The career of János Tóth may be described as a peculiar movement in reverse – a trajectory that by no means implies regression, but rather a poetic return to cinematic tradition and, in terms of craft, a homecoming to the world of filmmaking itself. This is equally characteristic of the established cinematographer who, even in the early 1980s, continued to experiment with short films at the Balázs Béla Studio [an influential Hungarian experimental film workshop founded in 1959], and of the ‘re-creator’ who restored Hungarian silent films. Such a career path is highly unusual even within the history of Hungarian cinema. Though he worked as cinematographer on feature films, he repeatedly returned to directing shorts, and as a director he remained throughout within the ‘experimental’ framework of the short form; his single feature-length work, Örök mozi (Eternal Movie), merely weaves his earlier short films into a unified whole. For him, it is primarily the short films associated above all with the Balázs Béla Studio that constitute the terrain of artistic self-expression; in feature films, he was only able to fully assert his artistic vision alongside Károly Makk [Hungarian film director, international art-house auteur], chiefly in Szerelem (Love) and Macskajáték (Cat’s Play) – for the latter he also served as co-screenwriter. Thus, unlike for example Sándor Sára [Hungarian cinematographer and director, later documentary filmmaker], who likewise began as a cinematographer and short-film maker, Tóth did not treat his short films as a mere overture to feature-length cinema, but remained a short-film director; and the extent to which he could assert his short-film experience within feature-film cinematography was dependent, in the first instance, on factors beyond his control. In the 1990s he eventually withdrew from direct creative work and returned to a more mediated form of film practice, reminiscent of his teenage beginnings: he developed a programme aimed at the restoration of Hungarian silent films and prepared reconstructed, cinema-distribution versions – so-called ‘re-creations’ – of two works: the 1916 A falu rossza (The Village Rogue) and the 1917 Az obsitos (The Veteran).
János Tóth’s attraction to early cinema contains within it a sharp critique of all that has since come to be called ‘film art’. In 1975, as a discreet participant in a round-table discussion on cinematography, he articulated this view in a markedly provocative manner. In the professional debate published in Filmkultúra [Hungarian film and cultural journal], considerable attention was devoted to Tóth’s body of work and to his collaborations with various directors, in particular to the question of what is more desirable for a film: whether the cinematographer should possess an individual style of his own, or whether he should ‘invisibly’ adapt to the director’s vision. Yet despite being repeatedly invited to speak, he did not request the floor. Only at the very end of the discussion, at the interviewer’s express urging, was he willing to offer his opinion – and even then he neither addressed the questions raised nor analysed the visual language of contemporary Hungarian cinema, but replied in an indirect and strikingly laconic manner. It is worth quoting in full János Tóth’s sole, brief intervention from the ten-page conversation, as it amounts to a kind of artistic credo:
“After many films, and ones that were often arbitrary, I feel a natural attraction towards the utterly unambiguous nature of the early reels of primitive cinema; one that particularly impresses me through its archaic simplicity is Mr Birt Acres’s [British film pioneer] half-minute film Rough Sea at Dover (also known as Gale at Dover and Sea Waves at Dover). ‘The waves surge in the most realistic form. They crash against the Admiralty pier, hurling up immense crests. The images are crystal-clear, sharp and without vibration’ – wrote the press. This is an enduring encounter between the sea, cinematic truth and criticism… In recent days, I came across an unexpected parallel in a cinematographer’s statement: ‘The cinema? I shall never go there again. Had I foreseen what it would become, I would not have invented it’ – said Louis Lumière in 1930.”
János Tóth, in the 1960s primarily as cinematographer of BBS short films – as well as of a considerable number of animated films – and in the 1970s as a director one of the inescapable figures of the period’s experimental filmmaking, is nevertheless a solitary creator (indeed, he himself rejects the label of ‘experimental’). If he may be said to possess any sociological interest, it is directed solely towards the medium itself – towards the historical anthropology of cinema; and his exploration of film language extends to the moving-image analogies of the sister arts, above all of music. It is as if he were continuing at precisely the point where the Hungarian avant-gardists of the silent-film era were forced, by circumstance, to abandon their work in the 1920s – or to pursue it abroad. The as yet unsurpassed periods of film history’s non-narrative tradition – the avant-garde of the 1920s, French Impressionism and Soviet montage cinema – stand in close affinity with the aesthetic views of János Tóth. Alongside short films rooted in non-narrative traditions, the feature-film cinematographer – and here, regrettably, we can refer only to Love and Cat’s Play – as well as the dramaturg of Szindbád (Sinbad), also attempts to reshape the narrative film form itself. His short-film experience – as phrased in a 1983 Filmvilág [Hungarian film magazine] interview given to Károly Csala – is channelled into a form of feature-film narration that realises a dramaturgy ‘beyond plot’, balancing on the boundary between suggestion and concreteness. Some of the most outstanding works of Hungarian cinema come into being with his contribution, yet none of this alters his fundamental creative solitude.
What, then, characterises that visual sensibility which is equally recognisable in both the non-narrative form of the short films and in the ‘beyond-plot’ dramaturgy of the feature films, regardless of whether in a given work János Tóth appears merely as cinematographer or as director-cinematographer? The question does not seek to settle the meaningless dispute of ‘whose work it is’ – even though, alongside a number of ‘correct’, ‘unobtrusive’ cinematographic presences (especially in feature films), it is remarkably easy to identify his directorial imprint even on films he only photographed – but rather aims to contribute to a clearer understanding of his artistic character.
It is difficult to assign any kind of style to the études of János Tóth, just as the label ‘experimental’ proves an empty term when applied to him. This difficulty undoubtedly arises from the striking and inseparable co-presence of craft and poetry: the films capture that abstract, ‘non-signifying’ quality of poetry which refuses any direct referential relation to reality – yet at the same time they achieve this, in terms of visual content, in the most immediate and simplest manner possible, through the recording of the natural environment, of the ‘moving world’. In his own words, then: on the boundary between suggestion and concreteness. Both of these diametrically opposed experiences of the world appear in his works with elemental immediacy.
The naturalistic representation of reality is an inherent feature of the film medium, yet it is precisely from this that cinema has moved furthest away – to such an extent that, for some time now, it is ‘reality’ that seems to be imitating the moving image. By contrast, János Tóth looks upon the world with the eye of early cinema: he watches the flight of birds, the gallop of horses, human gestures – or indeed works of art. Films concerned with the visual arts particularly illustrate, and almost formulate as an ars poetica through the works of others, the artistic ideal of the director–cinematographer himself. One more conventional way in which this appears is when the process of creation – the work itself – can be followed, as in Zoltán Huszárik’s Amerigo Tot, where from the sculptor’s side this involves no small degree of physical and technical exertion. The confrontation of the concrete and the abstract is realised in a far more distinctive manner when the artwork, as it were, returns to nature. Not to an artificial setting, but into nature itself, where the poetry of the placed object is suddenly concretised with elemental force. This is what happens to the wooden sculptures in Poézis (Poetry), which hover on invisible threads in the foreground of the landscapes, and it is towards this – in a somewhat more speculative manner – that Testamentum (Testament), directed by István Ventilla, also tends, as, after the dramatic presentation of the treasures of ecclesiastical art, it steps out from the closed frame of the image into the open air and confronts the destruction of the works – and of art itself. The culmination of this vision is Huszárik’s Capricció (Capriccio), in which it is no longer works of art that are concretised through labour or through nature, but rather concrete objects, ‘torn back’ from their own environment into nature, that become the (ephemeral) components of (ephemeral) works of art.
Yet the concrete images of our surroundings consist primarily not of artworks, nor even of such mythical locations as the arena, whose anthropological roots the film of the same title, Aréna (Arena), explores in the world of football stadiums. Images – as frames, and in time – must be shaped into film. The work of János Tóth is at its most powerful when the fragile, everyday elements of life are transformed into an outstanding visual event purely through technical processing. As to how this is achieved in technical terms, even the most attentive viewer lacking practical experience of filmmaking finds it difficult to provide an answer. Nevertheless, two procedures can most often be discerned in conjunction within Tóth’s poetic practice. One is the manipulation of individual images and frames: recolouring, the addition of text, the interplay of double or multiple exposures, the acceleration of sequences, the cutting into frames – in short, the (post-)work carried out on the strip of film, on the emulsion itself. The other is bound up with time: with montage, rhythm, associative relations between images, and musical accents. These solutions can only be fully revealed through a description proceeding frame by frame – it is no accident that Gábor Bódy [Hungarian filmmaker and theorist] constructed his analysis of Elégia (Elegy) essentially from commentaries written on individual frames – so dense and complex are the film-language solutions of these short films. Even from a more distant perspective, however, it may be established that János Tóth chiefly excels in the poetic transformation of everyday visual events – and, as we have already seen, in the ‘re-objectification’ of works of art. When the image elements themselves already possess symbolic value, the freedom of poetry may easily become didactic, and as a ‘message’ detach itself from the beauty of the details. This effect dominates Csendélet (Still Life), directed by Márk Novák, in which the thesis in effect shouts over the materiality of the biblical triad of bread, water and fish – and this is not mitigated by the equally symbolic linking of the images to human faces. Arena, too, is more gripping in its details; the conceptual message of the film as a whole does not even approach the originality of its form. What truly endures are those flashes – and from this perspective, too, Elegy stands as the supreme achievement – in which the cracks in the asphalt, the bare branches of trees, the details that generate an accidental beauty within the larger structure, bear the essential meaning.
The photographic manipulation of images and the musical structuring of image sequences, as formal building blocks of the short films, remain functional even when – in a somewhat ‘tamed’ form – they are integrated into the dramatic space of feature films. Just as the worldview of the short films dismantles the whole, only to reconstruct it in a hesitant gesture or a strangely shaped object, so the cinematographer who reconstructs the writer–director’s world builds the realm of the narrative from details. It is important to stress that, in János Tóth’s interpretation, the ‘beyond-plot’ dramaturgy of feature films does not mean a dramaturgy without plot. In both Love and Cat’s Play – and from this perspective, the narration of Sinbad is undoubtedly the most irregular – we ultimately encounter traditional storytelling: exposition, conflict, climax, resolution, a consistently constructed fictional world of action, a chronology that is repeatedly disrupted yet still traceable, along with causality. What invests these films with a different kind of sensibility lies precisely in the details – or rather, in the whole constructed out of details. The rapid montage of close-ups enriches the meaning of the story; associative image connections broaden its significance. They do not lead an independent existence, do not merely illustrate the narration, do not close into a subjective vision, nor do they reorganise the spatial and temporal structure of the narrative. Instead, they seem to ‘bend’ space and time around the characters and their environment – hence the frequent use of distorted extreme close-ups photographed through spectacles or magnifying lenses – and in this way, alongside the narrative point of view, and in parallel with it, we also perceive the story according to the rules of a new, ‘non-Euclidean’ geometry.
The cinematographer’s ideal in feature filmmaking is this kind of ‘double exposure’, in which the story unfolds, alongside the narration, also from a perspective that appears to imitate the free flow of associations. Yet this solution, as such, would amount merely to alternating between an external narrative and a subjective point of view – a well-known device of traditional narrative cinema (one need only think of dream or flashback sequences). János Tóth, by contrast, detaches certain images from both the external and the internal viewpoint, diverges from the ‘narrative’ trajectory of dreams or imaginings that step outside linearity, and places the ‘non-narrative’ compositional principle of film art in the service of storytelling itself. At the same time, however, he never departs from the world of the plot. In part for this reason, and in part because of their narrative embeddedness, we do not perceive the rapid montages and macro shots of Love, Sinbad or Cat’s Play as independent ‘short-film’ insertions, detached from the world of the work as a whole. Yet this method does require the incorporation of an appropriate stock of motifs and a carefully modelled environment into the narrative structure of these films.
The Art Nouveau style, which also appears in other films of the period, becomes the visual foundation that not only serves to evoke authentically the world – and the elements of that world – in all three works, but plays at least as important a role in providing, as a kind of musical raw material or painter’s palette, the possibility of formally completing close-ups, details and fragments. The spatial density of Art Nouveau, within the time of the film, becomes complete by abstracting itself, as it were, from itself; most often, the image as a whole can only be reconstructed as a sequence of mosaic-like frames placed one after the other in time. It is no coincidence that the Art Nouveau environment, in parallel with these feature films, also appears in the non-narrative short films of János Tóth, thus in Study I–II and in the Mozikép (Motion Picture) études, woven together in Ragyogás (Shine). Alongside the formal motivation, however, a historical aspect is also present here: the evocation of the time of cinema’s birth.
And yet the material world – whether it be the Art Nouveau setting, so particularly suited to fragmentation, the world of nature, or modern technology animated by its unexpected irregularities – exists above all so that, through it, film may reveal its own nature. Art Nouveau, with its formal richness, luxuriance and dynamism, is able to foreground the pure poetry of cinematography precisely because the ‘density’ of the composition leaves room for ‘pictorial silence’, for the emptying-out of the image, when bareness and nakedness, as it were, allow the nature of the film image in itself to become visible. The short films of János Tóth seem to strive towards the empty, white screen. At the conceptual endpoint of this movement stands light, just as in music it is sound without melody or rhythm. Pure film – pure light. In one place, the creator describes the ‘zero point’ of cinematography as follows:
“My long-cherished subject has ‘characters’: a burning candle, a magnifying lens and a screen – the three together form the basis of photography. If I place them in a particular relationship to one another, the burning candle appears on the screen. And if I then remove the lens, the image disappears… How this becomes film, and how it is set in motion in space, in time, in intensity – this is what I wish to capture in negative. In this everyday school experiment I want to show how film comes into being, and what makes it what it is…”
What words are able to articulate, the moving image cannot, for out of light film emerges at once – yet words, in turn, are incapable of restoring that film. Fortunately, this theme is realised in Study II, and later becomes the overture of Eternal Movie.
‘In the beginning was the image’ – thus one might summarise the profane gospel of János Tóth, and it is for this reason that the études, shedding the ‘burden’ of narrative, become the essential works of his art. This credo applies not only to the cinematographer who thinks in images in a genuinely sui generis manner, but also to the collector and film restorer who seeks out the material and spiritual traces of early cinema. If ‘in the beginning was the image’, then the image that was there in the beginning – the primordial image of cinema – must itself be rediscovered. Within János Tóth’s directorial oeuvre, the only thread that is thematically graspable and that binds together several films and several kinds of activity is his passionate interest in silent cinema. The titles of the works and projects associated with this obsession are highly revealing. The studies begun in Study I and Study II are summarised in Motion Picture, and these three études were ultimately placed side by side under the title Shine – Ragyogás. This sequence forms the backbone of the compilation Örök mozi (Eternal Movie), which is supplemented by the films Still Life, Arena and Poetry; its unified composition, its overture and its transitions, however, are constructed from elements of Shine, along with Laozi quotations written onto the screen in calligraphic lettering, each line separately highlighted. According to the original plan, Shine – Ragyogás would not have appeared alongside the earlier short films at all, but would have served as the outline for an unrealised project entitled Veszendő varázs (lit. Perishable Magic), a film about ‘the period surrounding the creation of cinema’. The project aiming at the preservation of Hungarian silent films, meanwhile, bore the title Kép a sötétben (lit. Image in the Darkness).
Although there was not even yet any question of a completed oeuvre, and Shine, even within the feature-length compilation, remained no more than a sketch – assembled from earlier fragments – this almost forty-minute work occupies the very centre of János Tóth’s art: the film image, the beginning of film history, and the end of the enchantment of cinema, the end of the filmic myth. (The closing intertitles of the film state this explicitly: ‘Here, the beginning is already over. Or is this the beginning of the end? Yes, this is the end.’)
Shine also belongs to the line of films that document works of art; only here the subject is not a particular artwork or artist, but film itself – more precisely, its myth, its legend, its aura and its vision of humanity, and, of course, its material substance: the film frame, the strip of film. At the same time, what is new in Shine is the ironic, even grotesque perspective with which the creator confronts the bewitching charm of cinema with the prosaic quality of the present. A further new element in the film’s language is the replacement of musical composition by a mode of structuring based on photographic principles: it is as if we were leafing through an illustrated album of film legend. The opening sequences provide a veritable introduction to the technological prehistory of the moving image; then, on the worn film strips running within an Art Nouveau frame, we recognise the earliest film genres: burlesque and melodrama. The position of Shine – defined by its creator as a ‘short-film speciality’ – within both János Tóth’s oeuvre and the works of the period is determined, above all, by the way in which it evokes film history not only through archival material but also through the reconstruction of cinematic schemas. Were we to venture into a semiotic interpretation – and as we know, it was precisely the exploration of meaning in film language that functioned as the guiding principle of the experiments carried out at the Balázs Béla Studio – we would come across fascinating systems of signs. Above all, the multi-layered nature of the sign-making is striking: the visual solutions of early cinema are essentially imitated only by frontal, static camera set-ups; the distorted proportions created before a wide-angle lens, the play of colour and light, and the optical shapes inscribed upon the image surface, however, already carry us away from the evoked era as distinctly ‘experimental’ devices. The objects, costumes and characters that appear in the image, by contrast, repeatedly serve the evocation of the cinematic past, and above all the gestures and schematic ‘cinema situations’, which penetrate one step further into film history and summon up film schemas and genres.
We see, first of all, the director barking ‘action’ and ‘cut’ as a parody of the ‘image’ (dark glasses, cigar, megaphone, self-satisfied superiority and weary boredom), the vamp and the heroic lover; we see pistols and even machine guns in the hands of beautiful women; we see a dwarf, a magician, and a cream pie slapped into a face – and, of course, we see long, repeated film kisses. (When mentioning Cinema Paradiso, the director discreetly failed to note that the idea of the closing ‘anthology of film kisses’ had already existed in Ragyogás.) These elements of film myth, however, do not form any narrative or chronological sequence of film history, but are instead arranged in a serial order, the central formal organising principle of which is repetition.
By invoking the archetypes of classical cinema, the film introduces yet another field of meaning that is alien even to János Tóth’s earlier work. The director persuaded the leading Hungarian film stars of the period to appear for a few minutes: Irén Psota [actress, leading stage and film performer], Teri Tordai [actress, with an international film career], Gyula Benkő [actor and comedian], Iván Darvas [actor, major film and theatre figure] and Zoltán Latinovits [actor and poet, iconic in film and on stage alike]. The evocation of stardom thus takes place in an almost purely sign-like manner: the actors do not ‘perform’ in the conventional sense, but merely repeat gestures that are in themselves devoid of meaning; significance arises exclusively from a dual frame of reference – from the recognition of familiar filmic topoi and of familiar stars. János Tóth, however, is fundamentally not a semiotically minded artist. Beyond the fact that, while watching the film, even the most uncompromising ‘hunter of signs’ is carried away by the poetic force of the images, the system of signification is in any case not applied consistently. Film types and role schemata are invoked not only by well-known actors, but also by unknown figures – for instance, the magician and his assistant – and the reanimation of myth even steps beyond the era of early cinema and of silent film, bowing its head instead before the art of the ‘last magician of cinema’, Federico Fellini. This distancing simultaneously brings with it a grotesque mode of vision that replaces nostalgia: the magicians repeat their act again and again among ruined buildings, while a familiar motif from 8½ is heard; behind the large-bodied prostitute calling out ‘Federico’, the prefabricated concrete blocks of a housing estate loom.
In the final images of Shine, a single film frame – perhaps the last frame of the last film – dissolves into nothingness before our eyes, as if it had been set alight by the candle flame of the opening images. The ‘beginning’ and the ‘end’ converge. Nothing remains but for the creator to give thanks for cinema – and then to sign, in proper form, the inventory addressed to his predecessors: ‘Respectfully, János Tóth.’
A comparable gesture of recognition was extended to him when another devoted lover of cinema, Iván Mándy [Hungarian writer and screenwriter], simply entitled one of his short stories Tóth János mozija (lit. The Cinema of János Tóth).
[2013]
This essay was prepared with the use of the study Köszönet a moziért (Tóth János kinematográfus) (lit. Thanks for the Cinema [János Tóth, Cinematographer]) published in Metropolis 2000/1 [Hungarian film and cultural journal]. (Reprint: A Titanic zenekara. Stílusok és irányzatok a hetvenes évek magyar filmművészetében (lit. The Orchestra of the Titanic. Styles and Trends in Hungarian Cinema of the 1970s), Osiris, Budapest, 2002, 90–101.)