“Human beings have their obsessions. What interests me most are the interrelations between the individual and society, the freedom that alone is worthy of the human being, as it relates to human dignity, and the violations of that dignity. My mania is that human beings are fundamentally born for freedom, and it is unbearable to me that although this is so, the several-thousand-year written history of humanity is nonetheless filled with wars, slaughter, killings, mass massacres, campaigns of revenge, assassinations, racial persecutions, genocide, pogroms – with the thousand forms of violent action that almost incessantly restrict human beings in the exercise of their most elementary right, freedom. […] Whenever there is any possibility, I try to make films to raise my voice against the humiliation and vulnerability that are unworthy of human beings. Not as if I had the illusion that a single film, or even hundreds of films, could prevent all this. I do it solely in obedience to an inner ethical command, for the purpose of awakening or prompting reflection.” – this is how Zoltán Fábri formulated his ars poetica and at the same time his moral catechism in his Hevenyészett önvallomás (Sketchy Self-Confession) written in 1965.
Indeed, the film career spanning more than three decades - apart from its beginnings, which still bore the dogmatic traits of the time, namely the cult of personality - is coherently constructed, focusing on the moral question of whether and how man can preserve his dignity, his dignity, his humanity in moments of fate.
Indeed, the film career spanning more than three decades – apart from its beginnings, which still bore the dogmatic traits demanded by the era, namely the cult of personality – is built with coherence, placing at its centre the moral question of whether, in fate-shaping moments, a human being can preserve dignity, integrity, and humanity, and if so, how.
An artist who grew up and came of age under the influence of 1930s French poetic realism and Italian neorealism, he remained throughout his life a classical director. His creative style is characterised by precisely elaborated screenplays, richly illustrated with drawings and diagrams, and by his tenacious adherence to them. Because of his era and his taste, auteur cinema did not affect him, and his fundamentally reserved nature also kept him distant from personal self-exposure; improvisation and spontaneity – so glorified by the pioneers of the French Nouvelle Vague – were alien to his creative methods.
Hungarian history, and within it the decisive turning points of the twentieth century, occupy a central place in his oeuvre. For his films he drew inspiration primarily from Hungarian literature, basing his screenplays on works by authors such as Dezső Kosztolányi, Ferenc Móra, Imre Sarkadi, Ferenc Karinthy, István Örkény, Ferenc Sánta, Tibor Déry, Margit Kaffka, Ferenc Molnár, and József Balázs. In selecting works, the primary criterion was always whether they reflected his own “obsessions” and whether they could be integrated into his system of ideas. For this reason, the success of his films depended greatly on whether the choice had been a fortunate one.
His oeuvre is extensive: a total of 22 films are associated with his name (although he himself did not include Vizivárosi nyár (Summer in Viziváros), the work he made for television). He was also the co-screenwriter of most of them and designed the sets for several as well. Despite this, he never overcame the rejection of several of his screenplays until his death. In his view, had those been realised, he would have left behind a far richer and more colourful body of work. He felt that the “film luminaries” of the ministry deprived him of his life’s major work when they refused to give the green light to, among others, the screenplay with the working title „Egymás mellett, akár a fókák…” (“Side by Side, Like Seals…”), whose source material was a short story by Mihály Sükösd. The rejection was clearly motivated by the fact that the planned film would have scrutinised the abuses committed by socialist petty potentates.
Beginnings with “mandatory tasks”
His entry into the profession was unconventional. At the Academy of Fine Arts he was considered the most talented student of his master, István Réti, and a promising future awaited him, yet under the influence of French poetic realism and Italian neorealism he changed his career path. Since no directing programme existed yet, he enrolled in the acting programme of the Academy of Drama, where he graduated in 1941. The most prestigious theatres in Budapest offered him directing and set-design work, but even his steadily rising theatrical career could not make him forget his secret desire to one day become a film director. That is why he seized the opportunity when, in 1950, he was offered a job at the film studio nationalised two years earlier. The offer, however, was not for filmmaking but for the somewhat vague position of “artistic director”. József Révai, Minister of Culture, entrusted the non-party-member Zoltán Fábri not with political censorship but with artistic advising: assisting in the artistic realisation of already approved screenplays.
Alongside his work on the dramaturgical committee, Fábri devoted all his energy to learning the craft of filmmaking from his colleagues. Soon he was given the opportunity to direct films himself. His debut came during the period of the 1950s, when the party’s cultural policymakers imposed the obligatory production of socialist-realist “production films”. These schematic works, radiating “hurrah-optimism”, placed at their centre heroes who fought self-sacrificingly for the workers and the people, opposed by reactionaries undermining production (see Dalolva szép az élet (Life Is Beautiful When You Sing), Kis Katalin házassága (Katalin Kis’s Marriage), Becsület és dicsőség (Honour and Glory), Tűzkeresztség (Baptism by Fire), etc.). If he wanted to be a film director – and Zoltán Fábri certainly did – he could not exempt himself from this requirement. In 1952 he made his own “production film”, Vihar (Storm), based on a work by Ernő Urbán.
Shot in colour, the film’s central conflict is that, just before harvesting, a sudden storm flattens the grain. The party secretary of the Red Dawn Cooperative, accompanied by a few members and a Red Army veteran of 1919, sets out to cut the grain by hand, while the “reactionary” chairman and his followers are satisfied to let the insurance company cover their losses. In the end everything naturally turns out well: the chairman and his “cronies” are exposed, and the members save the crop. The film fulfilled all the cultural-political expectations of the era: a dogmatic thesis film, with “angels” fighting for the socialist cooperative and “devils” plotting against them. The characters are ideological mouthpieces, and the conflict is contrived and unrealistic.
The director’s second film, Életjel (Signal of Life), shot in 1954, already presents a more nuanced picture. Based on real events, the story centres on the superhuman struggle to rescue the miners trapped underground after a mine collapse and flooding in Szuhakálló. Although the film still bore the dogmatic traits of the period, the director was already attempting to endow his protagonists with individual characteristics and to shape relatable destinies. With this film, Zoltán Fábri achieved his first international success: it won first prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
Breakthrough
The “thaw” that began in 1953 made itself felt in cultural policy as well: dogmatic works slowly began to yield to artistically ambitious films that depicted individual destinies, real conflicts and life situations. Yet these works still operated against a mandatory two-pole social background – though not as overtly as in the socialist production films. It was thanks to this changed political climate that Zoltán Fábri had the opportunity to create his epoch-making film, Körhinta (Merry-Go-Round), which immediately drew international attention to Hungarian cinema.
Pataki, an individual landowner, comes to an agreement with Sándor Farkas that he will marry off his only daughter, Mari, so that their lands may be united. “Land marries land” – he summarises the logic of his decision. But Mari loves Máté Bíró, who is not incidentally a committed supporter of the local producers’ cooperative. Behind the captivating love story lies the conflict between old and new – namely, the question of “to join or not to join the cooperative”. The film ends with the victory of the “new”, that is, of the young (virtually Fábri’s only film with a “happy ending” – given the era and the theme, it could hardly have ended otherwise). Yet the opposing side – the father and the rejected suitor – also possesses a genuine sense of truth and a mindset deeply rooted in Hungarian tradition. They are flesh-and-blood characters, not “devilish” reactionaries like those of the recent production films.
Merry-Go-Round is Zoltán Fábri’s most lyrical film. It expresses not only, with elemental force, the desire for free choice of partner, but also the yearning for escape and the urge to break out that lives within the young – a yearning to leave behind the mud and dust that cling to the world of isolated farmsteads, the monotonous way of life that has remained unchanged for centuries.
One of Fábri’s greatest strengths – his flawless casting – already appears in this film. Körhinta marked the debut of one of the most important actresses of the twentieth century, the then-student Mari Törőcsik, but the performances of the other actors – Imre Soós, Ádám Szirtes and Béla Barsi, all of peasant background – also remain unforgettable. The breathtaking imagery of cinematographer Barna Hegyi, together with brilliant montage work, especially in the whirlwind dance sequence, the wild cart ride, and the carousel scene, made the director a worthy heir to the finest expressionist traditions. A gripping story, masterful performances, stunning visuals and the equally outstanding score by György Ránki – small wonder that Körhinta achieved tremendous success at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. Though it did not win an award (the director believed this was likely due to the Cold War), the future filmmaker François Truffaut, then reporting as a film critic, defended the film in a passionate article and awarded his own imaginary “Golden Palm” to Körhinta.
After the enormous critical and popular success of Merry-Go-Round, expectations ran high for Zoltán Fábri’s next film, Hannibál tanár úr (Professor Hannibal), which he envisioned on the basis of Ferenc Móra’s novella. In his Sketchy Self-Confession, the director explained his choice of subject as follows: “At the moment of choosing a story, it is often a matter of what comes relatively close to what I would like to confess; and if I find such a thing, I accept it." Péter Szász and Zoltán Fábri thoroughly reworked the 1955 novella, shifting the story from the 1920s to the late 1930s, the period of fascism’s rise in Hungary. Fábri enriched his directorial toolkit with a new element: the grotesque.
The meek, intimidated schoolteacher Béla Nyúl, oppressed both at work and at home, writes a scholarly essay on Hannibal, the Carthaginian military commander. His ordeal begins when his paper is deliberately misinterpreted by the spokesmen of the Töhötöm Blood Pact, a movement that proclaims Christian morality and national consciousness as its banners. Its fanatical followers then threaten his life and force him to recant his “teachings.”
Although the film analyzes the operating mechanisms of fascism, the more perceptive viewers quickly sensed that the director was also “sending a message” to the present – that he was expressing a view of the era of the personality cult as well. The film is therefore a parable, a grotesque natural history of dictatorships. In Zoltán Fábri’s vivid formulation: “The film must be polyphonic. It must speak not only about one specific, clearly defined thing, but also about something beyond it. It must be a parable too, and the resonance, the multi-voicedness of the two together gives the work its essence, its substance, its main message. A completely clear example of this is Professor Hannibal, which takes place during the 1920s and 1930s, at the time of the fascist Ébredő Magyarság (Awakening Hungarians) movement, and at the same time reveals the impulses and methods of the show trials of the Rákosi era: fundamentally the unstable, easily swayed moods of the deceivable masses – something so characteristic of the years around 1956, when from 1950 onward the show trials, death sentences, and later rehabilitations, all these intolerable things, took place.”
Fábri therefore recognized already at the time of the 1956 events the parallel between fascism and Stalinism.
The filming took place in the summer of ’56, and the ceremonial premiere – attended by Imre Nagy – was held on 17 October 1956. The accompanying short film presented the reburial of the recently rehabilitated László Rajk.
After the euphoric gala premiere, Hungarian audiences did not have a chance to see the film for a long time, but abroad it achieved a brilliant triumph, winning the Grand Prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
Turning away from the present
In the years following the '56 revolution, the film industry was not characterised by the general lethargy and numbness of intellectuals. Filmmakers were in a privileged position compared to the literati, many of whom were in prison. Film production resumed on 21 November, almost a few days after the tragic events. The number of new films rose from 10 a year to 15. Zoltán Fábri, who by this time had already established himself as the country's leading director, made four films between '56 and '62. Sweet Anna and Two Half-Times in Hell are enduring works, but April Fool (1957) and Daytime Darkness, based on the short novel by Boris Palotai, are not among the director's brightest works. The common characteristic of all four films is a turning away from the problems of the present, a complete amnesia about a common tragedy.
After the crushing of the 1956 Revolution, the film studio was not characterised by the general lethargy and numbness that affected the intelligentsia. Unlike many writers – a large number of whom ended up in prison – filmmakers found themselves in a privileged position. Only a few days after the tragic events, on 21 November, film production started up again. Whereas earlier some ten new films were made each year, this number now jumped to fifteen. Fábri Zoltán, by then regarded as the country’s leading director, made four films between ’56 and ’62. Édes Anna and Két félidő a pokolban (Two Half-Times in Hell) are lasting achievements, while Bolond április (April Fools’) (1957) and Nappali sötétség (Daytime Darkness), based on Boris Palotai’s novella, are not among the brightest pieces in his oeuvre. What all four films share is a turning away from contemporary problems – a perfect amnesia regarding the shared national trauma.
April Fools’, based on Ferenc Karinthy’s novella, is Fábri Zoltán’s only comedy. The plot is rather anaemic: a student (László Mensáros) and a young widow (Marianne Krencsey) see their romance collapse because, owing to the woman’s overflowing hospitality, the boy ends up with a stomachache. Although the director undeniably had a feel for the grotesque and even for dark humour, the self-critical Fábri sensed that this excursion into a lighter genre had not been fortunate, and he never again ventured into this territory. He noted in several interviews that everything light or superficial was alien to him.
Although the film was completed by August 1957, its release was delayed by a further two years because the male lead, László Mensáros, was imprisoned for political reasons. In his book on the director, József Marx wrote the following about this situation: “No one had any interest in probing whether László Mensáros, the ‘rowdy’ Debrecen actor who had signed at Budapest, was chosen by chance or whether Fábri offered him an escape route when he cast him in the role of Gida.”
The film adaptation of Dezső Kosztolányi’s novella Édes Anna (premiere: 6 November 1958) was suggested by Péter Bacsó, the director’s constant collaborator and dramaturg. Zoltán Fábri again entrusted the title role to Mari Törőcsik, who in this psychological drama was once more able to reveal astonishing depths in portraying the humiliated maidservant. After Béla Nyúl, Anna Édes too embodies the small, ordinary person mocked and humiliated in her human dignity. Raised in an atmosphere devoid of love, the orphaned girl is cruelly overworked by her employers (Károly Kovács and Mária Mezey), and although they regard her as a model servant, they treat her with contempt and continually humiliate her, while the housewife’s nephew seduces her and then discards her. At a certain point, the girl’s patience breaks, and in a narrowed state of consciousness she kills her benefactors.
If we compare the novel and the film, it becomes clear that Zoltán Fábri approached the heroine with far greater empathy than the author of the novel himself, Dezső Kosztolányi. He conveys Anna’s instinctive inner life and fever dreams through powerful, almost surrealist montages. László B. Nagy, a critic who did not always treat the director with kid gloves, acknowledged with praise: “Anna’s fever dream is an achievement that stands on its own.”
Although the film did not attract particular attention at Cannes, it met with general approval among domestic audiences.
First disappointments
Six years, six films, festival successes, and packed cinemas at home. Zoltán Fábri had become the leading director of the era, receiving unreserved recognition not only from the Hungarian profession and audiences, but also drawing international attention to Hungarian film. It is therefore no surprise that the extremely sensitive and self-respecting director was deeply shaken by the rejection of three of his screenplays in a row. Some consolation, however, was provided by his election in 1959 as president of the Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association.
After these rejections, he once again turned to a novella by Imre Sarkadi, A tanyasi dúvad (The Savage of the Farm), when in 1960 he began working on his film Dúvad (The Savage).
The titular “savage” is a headstrong, unrestrained landowner (a kulak) who recognises “the call of the times” and joins the agricultural cooperative, eventually becoming its chairman. Yet his nature remains unchanged: he tries to reclaim his former lover, Zsuzsi, who by then is living a settled family life, thereby disturbing her hard-won peaceful – though somewhat tepid – existence. The woman shoots and kills her former lover, and this gunshot may even be felt as symbolic…
In 1960, beyond the Imre Nagy programme, beyond 1956, at the beginning of the Kádár-era consolidation, a film condemning kulaks can certainly be regarded as a step backwards – a return toward the world of class-struggle-driven, schematic films. Imre Sarkadi himself was not pleased with the choice of topic; in a letter found after his death, he described his earlier work outright as “whoredom.” Despite this, the director’s atmospheric power shines through the film, and certain scenes still have strong dramatic impact today.
One of the finest films produced by the Hungarian film industry in the years of deep decline after ’56 is the Second World War parable Két félidő a pokolban (Two Halves in Hell, 1961). Balancing between tragedy and satire, the film tells the story of a makeshift team of Ukrainian Jewish labour servicemen who, in a match organised in honour of the Führer’s birthday, defeat the team of German soldiers. Fearing a rebellion, a German officer shoots the jubilant servicemen. Even within the excellent cast, Dezső Garas stands out with his performance as a two-left-footed Jewish boy who can barely manage to kick the ball – yet still scores the winning goal against the Germans.
The basic idea was supplied to the director by Péter Bacsó, because the story is based on real facts: the football match between German soldiers and Auschwitz prisoners happened in real life, albeit in a different way than in Zoltán Fábri's film. (In 1981, an American remake of the Hungarian film was made under the title Escape to Victory. In the star-studded film directed by John Huston, the winning goal was scored by Pelé.)
Based on the novella by Boris Palotai, Nappali sötétség (Daytime Darkness, premiered 14 November 1963) introduced a major novelty in the director’s oeuvre: it was the first time Zoltán Fábri applied time-dissection techniques to portray the self-examination of a writer (Lajos Básti) struggling with a crisis of conscience. The method he experimented with here would later reach full maturity in Húsz óra (Twenty Hours) and in his monumental work 141 perc a befejezetlen mondatból (141 Minutes from an Unfinished Sentence).
In the early 1960s, a new generation of filmmakers emerged in Hungary, whose first attempts already reflected the influence of the French New Wave and of Antonioni and Fellini. Miklós Jancsó’s Oldás és kötés (Cantata), István Gaál’s Sodrásban (Current), and István Szabó’s Álmodozások kora (Age of Illusions) signalled the arrival of a new era. Under Kádár’s “soft dictatorship,” the previously compulsory ideological framing slowly gave way to the “lyrical I.” None of this affected Zoltán Fábri’s art: he remained faithful to the classical film style built on literary sources (within which he nonetheless experimented a great deal with renewal – see expressionistic features, psychological montage, and time-dissection techniques).
“[…] yet these schools, which had still counted as modern in the 1950s, by the early 1960s had already lost their momentum and ran into the label of being conservative” – as Péter Mátyás aptly described the reasons for the director’s growing sense of obsolescence and his gradual marginalisation from the mainstream.
Nevertheless, at that time Zoltán Fábri still had resounding popular and critical successes ahead of him.
The legitimisation of the Kádár consolidation
First and foremost with Húsz óra (Twenty Hours, 1965), based on the novel by Ferenc Sánta, a work that in the director’s oeuvre can be placed both in the category of village-themed films and in that of moralising works. The successful book published in ’64 was recommended to the director by studio head Szilárd Újhelyi.
The film outlines two decades in the life of a Hungarian village after the war.
A journalist (Emil Keres), who also serves as the narrator, wishes to write an investigative report on how former servant men and poor peasants of similar background found themselves facing one another in 1956, as a result of which the village’s party secretary killed his former servant comrade with a burst from a submachine gun. The story unfolds along many threads, from the perspectives of many characters (beyond the four former friends, also the count and the cynical doctor), through recollections that sometimes rhyme with one another and at other times contradict each other. As the fragmented memories assemble, viewers sense that each character has his own partial truth. In this film Zoltán Fábri elevated his time-dissection technique to the level of virtuosity. The screenplay, written together with dramaturg Yvette Bíró, created the opportunity for him to juxtapose and interweave four different time layers.
The first time layer is 1945, during land distribution, when the formerly destitute cotters look toward the future with ecstatic joy. The second is 1949, the era of forced collectivisation, when the authorities treat peasants with land as enemies. The third is 1956, when the former bread-fellows look at each other from opposite sides of the barricade, and the fourth is 1964, when the reporter is trying to find out what led to all this. “This report cannot be written” – he repeats as he attempts to piece together the mosaic of events. (It should be noted here that in connection with 1956 the film never uses the long-official and compulsory term “counter-revolution”.)
“The Kádár-era consolidation, the soft dictatorship, never before and never thereafter received such a clear and convincing allegorical narrative, presented either in a novel or especially in film, as Twenty Hours” – writes Tibor Hirsch in his analysis of the film – “[…] the absolutely positive hero, ‘Director Jóska’ (Antal Páger), can be identified directly with the First Secretary.”
By today’s knowledge the film paints the problems of collectivisation somewhat in rosy tones, yet owing to Fábri’s genuine dramatic talent the film is still impossible to watch without being deeply moved.
With this film the director achieved his greatest successes both at home and abroad. In Hungary he won the Hungarian Feature Film Review, and internationally among others the Grand Prize of the Moscow Film Festival. Nevertheless, and unjustly, people began to label him as “the showcase director of socialist cultural policy”.
With Húsz óra Zoltán Fábri returned to cinematographer György Illés, with whom he became an inseparable creative partner thereafter.
Compensation
Although years earlier he had already wished to adapt Ferenc Molnár’s immortal novel to film, Zoltán Fábri received the direction of the American–Hungarian co-production A Pál utcai fiúk (The Paul Street Boys) as compensation from the officials of the Film Directorate for his repeatedly rejected screenplays. The producer had several conditions regarding the collaboration. First, he insisted that most of the child roles in the novel, including Ernő Nemecsek, be played by young London actors, thus somewhat “gentrifying” the poor boys of Ferencváros at the turn of the century. The director knew the Ninth District extremely well, having been born and raised there, yet he was forced to accept this “polishing”, though he resisted the truly wild ideas tooth and nail: “He wanted to turn Nemecsek into a sort of child Robin Hood, and as for the ending, well, even Ernő Nemecsek’s death made him think hard, and he hinted whether the film could perhaps have a happy ending” – recalled Fábri about the American producer of Hungarian descent, whose greatest “virtue” was perhaps that he had succeeded in purchasing the film rights to the novel.
The evergreen literary source material and Zoltán Fábri’s impeccable technical mastery guaranteed success from the outset.
The Hungarian premiere took place on 3 April 1969 (the so-called Liberation Day was on 4 April!), on the anniversary of the country’s liberation. As expected, the film received an excellent reception both at home and abroad, and it was nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. Despite optimistic predictions, however, the golden statuette did not go to the Hungarian production, but to Sergei Bondarchuk, director of the monumental Soviet film epic War and Peace.
The student uprisings of ’68 and the events in Prague profoundly stirred the tepid waters of consolidation, and traces of this appear in several Hungarian films. These events also affected Zoltán Fábri, resulting in another parable that, within the walls of a convent, places under a magnifying glass the life-and-death struggle between reformers and conservatives. According to the director, with Hangyaboly (The Ant Heap, 1971), inspired by Margit Kaffka’s novel, he intended to pass judgement on the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia.
The Grotesque, or the Story of the Creation of The Tóth Family
In 1963, when István Örkény handed over to Zoltán Fábri his film novella Csend van (Silence), the director hesitated whether to embark on a Second World War story. The writer then expanded the film novella into a short novel, which was immediately seized upon by Károly Kazimir, director of the Thália Theatre, and from it one of the theatre’s legendary productions, Tóthék (The Tóth Family), was born in 1967.
Zoltán Fábri therefore did not “ride on” the success of the Vígszínház production but returned to the earlier film novella commissioned for him by Péter Bacsó, and to the short novel derived from it, when in 1969 he began directing Isten hozta, őrnagy úr (The Tóth Family). He entrusted the role of the major to Zoltán Latinovits, and cast alongside him such excellent actors, richly equipped with both dramatic and comic qualities, as Imre Sinkovits, Márta Fónay and Vera Venczel. He gave the film the subtitle Huszadik századi mese (A Twentieth-Century Tale). The Tóth Family was Zoltán Fábri’s last attempt at the then-considered-modern grotesque. Contributing to the effect of the absurd are the alienating devices – for example inserts, a narrator whose voice alone is heard, freeze frames, accelerated motion, “asides”, and the collision between the idyllic fairy-tale setting of the story and the horrors of the war raging in the background, invisible yet palpable.
The director’s guidance of actors is here again of an incomparably high standard. The already gravely ill giant of the stage, Zoltán Latinovits, drew visibly from his own inner torments in the brilliant portrayal of the major, whose wartime neurosis has shattered him. Using box-folding as a kind of work therapy, he drives his host, who gradually loses his human dignity, into madness and eventually into murder. It should be noted that in three of his films (Ötödik pecsét [The Fifth Seal], 141 Minutes from the Unfinished Sentence, and The Tóth Family) Zoltán Fábri entrusted Zoltán Latinovits with the portrayal of negative (fascistic, psychopathic) characters.
Examination of conscience – moralizing films
“A person has his fixations. What interests me most are the connections between the individual and society, in relation to the freedom worthy of a human being, to human dignity, and to the violation of that dignity. My fixation is that human beings are fundamentally born to be free, and it is unbearable for me that although this is so, the several-thousand-year written history of humanity is nevertheless filled with wars, slaughter, murders, mass killings, campaigns of revenge, assassinations, racial persecutions, genocides, pogroms, and a thousand variations of violent acts, which almost continuously restrict human beings in the exercise of their most elementary right: freedom. […] Whenever there is even the slightest possibility, I try to make films in order to speak out against the humiliation and degradation unworthy of human beings. Not because I have any illusions that one film, or even hundreds of films, could prevent all 0this. I do it solely in response to an inner ethical command, for the sake of awakening or prompting reflection.” – this is how Zoltán Fábri formulated his Sketchy Self-Confession in 1965, which serves both as his ars poetica and his moral catechism.
“One may defend oneself against any accusation except self-accusation.” – this is the motto of György Rónay’s short novel Az esti gyors [The Evening Express], from which one of Fábri Zoltán’s most debated and most emotionally charged films, Utószezon [Off-Season], was made. As in the short novel, the film’s protagonist, the pharmacist Kálmán Kerekes (Antal Páger), is guilty of a single unfortunate, ill-timed remark: the word “unless”. That is, “Unless the Szilágyis are Jews.” Because this statement, which amounted to a denunciation, was uttered in 1944, the pharmacist couple – at whose shop he worked as an assistant – were deported to a death camp on its basis.
The film abounds in grotesque elements; in every shot one senses the influence of modern literature, and especially of Dürrenmatt. (The screenplay was written by Péter Szász, who had a particular affinity for the grotesque.) In the short novel, the man tormented by guilt throws himself under a train, thereby rising to the stature of a tragic hero. The film’s protagonist also attempts suicide, but the train rushes past on another track… and so on.
The film won four prizes at the Venice Film Festival, but the Hungarian critics received it rather coolly. The debate centered chiefly on whether it is permissible to treat the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century in a grotesque manner. László B. Nagy even went so far as to call the Auschwitz gas-chamber sequence “the most repulsive scene in the history of Hungarian cinema”. Zoltán Fábri was deeply shaken by what he considered an unjust criticism; he felt that his intentions had been fundamentally misunderstood and misinterpreted.
The Fifth Seal (1976), like the Sánta novel on which it is based, is a parable. The story takes place during the Arrow Cross era. Four ordinary men – a pub owner, a carpenter, a book agent, and a watchmaker – gather each evening in a pub, where over drinks they discuss their everyday troubles. One day a parable is told about the tyrant Tomoceus Katatiti and the slave Gyugyu, and the question arises: into whose skin would each of them choose to step? On the basis of a denunciation made by an informant present, the group is arrested, and the story takes a dramatic turn…
The director again raises the questions that constantly preoccupied him: human dignity, freedom of choice, the scope of action available to the little man under dictatorships, in the hell of history. It is a testament to Fábri’s remarkable talent that the film does not become a paper-dry thesis drama; through its tension-creating force and the actors’ profoundly moving performances, it becomes a timeless masterpiece.
In the early seventies two successful novels by József Balázs were linked only by theme, but through the director’s ingenuity the similarity of names became blood relation, and from the writer’s works he created a two-part family saga, Magyarok (Hungarians), and Fábián Bálint találkozása Istennel (Bálint Fábián Meets God). The two works and the films based on them portray the fate of landless peasants in Szabolcs County from the First World War to the end of the Second World War. By decision of the studio, Hungarians was filmed first; it presents the fate of the son, András Fábián, during the Second World War. Three years later came the story of the father, Bálint Fábián, set during the First World War, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and the subsequent reprisals.
In Magyarok, András Fábián and his fellow cotters take seasonal labour in Germany in 1943 in order to escape conscription or starvation. The shortsighted poor peasants of Szabolcs, while working the fields of the conscripted Germans, do not notice – or do not wish to notice – the nearby death camp, the piles of corpses, and the gunshots. “A few distinctive elements still give the story some weight today: on the one hand, József Balázs’s modern image of the peasantry comes through – the disillusioned worldview of the group often described as the preservers of Hungarian identity; on the other hand, the world is not as two-polar as we are accustomed to seeing it in many Hungarian films: the German farmer (Sándor Szabó) is neither a Nazi nor a resistance fighter, the steward (Zoltán Gera) is neither a brutal driver nor a jovial Swabian; both characters have personal fates, and certain elements of these touch the Hungarian peasants as well.” – writes József Marx about the film. Although the film was nominated for an Oscar, the Hungarian critics labeled it “a distasteful lament over Hungarian identity”.
Comedy
In May 1981, Fábri Zoltán resigned from his post as president of the Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association.
His last two films, Requiem (1982) and Gyertek el a névnapomra (Come to My Name Day, 1983), added little that was new to his oeuvre.
Marx József aptly characterised Requiem, adapted from Örkény István’s short story of the same title, as follows: “The real challenge and at the same time the farewell in the oeuvre was this final effort to confront modern film.” The film’s protagonist, Hannover István (Balázsovits Lajos), murdered in the Vác prison in 1951, is revealed to viewers through the memories of his former partner, Netti (Frajt Edit), and a fellow inmate (Gálffi László) – recollections that sometimes echo one another and sometimes contradict each other. The film attempts to blend three time layers: 1944, 1951 and 1953. The workers’ movement theme was likely only a pretext for the director, eager for renewal, to introduce into his own oeuvre the associative method of Alain Resnais, whom he deeply admired – a method built on shifting temporal and visual planes.
Fábri Zoltán’s final film, his twenty-second, Gyertek el a névnapomra (Come to My Name Day), was based on Karinthy Ferenc’s 1976 novella Házszentelő (House-Blessing). The director commented on it: “I think that six years ago, following in the footsteps of Karinthy Cini, I voiced in the film what was still unannounced and unforeseeable at the time – perestroika…”
The film is a bitter critique of the socialist “little kings” who abused their power and whose entire way of life was steeped in corruption. Its premiere took place in April 1984. By then, this subject no longer had the force of revelation in Hungary, not only because of the prior stage adaptation. This may well have contributed to the failure of the long-awaited success, which only deepened the director’s disappointment.
Farewell
Did the 67-year-old director know that with this work he was saying farewell to film forever? What caused his withdrawal? Fatigue, illness, disappointment, resentment over criticism that was not always well-intentioned? Most likely all of these together – and also the fact that no one tried to persuade the contemplating artist to stay.
“Throughout his directing career he was driven by stubborn inner compulsions, while audiences increasingly wanted to be entertained” – wrote Mária El-Chami, the curator of the 2014 posthumous Fábri exhibition. “This was no longer his world and, in 1983, while he was shooting his last film, the canvas, the oil paint and the paintbrush were already waiting for him at home.
Freed from constraints, he could work without boundaries. On his canvases he reveals his inner struggles with unrestrained honesty, allowing his feelings to appear as they wish. At times he places his figures in discreetly modest positions; at other times the opposite happens: unmasked passion and intensity pour from them, and at times irony or even brutality are present as well. Yet in most of the paintings we find the sought-after calm, though the anxieties and fears of twentieth-century humanity break through from time to time – he obeys that certain ‘mania’.
In the late 1980s, the artist – already past seventy – relived and recreated the world he had experienced, whose tense contradictions, unfortunately, remain current today. In the process of creation, the artist seemed to become younger; in his painting we can still detect the techniques learned from his Nagybánya master and the influence of twentieth-century figurative expressionists, but we can already speak of a clearly formed and unmistakably recognisable ‘Fábri style’. His artistic oeuvre became whole through the tools of film, acting, painting and writing – with the human being always at its centre.”
Fák és folyondárok, egy komoly filmrendező pályaképe (Trees and Vines: The Career of a Serious Film Director) – this is the subtitle of József Marx’s book on Fábri Zoltán. Indeed, when we think of the director, seriousness comes first to mind. And moral integrity, the defence of human dignity, compassion for the small, humiliated individual crushed by the storms of history. “The characteristic feature of Fábri’s films,” writes Péter Mátyás in his study, “is self-examination, facing our ancestors, our friends and our enemies. His heroes interrogate the past through yellowed photographs and revived memories, striving to understand themselves. The irreconcilable conflict between present and past, between the individual and history, haunts these stories like the primordial guilt of Greek tragedy – the source and catalyst of their drama.”
Fábri Zoltán is one of the greatest figures of Hungarian and universal film art; his finest films are enduring works, significant historical documents of the twentieth century. Today this unparalleled oeuvre seems somewhat forgotten, but one hopes that posterity will one day rediscover its richness.
In his Sketchy Self-Confession of 1985 he wrote: “In 32 years, 21 films. Five grand prizes, twenty – or perhaps more – other awards at international festivals. Two nominations for the Oscar. I have been part of resounding successes and resounding failures. For 22 years president of the Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association. I received everything that can be received at home in terms of recognition. I was fortunate. Stubborn too. Forceful. Tenacious. A year and a half ago the smell of oil paint tempted me again. I took the brush back into my hand. A heap of paintings came into being. And now it is as if nothing had happened in between… It passed… It vanished… What passed? What vanished? Vanished – but what? Hoho!… Most likely… the breath on the mirror…”
[2015]