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If we attempt to outline the directorial career of János Erdélyi, born in 1955 in Duka in the Kemenesalja region of western Hungary, the usual structuring (‘key milestones’, ‘creative phases’) seems not to function. By this method, we can identify only one turning point: in the first part of his career, he worked as a co-creator and co-director with Dezső Zsigmond, while in the second, he took on the directorial responsibilities alone. Yet even this turning-point is not a real “point”: after Az asszony (The Woman, 1995), the feature film still jointly directed with Zsigmond, at which time their paths fundamentally diverged, they continued to work together intermittently, and for many years, they jointly or alternately edited the highly successful television programme Vetítő (Projector) on Hír TV.

Beginnings and unfaithful fidelity

Unfaithful fidelity to his homeland – this paradox might characterise both the life-path of János Erdélyi and the sequence of his films. In our first conversation, speaking about his childhood, he put it thus: “The most important thing for me, as a teenager, was to escape from that milieu.” What was this ‘milieu’ in his teens – that is, in the latter half of the 1960s? The organisation of collective farms had taken place; land and livestock had to be handed in. Yet young János’ father freed himself from this constraint and went to work as a labourer on a state farm. His grandfather, by contrast, ‘took in’ the land and the animals to the co-operative. The family remained in the village, but as outsiders, since they were not members of the co-operative. As a teenager, the future film director lived through the disintegration and decline of the traditional village way of life. His parents, however, continued his education, giving him the opportunity that they themselves had not had. He experienced Celldömölk, the small town where he attended secondary school, as a “grimly dark little railway town”. A crucial difference from the 1950s, however, was that by the 1960s, as one might say, it was already possible to ‘see through’ the Iron Curtain. “I wanted to go to Woodstock; I wanted to be a hippy.” Yet for the grammar-school pupil from Celldömölk even Budapest was unattainably far away: “I did my school-leaving exam without ever having been to Budapest.” After that exam he arrived in the city of his dreams, slept at the railway station, was picked up by the police, and only avoided having his (rebelliously) long hair cut off because he showed them his freshly issued school-leaving certificate.

(A few biographical facts in brief: he worked as an unskilled labourer at the Taurus Tyre Factory; did two years of military service at Jutas; later, while applying to the Teacher Training College in Szombathely, he was admitted to study Hungarian language and history. He wanted to be a journalist or a writer.)

So much for ‘unfaithfulness’. Fidelity to his native region runs like a subterranean stream through his filmmaking career. Characteristic works from the 2000s – Búcsú Kemenesaljától (Farewell to Kemenesalja), Az utolsó földművesek (The Last Farmers), A háború mindennapjai (The Everyday Life of War) – are all documentaries about the present or recent past of his home region. With the same affectionate objectivity, he makes films among Hungarian communities beyond the state borders, about apple-growing or good wines in the Carpathian Basin. Let us, however, return to the chronological line of his life.

A creative friendship

Dezső Zsigmond and János Erdélyi met at the Teacher Training College in Szombathely. Dezső Zsigmond studied Hungarian and cultural programme organisation; János Erdélyi studied history and cultural programme organisation. They became friends; their interests overlapped in part and complemented each other in other respects. Zsigmond proposed a children’s film project to the Balázs Béla Studio [an experimental film workshop in socialist Hungary], but the BBS was unable to take it on. Instead, he received a so-called ‘study grant’ of 40,000 forints (a modest sum even in 1983) [1], and, together with his friend János, he began making a documentary about a public conflict in a village in Heves county. This eventually became their first joint film (after many unexpectedly long years).

Ez (is) zárkózott ügy (This Is [also] a Withdrawn Case, 1984–1988)

There are times when the story of a film’s completion and approval (we are still in the one-party era) is almost as interesting as the film itself. This is no coincidence: the same political constraints shape the fate of the work as those that the film itself narrates – in this case through the story of the council chairman in Gyöngyöshalász.

A little more than ten years earlier, Judit Ember and Gyula Gazdag’s documentary A határozat (The Resolution, 1972), similar in subject, had not been shown in cinemas. In Ez zárkózott ügy (This Is a Withdrawn Case), the party-state authorities seek to remove a village council chairman who has been popular for twenty-two years; in The Resolution, it is the well-functioning chairman of an agricultural co-operative who comes under attack from the local party organisation. De jure The Resolution was never banned; de facto, it was simply not allowed to be shown. For years, however, it was repeatedly projected in closed screenings, at the Party Academy, the KISZ [Communist Youth League] school, and cadre-training sessions, as a kind of forbidden fruit, a political curiosity. In The Resolution, the party committee members almost boast about their interventions, which renders them comical.

It is as if the party apparatchiks of Heves county had learned from the lesson of The Resolution: they practically refuse to make statements; they shut themselves off. Throughout the film, it remains a mystery (we can only guess) why they want to remove the council chairman now, after twenty-two years. The figure of twenty-two years becomes the main source of absurdity – “So, he was good until now?” the villagers ask.

The first version of This Is a Withdrawn Case was completed in 1984, but that only marked the beginning of a lengthy wrestling match over finishing (the comrades in the county should consent to speak!) and authorising the film. As late as 1987, the National Film Directorate [central state body supervising film production] did not permit its release, arguing that ‘the other side’ was not heard [2]. The solution was brought by the first breezes of political change: the filmmakers supplemented the existing material with episodes from the struggle to secure the film’s release, and in the political climate of 1988, this version could no longer be withheld from distribution. This is how the little word ‘also’ in the title came about: This Is (also) a Withdrawn Case. At the same time, it is sadly undeniable that, over the four years of to-and-fro, the film lost much of its social and political impact. For today’s viewer, however, the all-too-familiar mechanisms of political backroom dealings and the memorable portraits of the villagers who do speak offer ample compensation.

Jelölöm magam (Voting for Myself, 1985)

The Erdélyi–Zsigmond duo did not make a film about the great political scandals of the general parliamentary elections [3]. Kajdacs is a village of some 1,500 inhabitants in Tolna county. The local council elections required at least two candidates. The nomination process trickles along in complete apathy; one of the (official) nominees does not even appear. At the second meeting, however, a young man stands up and nominates himself (which he is, in law, entitled to do). The local dignitaries are at a loss – they can neither swallow nor spit out this situation.

The civically minded viewer awaits the battle, the clash between progress and reaction, the victory of one side or the other. But in this film, there is no battle. The young man’s candidacy is neither explicitly rejected nor truly accepted; the situation sinks into boredom, and even the idealistic young man who nominated himself does not rebel against this.

It is this strange ending that distinguishes Voting for Myself from the average documentary films of its time. The filmmakers do not shrug their shoulders, do not, like those present at the meeting, dismiss the matter with the comment that “nothing happened here”. On the contrary, precisely by showing this ‘nothing’, and by interpreting its underlying causes at several points, they offer a more profound social, political, and social-psychological diagnosis.

The film’s reception history by audiences confirmed the value of this unorthodox, in-depth analysis. In the years leading up to the regime change, it was screened at numerous clubs and events, often in the presence of the filmmakers and progressive experts.

In the right place at the right time: Vérrel és kötéllel (With Blood and Rope, 1990)

During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, a volley of gunfire was unleashed on a revolutionary crowd demonstrating outside the border-guard barracks in Mosonmagyaróvár. Thirty-two years of silence were broken in 1988 by Hungarian Radio’s programme Vasárnapi Újság, and it was in the wake of this that Erdélyi and Zsigmond began filming.

The timing – historically – was propitious: the organs of the party-state still functioned, but everywhere the signs of change were apparent. It became possible to record material that two or three years previously would have been unthinkable. Witnesses and victims, and the relatives of those executed, spoke out (dared to speak) for the first time in decades about their emotions and their grief in public. Yet, paradoxically, in this transitional situation, even some of the perpetrators – those who ordered or carried out the shooting – were willing to talk, for the people’s republic whose protection they had enjoyed for decades formally still existed.

The place itself – Mosonmagyaróvár, the historical site of the massacre – was equally apt. With Blood and Rope stands out among many films about 1956 by portraying, without simplification, both the driving momentum and the chaos of revolutionary events at the local level, as well as the confusion of the moments preceding the fatal volley (whether there was an order to fire, and if so, from whom). The filmmakers found allies and helpers in the local MDF [Hungarian Democratic Forum, conservative party formed in the late 1980s] organisation, which was organising the first commemoration after decades of silence.

The film does not conceal that in the outrage over the shooting, a local officer was lynched and another driven to suicide. At its emotional peak, the viewer learns that, as an act of revenge by the Kádár régime, local men and residents of nearby Győr were executed – precisely those who had tried to prevent the lynching. Their relatives speak of this, with the drama of a grief newly torn open.

With Blood and Rope received the Best Documentary prize at the 1990 Hungarian Film Review.

Following his own paths

Alongside their joint works, both members of the Erdélyi–Zsigmond partnership also directed films independently. Among János Erdélyi’s first solo works, three mid-1990s documentaries deserve particular attention; they share the feature of rendering tragic episodes of recent Hungarian history through painful – at times resigned – recollections.

Akik utolsónak maradtak (Those Who Remained Last, 1994)

In 1944, the entire Jewish community of Zajta, a village in Szabolcs-Szatmár county, was deported to Auschwitz. The young men were taken to forced labour; the others were sent to the gas chambers. In 1945, Lajos Grózinger returned to Zajta with his younger brother to begin a new life. Erdélyi has him recount the deportation and Auschwitz, but the film is essentially about survival and reintegration. In this way, it offers fresh, original added value within Jewish–Hungarian (or Hungarian–Jewish) film narratives. The protagonist, who, after Auschwitz, becomes religiously indifferent, turns to farming – thus adapting to the village community now bereft of its Jewish inhabitants. He falls in love with the blacksmith’s daughter; he defuses emerging prejudices, and, as a closing gesture of assimilation, converts to Catholicism so that they can be married in church. “Az Élet él és élni akar” (lit. “Life lives and wants to live,”) [Endre Ady: Intés az őrzőkhöz (lit. Admonition to the guardians)], as the poet Endre Ady put it.

Sorsod sötétlő árnyak közt (In the Shadow of Your Dark Spirit, 1996)

News of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution inspired hopes among Hungarians in Transylvania as well. In the months that followed, the Romanian authorities rounded up (mainly intellectual, often Reformed Church–affiliated) opinion-leaders and sentenced them to long years of prison and forced labour. Forty years on, a group of survivors organised a journey to the sites of their suffering. Erdélyi and his cinematographer accompanied them. The film’s title is drawn from a psalm. The sequence of events as seen by the camera is unique (for many, this is their first visit back to the sites in decades) and dramatic (memories burst open, intense outpourings of emotion, moments of high drama). Here, recollection does not take the form of ‘talking heads’: through these memories, the viewer becomes a participant in a story.

A többi csak álom (The Rest Is a Dream, 1997)

This film was shot in southern Baranya, Croatia, near the end of the Yugoslav civil war. The ethnically mixed villages were to be ‘cleansed’ of Croats by Serb forces, and simultaneously of the Hungarians living there. The director has recounted how families who had previously lived side by side turned against each other. Some of the Hungarians fled; others stayed, fearing for their lives. It was a mere chance that determined which families were annihilated and which remained – terrified, but alive.

The title The Rest Is a Dream is taken from the words of a young man who fled, spoken at the funeral where all his loved ones lay. “My parents, my grandparents, everyone. (…) Our life was a dream, and this nightmare is the reality.” Over the nearly thirty years since the film was made, it has become a historical snapshot. Yet today’s viewer still watches it with anxiety: could passions once again be unleashed in the region? Could co-existence in this corner of Europe once more turn into a nightmare?

From documentaries to feature films

For the Erdélyi–Zsigmond pair, the 1990s offered two occasions when exciting documentaries were followed by feature adaptations. Feature films almost always reach a far wider audience than documentaries. Beyond that, the freedom to shape the story and the contribution of actors can enrich and add new dimensions to already familiar material.

Indián tél (Indian Winter, 1993)

Their documentary A kis indiánkönyv (The Little Indian Book, 1989) provided the basis for the feature Indián tél (Indian Winter, 1993) four years later. The contrast between the two – in themselves well-chosen – titles aptly conveys the conceptual surplus of the fiction film. The documentary’s title is ironic. It presents a young man who escapes from grey everyday life by playing at being an Indian, even though he is no longer a child. The feature’s title suggests tragedy, or at least the failure of a life. It is easy to play Indian in the forest in summer – but what happens in winter? In the feature, this “winter” also signifies the crisis of human relationships. To articulate this, the filmmakers introduced two new characters into the story: another young man, who attaches himself to the “Indian”, and a girl. The second young man, however, cannot cope with this way of life and ends up in a psychiatric institution, and the girl, too, is unable to relate to the “Indian”, who refuses every conventional role.

Ultimately, Indian Winter is about the desire for freedom. It is not hard to recognise in it the adolescent dreams of co-director János Erdélyi, who longed for Woodstock and wanted to be a hippy. The film’s value lies in Károly Eperjes’s performance in the leading role and Péter Jankura’s black-and-white cinematography. Indian Winter won the Best Director award at the Troia International Film Festival, Portugal.

Az asszony (The Woman, 1996)

The documentary precursor to this feature bears the somewhat misleading title Az eltűnt idő nyomában (In Search of Lost Time, 1993). There is nothing Proustian here, no madeleine dipped into tea. Six years ‘disappear’ in the sense that a military officer, threatened with a death sentence, is hidden by his family in a pit dug for him beneath the duck-house. The documentary’s material invites further elaboration, since six years of hiding also require the cooperation of the family (wife, elderly parents), who all continue living above ground and in the world outside. They change; they are exposed to stimuli and new situations. It is no coincidence that the title role in the feature is assigned to the wife. The filmmakers (with the help of writers József Balázs, Vilmos Csaplár, and Géza Bereményi) enriched the single-strand drama of the documentary. Time does not ‘disappear’; it becomes filled with events from which the man hidden under the duck-house is excluded. A temptation appears in the wife’s life: as a seemingly single young woman, she is courted by a handsome young customs officer. She may – for a moment – yield to him, may reciprocate his advances.

The Woman was made at an unfavourable moment. The general crisis of Hungarian film production was still ongoing. The distribution system for Hungarian films had collapsed under the capital-rich competition of incoming (mainly American) films. This was not a time when début or second-time directors could easily achieve breakout success.

For the creative partnership of János Erdélyi and Dezső Zsigmond, The Woman marked a turning point. They set off on their own paths, separately. There was no permanent breach; later, they worked together again on certain projects. Yet the collaboration that had lasted more than a decade came to an end.

“During the shooting of Indian Winter, we already experienced – and even more strongly on The Woman – how difficult it is for two people, two self-aware individuals with their own intentions, to direct a film together. A rather charming incident occurred when both Dezső and I began giving separate instructions to Mari Törőcsik. She kindly took us aside and said, ‘Gentlemen, you must decide whether I should look right or left. Talk it over between yourselves.’ (…) We were strong, that is the truth, strong because we had different ideas and could give each other great mental strength. But it makes a difference where the actor is looking, doesn't it? And it is a fact that, especially in The Woman, there were already disagreements between us.” (János Erdélyi, 2024.)

Another kind of political film

A kétségbeesés méltósága (Dignity of Desperation, 1998) is a film about the personality and political career of Dénes Csengey [Hungarian writer and politician], made by János Erdélyi together with András Matkócsik. Erdélyi met Csengey (and, at the same time, Tamás Cseh [Hungarian singer-songwriter]) in 1988 at the screening and debate of Voting for Myself. They did not become close acquaintances, but Erdélyi followed Csengey’s rising and later faltering political career with close attention. Seven years after Csengey’s death (1991), when the MDF was already disintegrating, he completed this documentary.

Why is this film different from most political documentaries and documentations of its time? That’s because Erdélyi gathers testimony and opinions about Csengey’s life story with impartial, honest curiosity, regardless of the interviewees’ political orientation. In this film, we hear from Sándor Csoóri, István Csurka, Balázs Horváth, Imre Kónya, Sándor Lezsák, and others from the MDF side, that is, from Csengey’s own party. But Csengey’s political opponents – Ákos Szilágyi, Miklós Tamás Gáspár, Péter Tölgyessy, and others from the then opposition, primarily from SZDSZ [Alliance of Free Democrats, liberal party] – are given just as much space. One of the film’s theses is that Csengey considered the traditional ‘populist versus urbanist’ cleavage in Hungarian intellectual life [long-standing divide between rural/national-populist and urban/liberal currents] outdated and superseded, even to the point of naïvety, although he himself remained loyal to the MDF until his death. In this film, Erdélyi and Matkócsik in effect realise Csengey’s utopia: here, lamb and wolf graze together. (I leave it to the reader to decide who is which.)

The film clearly shows that although Csengey fought bitter battles with his political opponents, the crisis of his final months was likely caused primarily by conflicts within his own side. Dignity of Desperation does not investigate these intrigues. It gives particular weight to the words of Péter Tölgyessy – by then himself no longer a member of SZDSZ – who argues that Csengey dedicated his life to revolt against the party-state dictatorship, and that when ‘they’ won, he could not find a place for himself in the detailed work of everyday policy-making.

Dignity of Desperation is one of the high points of Hungarian political documentary film of its era. Yet with this work (with minor exceptions), János Erdélyi effectively concludes his engagement with political film.

A bucolic Carpathian Basin

János Erdélyi has made numerous short documentary series. Sometimes he directed alone, sometimes alternating with Dezső Zsigmond, sometimes in rotation with other colleagues. Ameddig a harang szól (Until the Bell Rings), Az én folyóm (My River), Szenvedelmes kertész [Passionate Gardener] – including, for instance, Régi erdélyi almák [Old Transylvanian Apples], A nemtudom szilva [The “Nemtudom” Plum], Jó boroknak szép hazája… [Fair Land of Good Wines…] – the titles almost speak for themselves. Each series is held together by an initial concept, and the director’s own comment applies to all: “…when I made these films, I felt the good sense that here too we are speaking of cultural values. (…) Mostly, sadly, I presented values in danger of being lost, although some of them have since been saved.”

„…újra meg újra / Hazajön a fiad.” (“...so each time around, / Your son comes home to stay.”) [Endre Ady: A föl-földobott kő (The Tossed Stone)]

Over the decade and a half beginning around 2000, János Erdélyi returned to his native Kemenesalja region and, more broadly, to the western borderlands of Hungary. The films include:

Búcsú Kemenesaljától (Farewell to Kemenesalja, 2000)

Az utolsó földművesek (The Last Farmers, 2005)

A nyomsávon I–II. (In the Border Strip I–II, 2013)

A háború mindennapjai I–II. (The Everyday Life of War I–II, 2014)

Here, translated into images, appears the decision of the young János Erdélyi that, however much he loved this landscape, he had to escape from it. Yet as a mature director, he can also show how many indissoluble emotional threads still bind his soul to this region. The last two works reconstruct the ‘everyday life’ of two different wars. In the Border Strip investigates the Cold War, when an ‘Iron Curtain’ ran along Hungary’s western border, and anyone attempting to cross was shot at. The Everyday Life of War uncovers village-level microhistories of the Second World War in his native land – indeed, within his own family. Both are undertakings that fill significant lacunae.

The snake of freedom bites its own tail

The film Ily korban szabadon (Free in Such Times, 2016) does not, in a sense, exist. That is, the intended film could not be made; what we see is the honourable substitute for a drama.

“This is a story of failure and pain,” the director has said. “A failure insofar as I wanted to make a film about an acquaintance, a marvellous lad who travelled the Hungarian landscape with two grey oxen and a wagon with a bell-shaped cover, trying to live, as we would now say, with a very small footprint. But he later realised, and expressed beautifully, that he did not want such a memory to remain of him, and so we stopped the shoot that had begun.

We called this lad the ‘Wanderer’, and I followed his life because, in fact, he lived a beautifully simple and exemplary life – but he did not want this film. And so I decided, when he withdrew, to make a film about other acquaintances of mine in whom the desire for freedom was very strong.”

In his career interview, the director himself pointed out the human and creative return involved here. “In the 1980s, we met an ‘Indian’ who lived in the forest and tried to exist as an Indian, stepping out of the oppressive social existence of the time. We felt that this Indian was, in a way, ourselves. That is why we made the feature film Indian Winter. And now, many years later, I encountered this man travelling with two grey oxen and his own wagon, someone who had slipped out of, fled from, society. I probably saw another Indian. The earlier ‘Indian’ mattered to us because he stepped out of that terrible communist world in which everyone had to have a registered job. This new ‘Indian’ rebelled against the consumer society, rejecting everything.”

With what is to date his last major film, Free in Such Times, János Erdélyi returns to the adolescent longing for freedom that once made him dream of Woodstock and of being a hippy. Surveying – even without claiming completeness – the sequence of his films, we can understand the paradox that his protagonists (and the director himself) reach the realm of freedom by bending their necks under the yoke of land and nature.

Notes

[1] Zoltán Bíró’s compilation in the journal Ötlet, 17 March 1988

[2] Ferenc Kőhalmi’s memorandum, 23 August 1987. Cited in: András Gervai, A tanúk. (The Witnesses.), p. 325.

[3] Such a film was later made by András Kovács: Két választás Magyarországon (Two Elections in Hungary, 1987; alternative title: Valahol Magyarországon – Somewhere in Hungary).

[2024]

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János Erdélyi

Selection of works