following and critiquing each other’s work – even their initials were the same, though no deeper conclusion can be drawn from that. Indeed, if legend is to be believed, Bódy played a decisive role in the birth of Bereményi’s first book. His short story collection A svéd király (The Swedish King), which caused a considerable stir, came about when its title story – a promising piece – pleased the editor at Magvető Publishing House (one of Hungary’s leading literary publishers), but the author had no other short prose pieces to hand. Spurred on by his friend’s encouragement – and by a measure of defiance – he quickly wrote the rest of the texts.

What, then, made this prose writing so impactful – both at the time and later? In Bereményi’s work there is always some lurking secret. Perhaps, consciously or not, he transposed into his writing the adventurous circumstances of his own birth and upbringing. Nothing is ever quite what it seems. Behind reality – behind the reality constructed on appearances – there is always a deeper, truer layer, where, if only for brief moments, the truth emerges: a truth we do not, or cannot, know, because it must remain hidden. The Kádár era (the period of Hungary’s “goulash communism” under party leader János Kádár, 1956–1988) was built upon great silences and great repressions. In the latter half of that period, it became possible to speak about many things, but the most essential matters were still surrounded by silence – or by prohibition. We lived in a great lie, all of us: those who participated in artistic life and those who withdrew from it alike, including those who retreated into the so-called “second public sphere” (második nyilvánosság: an unofficial cultural space where censored ideas could circulate).

It was perhaps for this reason that the leading genre of Bereményi’s early career became the song – the lyrics he began writing for Tamás Cseh, a few years his senior. Nothing of the sort had been written before. These lyrics articulated things about which literature and film remained silent. The great truths of the historical past – about wars of independence, world wars, revolutions – could gradually be expressed, mainly in the language of parable or allegory. The past found its voice, at times in baroque, richly ornamental language, at others in stark realism. But when it came to the present, art had no truly honest words. These songs, initially misunderstood, conveyed hidden truths – or at least their embryonic forms. They articulated a state of mind, and within that orbit it became possible to experience the sense – at times even the thrill – of resistance to the existing social order.

Géza Bereményi – the former dubbing dramaturge and novice prose writer – suddenly became a secret major author. It is impossible to pinpoint a single moment in his career when this qualitative leap occurred. At first, he appeared before us in the figure of Tamás Cseh, the singer performing his songs; many were unaware that the “double-layered” lyrics – those with layered or subversive meanings – had a different author from the one performing them.

This hidden role continued with his work on film scripts. Whenever a director stalled with a screenplay written according to the then-dominant auteur model, the saving words were uttered: “Call Géza.” And Géza – that is, Bereményi – would arrive and, as a literary consultant, salvage what could be salvaged. First, he became a co-author, then an independent screenwriter, and later, a director in his own right.

The real turning point, perhaps, came with the writing of the screenplay for Megáll az idő (Time Stands Still). As I myself took part in the production, I can testify that he appeared – so to speak – fully armed. He needed no dramaturgical advice or assistance of any kind; indeed, he could just as well have directed the film himself. A few years later, this is precisely what happened: in 1985, when István Nemeskürty (Hungarian film historian and influential studio head, 1925–2015) stepped down from film production, he offered Bereményi the opportunity to direct his own screenplay as the feature film A tanítványok (The Disciples).

Both works – Time Stands Stull and The Disciples – played a central role in the history of Hungarian cinema in the 1980s. The former was a bold act by exposing the false nature of the so-called Kádár consolidation (the state’s attempt in the 1960s–70s to normalise life after the 1956 revolution through limited liberalisation), while the latter revealed the dark side of technocracy at a time when Hungarian society was still largely receptive to its promises. In both cases, these films addressed audiences in opposition to traditional historical and philosophical modes of thought. Bereményi did not emerge as a promising beginner – he appeared before us as a fully formed filmmaker. The Disciples became known in the mid-1980s as a work signalling the renewal of Hungarian cinema, and it retained that status even though similar films did not follow from other directors’ workshops.

The great question raised by such a remarkably prolific career is whether it is even possible to be so multifaceted – to excel simultaneously in so many different forms. The question is, of course, rhetorical, because the works themselves provide the answer: yes, it is possible. There is no point in trying to rank them – to ask, for instance, whether Géza Bereményi is “better” as a lyricist, playwright, film director, or theatre director. In my view, he is seeking the same thing in every genre: to understand the world and to help others understand it, and to understand his own place within it.

From the vanguard of a generation he thus became one of the protagonists of an entire era. This included even the decision to suspend, for a considerable period, his most cherished form – songwriting. Authenticity was at stake: it could not be continued out of mere habit. I believe this is the key to Bereményi’s entire artistic temperament. One cannot work by routine. One cannot simply repeat tried-and-tested patterns. Indeed, perhaps this is the secret behind his multi-genre creativity: when he grows tired of one form, another awaits. When the songs fall silent, he can write and direct films. When there is no money for filmmaking, he can remain close to the actors by running a theatre and directing there. Of course, this is possible only for someone who is capable of working at an approximately equal level of excellence in every form.

He is a man who is “in many places at once” and “could be taught everywhere, from nursery to university” – to borrow a fragment from one of his own song lyrics to characterise his oeuvre. Yet this multiplicity applies almost exclusively to genres and forms. Every true artist has a single fundamental idea which they circle around and, in the best sense of the word, repeat. How might one formulate Géza Bereményi’s “one sentence”? Such attempts at clever summary, of course, always risk the objection: “he never intended it that way.” As the saying goes, the owl of Minerva – that is, wisdom – begins its flight at dusk.

The key word is history. Whether Bereményi is writing contemporary stories – in song lyrics, in other prose forms (short stories, novels), or even in his plays – he invariably explores and portrays non-heroes, ordinary people at the mercy of history. His rich store of life experience, and his unsettled childhood and youth, provided him with abundant material, enabling him, even alongside large-scale historical frescoes such as A Hídember (The Bridgeman), to remain a chronicler of everyday truths and a compassionate observer of the fate of ordinary people.

(2015)

László Bedecs: Géza Bereményi, the Writer

Géza Bereményi is an exceptionally versatile artist who has, for decades, created significant work across a range of artistic fields – and who continues to reinvent himself even within a single discipline. He is recognised and respected as a writer, playwright, lyricist, screenwriter, and as a film and theatre director. In part, this is thanks to his ability to find points of passage between different art forms, modes of expression and means of communication: he typically operates within trans- and multimedia contexts, employing diverse media to articulate, experience and reflect upon Hungarian reality and the Central European condition.

Novels and collections of short stories, feature films, television and documentary films, song lyrics and successful theatrical productions are all associated with his name. His films engage equally with autobiographical and historical themes. As a dramatist, he has demonstrated his talent in a wide variety of forms, ranging from absurd tragicomedy to realist popular theatre, from historical drama to musical. As a prose writer, his work is characterised by lyricism and humour, by anecdotal and grotesque elements, by a historical sensibility and a commitment to passing on family stories, as well as by a self-reflective and analytical narrative style. Beyond the intrinsic value of individual works, it is precisely this ultimately inexhaustible diversity that makes his art distinctive.

The oeuvre, which may appear wide-ranging yet can also be regarded as fundamentally unified, can only be truly understood if we unravel the threads that run in a single direction – if we allow works created in one genre or art form to be interpreted through the lens of another that supports or complements them. For Bereményi’s various creative periods have generally been shaped by similar sensibilities and preoccupations, and the fundamental questions he grapples with run through his entire body of work.

Bereményi’s prose oeuvre – and, indeed, his artistic career as a whole – began in the 1970s with the short story collection A svéd király (The Swedish King). At the centre of his early literary programme was the artistic expression of an intellectual mood, a state of being and a worldview. Later, this was gradually replaced by a desire to understand the recurring, often absurd and incomprehensible events and patterns of personal history and of history at large – in other words, the urge to discover one’s roots, to answer the question “Where do I come from?” In this context, the personal and family past – for instance, the story of how one’s parents and grandparents met and fell in love – is just as important as the pivotal moments of the national past, which themselves shape the destinies of individual lives.

Yet whereas for Bereményi’s contemporaries Péter Nádas (Hungarian novelist and essayist, b. 1942) and Péter Lengyel (Hungarian prose writer, 1939–2014) the crucial theme became the loss of the past and the resulting uncertainty of identity, for Bereményi it was the recovery and reconstruction of a past believed to be lost. Roots – and their forgetting, the family’s collective amnesia – are central to all three writers’ work and receive sustained reflection throughout their oeuvres. It is also significant that all three began their literary careers with short stories. However, once we examine their modes of narration, the differences become striking: Bereményi’s light, playful, quickly written stories are, despite their essential thematic connections, quite different from the meticulously crafted, elaborately detailed texts of Lengyel and Nádas.

Moreover, in Bereményi’s work it is not only the language that is playful, but the themes themselves often revolve around play and are treated with irony. His characters, for instance, pretend to be Native Americans (Játékok a vadászterületen [lit. Games on the Hunting Grounds]), to own a motorboat (Utolsó kör a vízen [lit. Final Lap on the Water]), or they stage a mock execution (Csendőrök [lit. Gendarmes]).

These stories introduce into his creative world the same figures later familiar from his films and from the songs performed by Tamás Cseh: aimless, melancholy, uncertain young people wearing jeans, wandering and loitering through life. The typical backdrops are house parties, smoke and alcohol, dreary and frustrating jobs, cheap rented rooms, love triangles that drag everyone down, the depths of small smoky cafés, the illusion of remaining on the margins, and the pose of rebellion – in which, despite all hopelessness, there is something elemental, vital, sustaining. There is a love of life and youth here, and a kind of perspective – an elevating lightness born of irony that allows the narrator to rise above things.

Even in these stories of life gone hopelessly astray – tales filled with lies, self-deception, bitterness, or rather bittersweetness – freedom can still be found, despite the “filtered” air. Friendships and loves, meanwhile, represent powerful, genuine emotions, shared and lived despite the external circumstances. The cautiousness characteristic of the period virtually prohibits political conversations, but the characters speak openly and freely about their feelings. In these relationships they attempt to free themselves from the burdens imposed by the era, the political environment, and their parents – burdens that have otherwise condemned them to drifting, aimless, frustrated lives.

Bereményi’s protagonists generally try to start anew, to find happiness – yet their attempts repeatedly end in failure. Defeat, actions doomed to fail from the outset, and heartbreak as a shared experience – these bind together the works of the first two decades of his career, from the 1970s and 1980s alike.

Published in 1977, Legendárium (lit. Legendarium), Bereményi’s first novel – which some critics have described as a “cycle of stories” or even as a collection of closely interconnected short stories – attempts to construct, behind a series of loosely connected texts, a larger family narrative by recounting the myths and stories of “a community of fragmented fate,” focusing on various members of a single family. It weaves a web in which one point – here, the central point – is the eldest son.

A crucial innovation of the novel lies in its refusal to resolve the contradictions among the family members’ memories. It does not attempt to uncover “the truth,” nor does it try to fill in the dark gaps of memory or complete the fragmentary stories – and it does not even seek to expose the lies. Instead, it allows each character to remember events in their own way, to construct their own version of the past, to invent for themselves a personal life story. In doing so, it conveys the idea that there is not just one “true” story but many subjective truths – and thus stands in deliberate opposition to the monolithic official truth and one-dimensional worldview of the totalitarian politics of the time.

Bereményi constantly shifts narrative perspectives, which also brings with it a variety of narrative voices and sentence structures. This unusual narrative technique leads to a looseness, fragmentation and contingency in the prose, formally mirroring the disintegration of the family at the heart of the novel. He consciously divides the reader’s attention, ultimately leaving it to the reader to discern the common denominator of the individual stories – to piece together, through points of intersection, the lives of family members who now live separately and scarcely even acknowledge one another’s existence.

Together with his first collection of short stories, this book precisely defines the thematic concerns of Bereményi’s prose – and indeed of his entire artistic world. It reveals his sensitivity as a writer and shows that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he not only recognises the problems of human relationships and personal life stories but also integrates them analytically into his works. In other words, beyond his acute sensitivity to problems, he offers – at least tentative – answers to the burning questions of his generation and of Hungarian society in the 1970s and 1980s: the lack of freedom, the barely acceptable standard of living, the crisis of communication within families, the phenomenon of drifting and the absence of a foreseeable future.

The awakening of Budapest’s young intellectual generation during this period – a shared generational experience reflected in the songs Bereményi wrote for Tamás Cseh in this decade – was fundamentally about continuous failure, loneliness, the disintegration of families and broader communities, and the loss, or indeed the prior absence, of inherited values.

Legendarium is a novel about a family, and Bereményi’s second novel, Vadnai Bébi (lit. Bébi Vadnai), published almost three decades later in 2013, likewise tells the story of the members of a distinctive, disintegrating family composed of very strong personalities – raising one of the central questions of what, if anything, holds these people’s relationships together. The title character is a woman who expresses her feelings under all circumstances; although her beauty can seduce anyone, she herself becomes a victim of her own emotions. Her son, Doxa, seems to carry within himself two souls: he appears scatter-brained, even insane and rebellious, yet also infinitely pure, sincere, and brilliantly talented. Both Bébi and her son live life on their own terms, disregarding social expectations – an attitude that seems enviably courageous, but for which both pay a heavy price: their lives ultimately disintegrate and turn bitter.

One of the novel’s narrative strands once again takes the reader back to the Budapest of the 1970s, and specifically into the circles of the underground art world – a milieu in which the author clearly felt most at home, and whose faces, disappointments and internal laws he knew best. Alongside this, the novel is also a search for a missing father, a recollection of a great love story, and a monument to the life of a legendary artistic figure, since the model for Doxa was János Gémes (Hungarian poet and performer, known in artistic circles as “Dixi”). Moreover, the story is itself about the act of writing, about literary fulfilment, and about the process of a novel coming into being: according to the fiction, Dobrovics – a recurring character in Bereményi’s oeuvre who closely resembles the author – writes the very book we are reading based on the information he gathers during his investigation.

The most present and widely known part of Bereményi’s oeuvre remains, of course, the song lyrics already mentioned. The friendship and decades-long creative partnership he shared with Tamás Cseh is surrounded by countless legends, and the songs – now considered classics and unforgettable to several generations – could be listed at length, beginning with their first album, Levél nővéremnek (Letter to My Sister, 1977). These songs became, in a sense, countercultural campfire anthems, offering many people guidance and solace in surviving the suffocating atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s. Their brilliance lay in their ability to speak – between the lines and between the notes – about discontent, oppression, and anxiety, all in defiance of official censorship. They did so with winks and knowing glances, with irony, or by ostentatiously talking around the subject.

Phrases imitating spoken language, constant self-corrections, and of course the intensity of great emotions made the songs feel intimate to listeners and helped build a virtual community around them. New works by the pair continued to emerge even after the political transition of 1989–90. The countless cover versions of their songs show that these pieces – usually performed with nothing more than a single guitar – remain relevant, communicative and fresh not only for their contemporaries but also for subsequent generations.

It should also be remembered that Bereményi wrote lyrics for Dorottya Udvaros, Juli Básti, György Cserhalmi and Anikó Für (all prominent Hungarian stage and screen actors), and the albums born from these collaborations likewise conveyed the tone, values and worldview of Bereményi’s poetic universe to many listeners.

The fact that we can speak of these lyrics as poems was confirmed by the author himself when, in 2016, he published Versek (lit. Poems), a carefully curated selection of texts arranged into thematic cycles – works that, even stripped of their familiar melodies, stand on their own. The singable poem recalls an older, more primal form of poetry, though leafing through the volume still leaves one question open: can these texts function independently, do they possess enough power to endure without the music – and enough potential to reveal a new face of themselves?

The third pillar of Bereményi’s art is film and theatre. Some of the most significant and indispensable works in the history of Hungarian cinema are linked to his name – as a director: Eldorádó (Eldorado / The Midas Touch), A tanítványok (The Disciples), or A Hídember (The Bridgeman), which, at the time of its production, was the most expensive Hungarian film ever made; and as a screenwriter: Megáll az idő (Time Stands Still, 1981), A nagy generáció (The Great Generation, 1986), and Meteo (1989).

Bereményi’s first film, The Disciples (1985), examines the possible roles of the intellectual by juxtaposing – or rather, confronting – different attitudes and responses. It reveals how similar the situation was under the Horthy era (the conservative, nationalist regime of Regent Miklós Horthy, 1920–1944) and the Kádár era (the period of socialist rule under János Kádár, 1956–1988): the same patterns of behaviour led to the same consequences. Power, sooner or later, breaks the resistance of opponents and humiliates those who compromise. In the end, most people find themselves on the losing side, remaining silent, avoiding conflict, and seeking merely to survive. Among the director’s most striking cinematic techniques is the intercutting of archival footage from the 1930s with newly filmed scenes using actors in period costume – a stylistic device that would reappear in Eldorado (1989).

Eldorado or The Midas Touch – widely regarded by critics as Bereményi’s finest and most mature film – is, like so much of his work, autobiographical in inspiration, telling the story of his grandfather. It ventures deeper into the hidden recesses of the human soul than his previous film, weaving an adventurous narrative around a single central figure: the most skilled and cunning trader in the Teleki Square Market (a bustling open-air marketplace in Budapest, evoking at times a distinctly Balkan atmosphere). The film narrates the pulsating, incredible, almost surreal twists of this man’s fate with visual intensity and momentum, forging a distinctly personal cinematic language.

In a story that confronts the immense forces of human energy and fanatical faith, the power of instinct, the might of strength, and – above all – the even greater forces of history and destiny, we encounter the kind of strong, active, dynamic protagonist characteristic of Bereményi’s work. Yet the active father is unable to pass on his energy to his son, and the same thing happens here as in the relationship between master and disciples: talent and momentum falter after just a single generation.

Upon its release, the film won the Grand Prize at the Magyar Filmszemle (Hungarian Film Festival), the Félix Award (the European Film Award) for Best Director in Paris, and was also chosen as Film of the Year by Hungarian film critics.

Bereményi is also a significant figure as a playwright and theatre author. Among his plays and adaptations, Az arany ára (lit. The Price of Gold) is perhaps the most notable. This is not only because it has been staged by at least six different theatres, nor solely because Bereményi chose this title for his 2007 volume of collected plays – signalling how important he considers the text within his oeuvre – but also because it demonstrates most clearly that all his works, whatever the art form or genre, are connected by something essential: the author’s deeply personal knowledge and worldview.

The Price of Gold is in fact a slightly reworked stage adaptation of the 1988 film Eldorado, yet the same story also exists as a short story under the same title. Bereményi drew on his own childhood memories to craft this tale – which can also be read as a parable – and to create its powerful, memorable characters. The play retains many scenes and lines familiar from the film, though for dramaturgical or perhaps technical reasons, the crucial 1956 sequence (depicting the Hungarian Revolution of 1956) is absent, as is the child’s perspective that shapes the short story version. What becomes clearer on stage, however, are the structural tensions of the three-generation family narrative and the ideological and philosophical disputes between its members. Here, money and commerce come into conflict with faith, and the power of gold – that is, of money – is set against the power of prayer.

It is significant that Bereményi’s plays – including The Price of Gold – are firmly rooted in a specific time and place. The historical era, with all its social and political conditions, profoundly shapes the personalities and decisions of the characters, each of whom is confronted with a concrete yet often deeply complex moral dilemma. In The Price of Gold, the character Skultéti declares that “the problem is not with the world, but with us,” yet the other characters feel their lives and situations to be hopeless precisely because they blame all their suffering and frustration on external circumstances rather than living bravely and taking risks. Bereményi, in each situation, seeks to expose the falseness of this way of thinking.

In Bereményi’s oeuvre, the different art forms, genres, themes, and narratives intersect – or at the very least, they touch each other across broad surfaces. This perhaps suggests that for many decades he has been preoccupied with similar questions: he seeks the place of personality, of individual existence, within the external world – a place defined by the individual’s past and by the history of the community surrounding them. The roots of this search lie in inherited and acquired values, yet the great question is always how these values can be applied in the present: whether we can direct our own lives within given political and social circumstances, especially when politics seeks to intervene directly in those lives.

Bereményi is drawn to stories of fragmented families and false legends, to the dynamism of fathers and the resignation of sons, to the fate of generations growing up in the 1950s and 1960s – generations lost because they were confined within boundaries. He is concerned with a past heavy with burdens and a present that has gone awry and offers no promise of harmony. His protagonists are most often unusual, marginalised, unhappy young people who have no clear goals but who know they want to be different from who they are – and who, in their hearts, would certainly be different if only they had the chance.

Part of Bereményi’s self-mythology is the idea of the instinctive talent who can, when pressed by deadlines, write a cluster of short stories in a matter of days, an entire volume in three weeks, or half an album’s worth of songs in a single evening. At the same time, he has shown the patience to experiment with artistic forms and modes of expression, and the freedom to test himself in several art forms – demonstrating how the expressive tools characteristic of each medium can, even unconsciously, reshape foundational stories, shift emphases, and redirect the attention of readers, viewers, and listeners towards the central points of his oeuvre.

(2016)

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