Bottle thrown into the sea
“We can hope for a future and for independence only if we are able to create a high-quality type of human being, a nation of profound culture” – wrote István Szőts in his reform proposal titled Röpirat a magyar filmművészet ügyében (Pamphlet on the Cause of Hungarian Film Art), published in April 1945, in which he regarded film as the most effective weapon of “our culture, our taste, our education.” Armed with the artistic and production experience of his first feature film, Emberek a havason (People of the Mountains), as well as with its significant international success achieved even in the midst of the world conflagration, he hoped that “the film reborn from the ruins will not be a continuation of the old clichés, but will be built on new foundations and, with new people – young people, idealists – will realize Hungarian film art.” During the dramatic days of the siege of Budapest, he could even dream that film would no longer be the “cheap handmaiden” of “blinded politicians,” “profit-hungry traders,” and “bad-taste masses,” but that responsible artists would instead use its “unparalleled power of mass education and persuasion” to bring peoples closer to one another by acquainting them with “each other’s values, land, language and music, joys and sorrows, dances and everyday lives.” As exemplary models for the creation of a “Hungarian film style,” he held up the art of Petőfi, Krúdy, Eötvös, Mikszáth, Tamási, Szinyei Merse, Mednyánszky, Ferenczy Béni, Liszt, Bartók, and Kodály, alongside that of Goethe, Verdi, or Brueghel – artists deeply rooted in national traditions yet universal in their reach. The reorganization of film production after 1945, however, began in a direction precisely opposite to this exceptionally intelligent program addressing the entirety of Hungarian film culture, and film soon became an instrument of political manipulation more exclusive than ever before. It is therefore hardly surprising that Szőts’s manifesto – which demanded concrete and immediate decisions, disregarded all prior and future professional (and political) interests, and was even explicitly offensive – “was not even granted a public debate,” and turned into a “message in a bottle.” From time to time the tide washes it ashore; then – because it still formulates timely and irrefutable aims – a few people rediscover it, one or two of its ideas are put into practice, and then it is thrown back into the water yet again.
A dream comes true
István Szőts, in the few films he completed as well as in all his projects, both before and after 1945, in Hungary and in Austria alike, adhered uncompromisingly to his artistic and moral principles. In radical opposition to the prevailing practice of Hungarian cinema up to that point, he established a fundamentally new relationship with reality, one that was essentially visual in nature. Above all, he was preoccupied with the tragic struggles for existence of human beings exposed to the forces of nature and to even more threatening, unpredictable historical and social catastrophes. For him, the question of truth and injustice constituted the only valid political and ethical measure.
Relying almost exclusively on his own observations and on a handful of devoted collaborators, he had already created in 1941 a film style whose theoretical elaboration had been underway in Italy since the mid-1930s by an entire group of filmmakers. Its practical realization – in Megfigyelnek minket (The Children Are Watching Us) by Vittorio De Sica and Megszállottság (Ossessione) by Luchino Visconti – took place precisely in the same year, 1942, when Emberek a havason (People of the Mountains), a film radically different from mendacious melodramas, superficial comedies, and political propaganda films, won the award for “most artistic film” at the Venice Film Festival. (The main prize, the Mussolini Cup, was awarded on the instructions of Joseph Goebbels to Veit Harlan’s film about the Prussian ruler Frederick II, A nagy király [The Great King].) According to contemporary Venetian reviews, however, Szőts’s film was the festival’s “greatest sensation.” Representatives of the emerging Italian neorealism were particularly enthusiastic about it, as they recognized their own ideals in the work. Its characters are ordinary people – not overfamiliar stars, but young actors, often amateurs. Although its source of inspiration is literature, the film is by no means “papery,” not least because the director – accepting the risk of unpredictability – took his camera out of the artificial studio world of contemporary Italian and Hungarian films and into nature and real life. Nature and the characters’ environment form an organic part of the work, which depicts authentic human destinies through the specific means of cinema, in consciously composed images of unforgettable beauty or shattering power. It was also for his social sensitivity, profound humanism, and a worldview that expanded the national into the universal that the young Hungarian director was celebrated in Venice and later in Rome. Like the greatest figures of Italian neorealism (Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica), Szőts cherished the utopia that, with the help of film, it might be possible to change both the audience and the world.
The film’s reception at home was far from as positive as it was in Italy. Instead of assessing its merits, most critics – from Actio Catholica to Népszava, that is, on both the right and the left – were driven by envy or petty political considerations. This already foreshadowed the suspicious or dismissive reception that would greet all of Szőts’s later plans and films in Hungary, even though he consistently kept his distance from politics and focused solely on realizing his artistic ideas. While the Italian neorealists were able to make their era-defining works, István Szőts never again had the opportunity for calm, uninterrupted work after People of the Mountains. The war, the communist dictatorship, and later emigration – which severed the very roots that sustained his art – irreparably hindered the full development of a talent that was promising even by international standards.
The visual artist
In keeping with the idea of “cosmic art”, Szőts regarded nature as a participant equal to humankind. The organic relationship between human beings and nature is often the point of departure of his works. His two completed feature films depict moments when radical change or violence – in Emberek a havason (People of the Mountains) the logging operation, in Ének a búzamezőkről (Song of the Cornfields) the war – devastates this primordial unity. His protagonists are naïve, morally pure mountain and farmstead people who, even under altered circumstances, attempt to remain faithful to their traditional value system – nature, the motherland, family, friendship, or solidarity – yet the unanticipated changes lead to tragedy in both ballad-like narratives. The married couple of the 1941 Emberek a havason (People of the Mountains), Anna and Gergely, are unable to protect their arduous yet happy life from the new laws and new masters of the mountains. The head of the logging camp covets the woman and then assaults her; she dies from the injuries sustained while fleeing. The husband, who carries out an act of ancient blood vengeance, is killed by the bullets of the gendarmes, and their orphan is taken under the protection of the mountain shepherds. The 1947 Ének a búzamezőkről (Song of the Cornfields) tells the story of two neighboring farmers of the Great Plain, Ferenc and Rókus. After the First World War they escape together from Russian captivity, but Rókus becomes so weakened on the journey that Ferenc believes him dead and takes the last piece of bread from his stiffened hand. After returning home, he learns from his fellow villagers that his wife has died. The widowed Etel and Ferenc fall in love. They raise their half-orphaned children together and cultivate the land of the two families jointly, but their happiness does not last long.
The changes of nature in both films signal the unfolding of the protagonists’ fate with visual density. In Emberek a havason (People of the Mountains), the nocturnal howling of wolves and the images of snowstorms become omens of death during the illness of the unbaptized little Gergő, at the moment of the logging camp’s act of violence, and at the death of Gergely Csutak after his escape from prison. In Ének a búzamezőkről (Song of the Cornfields), the recurring row of storm-battered poplars likewise forms a ballad-like condensation of Ferenc’s inner state at the drowning of his little son, Péterke, at the moment he confesses his sin to Etel, and after the woman’s suicide. Yet as nature is reborn, the dramatic images give way to symbolic images of hope and continuation. In Emberek a havason (People of the Mountains), little Gergő becomes acquainted with the forest in the spring sunshine. In the Móra adaptation, the image dissolves from the mourning of Péterke to a blossoming fruit tree, heralding new life, the birth of Matyika. And at the end of the film, Ferenc, even after the tragedies, ploughs and sows so that – as in the opening image of the film – wheat may again be blessed in the spring. “For the plough is stronger than the sword…”
In People of the Mountains, through the figure of Üdő Márton, and in Song of the Cornfields, through the characters of Mátyás and Szüle, Szőts also creates the type of the Hungarian peasant who possesses a wise, ironic outlook and accepts the struggle for existence, tragedies, and death as natural concomitants of life. He is capable not only of rendering tragic content through visual means, but also of depicting the comic and grotesque manifestations of folk life. When, for example, Mátyás and Szüle “contrive” to match their widowed daughter-in-law with the neighbour (and with the adjoining lands), the camera shows pigs smacking their mouths in the slop. In portraying these figures, the director relaxes the ballad-like form; in contrast, in the depiction of the young people a sense of foreboding haunts even the most serene images, something Szőts often achieves through composition. In one idyllic shot of People of the Mountains, Anna washes in the stream with her skirt tucked up. The mountain that fills the entire frame, however, seems almost to press down upon the woman, cutting off any possibility of escape. In the very next shot, the logging foreman who will cause the family’s doom appears, filmed from a low angle. In Song of the Cornfields, the fleeting nature of Etel’s and Ferenc’s happiness is signalled – and the drownings are foreshadowed – by the fact that, during their walk, we see their reflections in the lake. The intimate silence is suddenly pierced by the horn of the postmistress lurking behind a barren tree. She will later deliver the letter from the man long thought dead, Rókus, from Russia.
The bread-baking episode, usually associated with positive connotations, is likewise charged in the film with opposing layers of meaning. In a single long take, filmed from inside the oven, the first visual plane shows the dark mouth of the oven and the loaf baked to a crisp. In the second plane, in front of the opening, the black-clad Szüle moves about, tending to her tasks. This dark-toned, static plane is counterpointed by the sunlit section of the farmstead. Into this third plane arrives, by horse-drawn cart, the cheerful family heading to town, entrusting the two children to Szüle’s care. The scene both sums up and foreshadows events. On the level of the story, it presents the happiness of the new family; yet since the film’s most crucial dramaturgical motif, bread, signifies not only life but also death, this dual meaning is visually reinforced by the simultaneity of dark tonality and white radiance, of stillness and dynamism, and by the cartwheel’s shadow rolling over little Péterke as he plays in the sand, all of which intensify the premonition of tragedy. The sight of the piece of bread clutched in the hand of his drowned little son – taken from Rókus’s daughter – shocks Ferenc, shown from a high angle as he collapses onto the parched earth, because it reminds him of his own guilt.
Szőts employs a similarly original compositional solution in People of the Mountains, when the camera photographs the burial of Csutak Gergely from the depths of the grave. The dark screen and the dull thuds of clods of earth falling onto the coffin convey with shocking force the cruelty and irrevocability of death.
The counterpoint created within the frame and through editing is further deepened by the extremely conscious and expressive use of camera movements, as well as of light–shadow and black-and-white contrasts. A textbook example of Szőts’s visual art – including his use of backlighting – is the legendary sequence of extraordinary beauty in People of the Mountains, in which the small family, making a pilgrimage with the mortally ill Anna to the Virgin Mary of Csíksomlyó, seems to be walking upon the clouds billowing among the pine trees and mountain peaks. Nyírő’s short lyrical sentence – “They were already walking in the purity of the heights” – was perfectly translated into the language of film by the young director (and his enthusiastic crew) through “patiently waiting for the appropriate lighting conditions.” A contrasting mood is conveyed by the backlit long shot in Song of the Cornfields, evoking medieval representations of the dance of death, in which the shadow figures on the desolate plain, along the hair-thin line separating sky and earth, follow the deceitful wise woman as if spellbound. This is a powerful closing image to one of the film’s most complex scenes, the well-episode, which exploits with great inventiveness the expressive possibilities offered by black-and-white film and geometric forms, camera angle and camera movement, composition and editing. Its memorable formal solutions exerted a demonstrable influence on Hungarian cinema of the 1960s – for although audiences could not see the film for decades after it was banned in 1948, it was occasionally screened at the film academy.
“Rarely does it happen that an artist earns the title of master on the basis of only two major works. This is what happened with Szőts, because the poetic quality of his films, their stirring linguistic freshness, and the sincerity of his artistic intention remain timeless even after fifty years” – wrote Bruno De Marchi about István Szőts in issue 1994/1 of Európai utas. (The Italian film historian is also credited with the 1991 Gemona retrospective and award devoted to Szőts’s oeuvre, as well as with the Italian publication of the Manifesto in 1998.) Indeed, the elemental impact of the films can still be felt today; it is only occasionally weakened by factors such as overly strident music or mannered acting performances. Yet it was Szőts himself who suffered most acutely from these shortcomings.
The ethical man
“We can never know how he would have sought to overcome what confronted him, or how far he might have gone. But whatever new things this silenced artist may still have wished to say, he knew one thing for certain: that he could speak only in a single language, be animated by a single sensibility, and give voice only in a single key. His fidelity to silence is a kind of glory that today is at once a consolation and a bitterness for him” – we read in the cited study by Professor De Marchi.
It might be an equally bitter consolation for Szőts that time has vindicated him: although critics of the twentieth century, dazzled by the marvels of technology, often branded as anti-progressive in both of his feature films the worldview that emphasized the vital importance of the relationship between nature and humankind, today we increasingly feel the despair he expressed over the destruction of natural and human values. Likewise, his last major plan thwarted in Austria, The Solution to the Serious Problem of Hunger, would be even more urgent today than it was in the early 1960s. His films speak with timeless force about the inner conflicts of ordinary people in the twentieth century, when moral norms based on the Ten Commandments no longer provided adequate guidance for resolving new kinds of conflicts. Gergely Csutak still kills the timber operator under the ancient right of “blood revenge”, whereas Ferenc is forced by war not only to kill the enemy, but also to violate the law of friendship by taking from the dying Rókus the piece of bread that means life itself. Yet, according to Szőts, moral norms cannot be broken with impunity: therefore, despite justified grief and the coercive circumstances created by war, he does not absolve Csutak Gergely of the sin of murder, nor does he free Ferenc from the burden of conscience. His dramaturgical changes make the ethical dilemma even graver than in the original works. In one of Nyírő’s short stories (Márton Feri), which served as the basis for People on the Mountain, the jealous protagonist kills his wife, while Gergely kills the seductive timber operator. However much greater sympathy we may feel for him, he must still atone for the murder. In the Móra adaptation, by contrast, unlike the novel, Szőts does not grant the protagonist the possibility of escape through suicide but keeps him alive. Paradoxically, this makes the film even more devastating, since the generation that survived the horrors of the Second World War had to carry out the work of reconstruction bearing similar psychological burdens in a country that was soon to be deprived even of the hope of freedom.
In the footsteps of Bartók
The Italian scholar was right about Szőts: we can never know, for example, whether Szőts might have helped foster Romanian–Hungarian reconciliation through a co-production evoking Bartók’s Transylvanian folk-song collecting, or how he would have preserved the folk traditions of the whole of Hungary in his planned project Bölcsőtől a koporsóig (Cradle to the Grave), from which – apart from documentation prepared for the Institute of Folk Art – only Kövek, várak, emberek (Stones, Castles, People) was ultimately completed in 1955. What is certain, however, is that the enduring power of his films and their ever-growing ethnographic and sociological source value stem above all from a profound knowledge of the people’s lives and inner emotional movements, and from their intimate portrayal. This is why today’s viewer of People of the Mountains can still experience, through the silent close-ups of mostly amateur passengers who sympathize with the protagonist in the corpse-transport scene – judged at home to be “too ragged” because of the real shepherds and woodcutters, or deemed “disgusting,” yet received in Venice with thunderous applause – the tension of the eternal outcasts’ suffering and repressed emotions; and why, in Song of the Cornfields, the vulnerability of the furrowed-faced, destitute peasants of the Great Plain becomes so palpable. For the same reason, in Stones, Castles, People, Szőts was able to convey the history, mindset, and past of the entire Hungarian nation through an ordinary Sunday in the life of a single Hungarian village, Hollókő, and through its seemingly provincial folk customs. In the same way, he could compress his bleak judgment on the present (and the perhaps even bleaker future) into a few seconds showing “commuters” setting out in darkness and returning in darkness on weekdays. The painfully ironic basic tone of the historical retrospect is created by the contrast between Balassi’s lines evoking the heroic border-fortress past and images that show only its remnants. Weeds and wildflowers grow among the castle ruins; a grazing goat peers out from one of the windows. The shepherd scratching the ground with his staff no longer cares whether the skull that often turns up from the soil was Hungarian or Tatar. The old glory has vanished, but the people – like nature itself – continue to live their lives, from dawn to dusk, from cradle to grave. Szőts could still portray disappearing customs in their natural environment, as integral parts of people’s everyday actions. The surroundings – as in the two feature films as well – were still a natural living space, not a museum-like repository of the material relics of folk culture. Yet the camera does not only show the rituals of the feast, the cheeky eroticism of donning multiple skirts underscored by musical accompaniment, or the whirl of the dance; almost as if by chance, through sudden close-ups, it also captures tiny gestures and facial expressions that reveal the characters, their fates, and the relationships among the villagers.
n Hungary, Szőts István is often seen by many, based on the few films he was able to realize at home, merely as a “folk” artist. His sensitive and finely crafted Austrian portraits (Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Otto Wagner, etc.), however, testify that he was also thoroughly familiar with Viennese art at the turn of the century. Klimt and Schiele are outstanding symbols of the final moments of the “happy fin de siècle”. Their eclectic, visionary art simultaneously conveys to twentieth-century humanity the anxieties accompanying the agony of the Monarchy and the mourning of vanishing old values – beauty and humanism. A striking visual record of the mystery of life and death is
Hallstätter ballade (1960). In the mountain-enclosed village, lacking burial space, the inhabitants eventually exhume their dead, bleach the skulls, and then paint them with floral motifs, thereby elevating death into an aesthetic component of life.
Although Szőts’s fundamentally historical way of seeing is present in all of his films, none of his explicitly historical projects could ever be realized. As a result, the artist who thought in terms of the whole nation, indeed of our entire Central European existence, has likewise been unjustly remembered exclusively as a chronicler of folk life. In public consciousness, István Szőts effectively lives on as a one-film director; yet in light of his plans, it can be stated that alongside thematic diversity, a constant drive toward formal experimentation, as well as a sustained interest in and sensitivity to media, characterized him until the end of his life. The visual grasp of the death we carry within ourselves fascinated him, for example, in an early plan in which he intended to depict sexual union on X-ray film. Notes found in his estate also reveal that even past the age of eighty he was still contemplating experimental film – with stones in the leading role. He hoped to win János Tóth as a collaborator and diligently collected stones of interesting colours and shapes.
His exceptional power of visual composition and atmosphere creation, his editing technique based on unique observations and suggestive of the continuity of movement, and his sound-design solutions synthesizing meaning nevertheless made him one of the most significant innovators of cinematic language in Hungarian film history. His achievements became organically integrated into the film canon. Through his films, his pamphlet, his unrealized projects, and his human and artistic stance – his many messages cast into bottles – he rightfully earned the recognition of the Hungarian filmmakers of the 1960s, diverse in personality and style (István Gaál, Sándor Sára, Zoltán Huszárik, Ferenc Kósa, Miklós Jancsó, István Szabó), and he is likewise frequently cited by members of younger generations, from Géza Bereményi to Ferenc Török.
The fate of István Szőts, his career cut short, stands as a warning example for subsequent generations, because, in the stern judgment of Bruno De Marchi: “The silenced artist is a loss to all humanity. To forbid an artist to become what they could be is the mark of shame of every power. It is one of the gravest crimes committed against the Spirit, one that cannot count on God’s mercy.”
The text was prepared using a study written with Eszter Fazekas (Eszter Fazekas – Judit Pintér: Szőts István, Metropolis, 1998/summer, pp. 72–90.).