There are filmmakers who, after a long period of apprenticeship and youthful experiments – sometimes even a decade – create their most influential works only later in life. Few are those who find themselves in the front rank at once, whose very first appearance causes a genuine stir. The feature debut of Ferenc András belongs precisely to this latter category. Veri az ördög a feleségét (Rain and Shine) – released in the summer of 1977 – achieved remarkable critical and popular success. In terms of audience numbers it held its own against commercial productions designed purely for entertainment which have since slipped into oblivion, while the critics were similarly appreciative, almost cosseting the young director and his fresh, compelling work. Only its approval process caused some minor wrangling. The story goes that, prior to its public release, the film was screened at the party resort in Aliga [a government retreat used by the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party], where the ‘comrades’ – and especially their spouses – found it highly amusing, thus clearing the way for the official premiere.
In Rain and Shine, nothing of consequence ostensibly happens: an elaborate festive meal is prepared and eaten. It is St Stephen’s Day, which the communist authorities had forcibly linked with the imposed celebration of the 1949 Constitution [the foundational legal document of the communist state]. The story unfolds in the Balaton Uplands, in the home of a calculating family who have invited a relative from Budapest and his superior, an influential party functionary. Their underlying intention is to secure favour for their petty affairs over the lavish meal and its delicacies. Yet the important comrade suffers from a stomach condition and cannot partake of the feast in any form.
From this grotesque premise emerges a genuine comedy. We witness, in painstaking detail, every mouth-watering moment of the cooking and preparation, and in visual terms the director draws the viewer into the potential pleasures of gastronomy – pleasures from which we, like the suited and well-groomed party official, ultimately remain excluded. The influence of the Czech New Wave, which had flourished a decade earlier, is unmistakable. Yet Ferenc András created an original, distinctly Hungarian world. The milieu in which events unfold is narrow and unassuming, but this is hardly the fault of the characters. The so-called Kádár consolidation [the comparatively moderate political and social settlement of the János Kádár era] afforded them no broader horizons, no greater degree of freedom. Beneath the tale of the Hungarian ‘great feast’ lies a profound sadness. The unspoken, hidden moral is this: you may fill your belly, you may acquire this or that, but you can never truly be free. Not everyone may have grasped this veiled message at the time, but it is undoubtedly the secret of the film’s enduring success and its impact across the decades.
It remains an enduring loss to Hungarian cinema that, for political reasons, Ferenc András was silenced for a full five years after his debut and was barred from directing another feature-length film. Fortunately, when he was finally permitted to return to the starting line, he produced a work as powerful as his first, one that again achieved simultaneous popular and critical success. At that point he became the director whose very presence and oeuvre offered a kind of guarantee that the often artificial opposition between the ‘popular film’ and the ‘art film’ could be bridged.
Whereas his debut had been based on an original screenplay, Dögkeselyű (The Vulture), completed in 1982, became a major box-office success and was adapted from a novella by Miklós Munkácsi [Hungarian writer and journalist, known for socially critical prose]. The literary world might scarcely have taken notice of this somewhat abrasive and combative work of fiction had the film not drawn broader attention to one of the most pressing social concerns of the early 1980s: the impoverishment and downward mobility of the Hungarian intelligentsia under late socialism. Its protagonist is a taxi driver who originally possesses a university degree, yet cannot earn a living from his salaried profession – a fate shared by many at the time. While on the job, he is robbed by two seemingly respectable elderly women, prompting him to take justice into his own hands and, in the end, to exact a terrifying revenge – not only upon others but also upon himself.
The film’s climactic suicidal explosion evokes, for the overly knowledgeable film historian alone, the ending of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou. This educated Hungarian taxi driver had no other escape route, no other means of drawing attention to the untenable situation not merely of his own life but of an entire social stratum – indeed, in broader terms, of an entire country. The film functioned as an alarm signal, wrapped in the foil of an action-packed, adventurous narrative. Some viewers delighted only in the tension-filled, dynamic and suspenseful scenes, hitherto unusual in Hungarian cinema; but others took the message seriously and could not free themselves from the choking memory of the human sacrifice embodied by József Simon, taxi driver (portrayed by György Cserhalmi [major Hungarian stage and film actor]).
Success did not elude him on this occasion either: with his second film, Ferenc András again captivated audiences across all social groups. Yet several more years passed before he returned with another feature (though he continued to work regularly for television in the meantime). Teaming up with another distinguished writer, Géza Bereményi [writer, filmmaker and screenwriter], already present on the crew of Rain and Shine, he co-wrote the screenplay of A nagy generáció (The Great Generation). By the time the film reached cinemas in 1986, Hungary’s political crisis was already brewing after years of economic and social decline. No one could yet foresee that, within a few short years, a new world order would emerge in Eastern Europe; but the conviction that things could not continue as they were had become the scarcely veiled view of every responsibly minded intellectual.
The Great Generation offers a retrospective gaze on the legendary 1960s from a vantage point two decades later. It is a crisis film born of a crisis era, though its creators themselves are not in crisis. They present what posterity may regard as the uncomfortable truth: that no one was entirely in the right – neither those who left the country or fled, nor those who remained during the years following the suppression of the 1968 movements. Something slid badly off course – this is the bitter moral of the film. The creators even imply that, even then, during the ostensibly uplifting decade of the sixties, this generation nurtured little more than illusions; indeed, measured on a historical scale, it was no ‘great generation’ at all, for it solved none of society’s pressing problems and contributed nothing of lasting significance. The dictatorship existed and the dictatorship persisted – one could at most indulge in daydreams, shout occasionally, or mutter lyrics laden with hidden meanings (as did, for instance, Tamás Cseh [singer-songwriter associated with subtle political allegories]).
This film by Ferenc András did not attract the same acclaim as his preceding two works. A segment of the audience – especially the opinion-shapers – saw in it a mirror of their own life disappointments and therefore turned away from it. For them, the film became a ‘bitter draught’, one whose lessons they could only fully appreciate after repeated viewings in later years.
Much the same theme underpins his next film, Vadon (Wild), released in 1988. Based on a substantial historical novel by Péter Dobai [Hungarian novelist and screenwriter, known for politically resonant prose], the film portrays the moral landscape following a failed revolutionary moment. One review described it succinctly: “vain hopes, frenzied dreamers”. The story is set in 1859, when the Kossuth émigrés [the followers of Lajos Kossuth, leader of the 1848–49 Hungarian Revolution, then in exile] believed the time ripe to ignite anti-Habsburg struggles in Hungary. Yet the returning legionaries soon fall into a trap and have no realistic chance of any victory. Historical illusions disintegrate within moments, leaving the initiators as nothing but victims.
It is as though we were witnessing the story of the ‘great generation’ once again – this time in historical costume. In this Dobai novel Ferenc András found what may be the central thematic core of his entire oeuvre, something he had experienced in person as an adolescent walking the streets of Budapest with his father during the 1956 uprising: the shattering of illusions and the impossibility of fulfilling grand historical longings and dreams. And yet, when the film reached cinemas in March 1989, the streets of Budapest were once again in ferment: another generation, seemingly ‘great’, was demonstrating on 15 March, fired by the fever of political transformation. For this reason, Wild received less attention than it deserved. Yet in the primary aesthetic sense of the term, Ferenc András created here the most beautiful film of his career. The profession, however, interpreted it as a parable – a narrative mode whose artistic force had, by this period, lost the vitality it had once commanded.
The political transition of 1989–90 dealt a severe blow to the overwhelming majority of Hungarian filmmakers active at the time, including Ferenc András. In an interview he later recounted how, almost overnight, the entire structure of film production collapsed. Unlike their Polish counterparts – who, under the leadership of Andrzej Wajda, managed to preserve both their financial and intellectual resources – Hungarian filmmakers proved unable to protect themselves. The most significant loss was the disintegration of the old studio system, much criticised yet nevertheless vital for artists.
In response to this abrupt political challenge, Ferenc András attempted to offer an immediate cinematic answer. Joining forces with Dénes Csengey [Hungarian writer, political commentator and key figure of the democratic transition], he shot Az utolsó nyáron (The Last Summer). Characteristically, the production was not made by MAFILM [the former state film studio complex] but jointly by Magyar Televízió (Hungarian Television) and MOKÉP [the state film distribution company], and reached cinemas in the autumn of 1991. As Hungarian film production had by then lost not only its financial foundations but also the institutional structure that ensured professional reception – in blunt terms, no one expected anything of value from filmmakers – The Last Summer quickly sank without trace in the cinema listings.
‘Where are we going?’ asks one of the young men in the film, yet neither the characters nor the creators can provide a clear answer in the autumn of 1989. Another generational group – the middle-aged cohort who were still active during the transition – fail their ‘historical final examination’. They face the approaching changes with bewilderment, more concerned with protecting their hard-won positions and guarding their privileges.
Bewilderment, however, is not characteristic of the protagonists of Törvénytelen (Bastard), released in 1994. Based on a screenplay adapted from a text by Miklós Munkácsi, the film targets the profiteers of the abruptly unleashed freedom – figures who accumulate wealth by crossing legal boundaries and applying mafia-like methods. This story, highly typical of its era two decades ago (one may recall, for instance, the so-called ‘oil-bleaching’ scandals – massive tax fraud cases never fully uncovered), is framed in the dramaturgy of the Western. György Cserhalmi, for the fourth time in an András Ferenc film, played the lead: the risk-taking, solitary hero.
Another relatively long pause followed in the director’s career. During this interval he was far from inactive, continuing to produce television and documentary films; yet within the Hungarian film community, for reasons that remain somewhat opaque, only those works screened in cinematic distribution tend to be regarded as significant milestones in a filmmaker’s life. Even a director’s unrealised projects – those scripts that never reached production, however passionately they were desired – may shape their place in film history. Among Ferenc András’s unrealised ambitions were two large-scale adaptations of Antal Szerb [novelist and literary historian] and Géza Csáth [writer, physician and avant-garde figure)]. The latter did leave a visual trace in Morfium (lit. Morphine), a short film functioning as a kind of preparatory study.
Instead of the novels by either of these Hungarian authors, András eventually brought to the screen the work of a twentieth-century Italian writer. A Szent Lőrinc folyó lazacai (Salmons of the Saint Lawrence River), released in 2003 and his most recent feature to date, took considerable time to complete owing to its international co-production background. The parable embedded in its title – the story of salmon that never reach their destination during their migrations – expresses Ferenc András’s overarching reflection on the fate of artists.
Two and a half decades, seven feature films – this is the numerical measure of Ferenc András’s career. Some directors have achieved film-historical immortality with fewer works, while others, in their heyday, directed annually, only for the majority of their films to sink into the merciful haze of oblivion. Quantity has never guaranteed quality. Posterity does not celebrate those who mass-produce their art but those who, through powerful cinematic experiences, impart essential ideas to their audience. Regardless of the varying degrees of critical acclaim, Ferenc András’s films consistently considered the viewer. (“There is no film without an audience”, he emphasised in one interview.) His oeuvre is not only known and recognised within the Hungarian canon but has also enjoyed significant international success. He is a filmmaker who regards art primarily as a craft and contemplates artistic meaning only once the necessary conditions for creation are in place.
It is customary to summarise the life’s work of a major artist – whether writer, visual artist or film director – in a single sentence. Borrowing the phrase used by film historian Vince Zalán, one might say that Ferenc András made films about heroes – or ordinary people – whom history abandoned.
[2015]