Gulyás Gyula was born in 1944 into a middle-class, intellectual family. He was a child in the 1950s, an early teenager in ’56, and reached adulthood during the period euphemistically referred to as the country’s consolidation – that is, the era when, after the crushed revolution, the Party’s expectation of cooperation in exchange for certain concessions gradually became an internalised necessity for the population. As a sharp-minded, multi-talented yet rebellious and self-willed teenager, he repeatedly came into conflict with the educational system. His later work Tanítványok [Disciples] is based on his experiences at the Kölcsey Gymnasium.
Amateur films
Gyula Gulyás and his younger brother, János, became involved at a very young age in the then highly active amateur film movement. They regularly participated in various national festivals, winning numerous awards for their early works. They experimented with the widest range of genres, from film etudes to fiction and documentary films, all the way to animation. They were the founders and operators of the film association called Cinema ’64 Studio.
In his time, Gyula Gulyás was one of the leading figures of the amateur-film scene. Yet he was not admitted to the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts. According to a much later verbal remark (more likely a slip of the tongue) by the academy’s then-rector, Herskó János: “…that year they accepted perhaps ten people to the academy out of the twelve applicants who remained for the final round, and party headquarters called in on behalf of eight of them. I didn’t ask who the other one was they didn’t call for.”[1]
The most important project created within Cinema ’64 was Valóság – síppal, dobbal avagy tűzön, vízen át [Reality – With Whistles and Drums, or Through Fire and Water]. Based on Antal Végh’s sociography Állóvíz [Backwater], the documentary film presents a village pushed into extreme poverty, and the experience left a lifelong mark on the Gulyás brothers:
“The filming itself was more than just wild romanticism: reading about it and seeing with our own eyes the conditions in which people lived out in the Nyírség were two entirely different things. Based on the interviews it seemed that the people living there had no idea why they were so poor! The Party Committee took us seriously and so the district sent out a lower-ranking fellow who was forced to give us a statement. He merely hemmed and hawed… It also became clear that redistributive systems existed in Hungary, and that half or two-thirds of what the county received was absorbed by the county seat, leaving nothing for those living on the periphery. There were unemployed people here already at a time when ‘dangerous vagrancy’ was punishable by law. […] Our tiny crew sloshed through mud, slept in a storage room – János on a workbench – and meanwhile the film reels had to be rewound, numbered, and recorded…”[2]
In their film, they confront – and make the viewer confront – the inhuman indifference that constitutes the very essence of the system: everything and everyone is considered a real factor only to the extent that their existence fits into the system’s ideological self-image, which dresses up its naked authoritarianism in empty concepts such as “class struggle”, “the socialist type of man”, “the building of communism”, and similar notions.
At the same time, they emphasise the importance of stating the actual situation: one cannot (only) reflect on the world around us in richly imagined and intellectually substantial art films when there is no forum whatsoever where the fundamental reality of that world can appear in any form.
Joint works with János Gulyás
The Gulyás brothers became involved from the 1970s in the work of the Balázs Béla Studio, which served as a workshop for young filmmakers. They became perhaps the most important creators of the specifically Hungarian documentary-film method and style developed there. Their method – preserved to this day because its honesty and authenticity make it impossible to outdate – can be described by fixing 3 basic principles:
1. In contrast to the earlier documentary practice, which positioned the filmmaker as an objective observer and thus gave them a quasi-judging role, in their films the presence of the creators themselves appears and even receives decisive emphasis, along with the inclusion of the very situation of filming within the film. By this they essentially declare that the slice of reality they perceive, observe, and attempt to understand also includes the crew and the filmmakers themselves; they cannot help but judge, but their judgment is not unappealable.
2. They do not wish to influence the processes unfolding in front of the camera, using only the most necessary so-called cutaway shots, and not as illustrations. They devoted time to becoming participants in the processes; they became the personal acquaintances of the subjects; the shoots themselves lasted for years, and on several occasions they returned to the original locations years or decades later, dedicating new films to following the changes.
3. Finally, and perhaps most importantly: the Gulyás brothers were committed to topics that, in their own time, were neither advisable nor advantageous to speak about.
Most precisely, it was perhaps György Spiró who summed up what the film-historical significance of the Gulyás brothers consists (or consisted) in: “It seems they have discovered the documentary large form. By giving up the snapshot, they make time an organic part of the work. Certainly, they too must once have had numerous preconceptions derived from earlier films, earlier ideologies, earlier aesthetics. They have given them up so thoroughly that they are no longer visible. They reject the symbolic possibilities of the snapshot and concentrate their attention on change and variability. They do not wish to know anything in advance about their material. They simply want to get to know the chosen subject.” [3]
Vannak változások (There Are Some Changes, 1978)
Ten years after the shocking diagnosis presented in Reality…, the directing duo returned to the Szabolcs village to assess what had happened since then. The result proved devastating. Electricity had indeed been introduced to Penészlek, pavements were built, and other measures were taken to make the living environment more comfortable – yet the deepest problem remained untouched: the system that regarded the human being not as a real person with a fate, needs, desires, and faith, but merely as a population, as a client, as a demographic figure – in other words, as a statistical data point, a native deprived of any ability to influence his own destiny. This had not changed and could not change, since this very outlook formed the basis of the communist system itself. Parallel to these superficial measures, which did nothing to address the core issue, emigration intensified, and by the mid-1970s the village presented the image of a frozen habitat, a community condemned to death. The film exposes the mechanisms that – contrary to official success propaganda – truly shaped society (the complete ignorance of the leadership regarding real problems, and their brochure-mentality that viewed people as mere supporting characters in the Grand Salvation Narrative). These mechanisms were inseparable from the fate that befell this remote village. The film never received official distribution. Interested viewers could only see it in obscure cultural centres and clubs.
Despite the film being ignored, this work – which barely managed to fit into the category of what was merely tolerated, a provocative film that criticised the system more openly than anything before it – nevertheless opened the doors of professional filmmaking for the brothers.
Pofonok völgye, avagy Papp Lacit nem lehet legyőzni (The Valley of Slaps, or You Can’t Beat Laci Papp, 1980)
The Valley of Slaps is, contrary to what one might expect, not a colourful, triumphant retelling of a success story, but a multilayered, detail-oriented and profoundly honest portrait film. It simultaneously presents the athlete, the celebrity consciously constructing his own legend, and the vulnerable little man whose professional career was destroyed – by political decree – by the very people who otherwise held him up before the nation as a model to follow.
“Interviews, documentary footage, old newsreels, conversations, László Papp’s own recollections, training sessions, sports reporters, writers, journalists, the family, coaches, enemies, absent and silent enemies, the staged bar-fight from the feature film starring László Papp, politicians, fans, the audience, and the filmmakers themselves speak before us. Not every word of theirs deserves to be carved in stone. But somehow everyone betrays themselves. Somehow this camera is very objective. The journalist comes off badly, lethargically declaiming beautifully ringing clichés in his ‘bourgeois’ apartment; the writer comes off badly, whose anaemic intellectualism might even go unnoticed in a different context. The protagonist himself comes off badly too, for we see him rattling off texts written by others, and we see him repeat his own professionally crafted jokes word for word before different audiences. But the filmmakers themselves come off badly as well.”[4]
Gulyás and his brother present Laci Papp as an entirely ordinary man, someone who could easily be our neighbour. He makes witty remarks in the sense that he has good “bonmots”, but the filmmakers do not endow him with the role of a wise oracle. The vulnerability of the Great Man is revealed – and it is precisely this vulnerability that is elevated. In the Olympian’s fate we can also sense the heavy, hard-to-bear weight of history.
Ne sápadj! (Do Not Pale!, 1981)
Just as in their next film, whose protagonist is not a public figure but is nevertheless an exceptional personality, the Gulyás brothers succeed in capturing in him the Hungarian peasant – the peasant-citizen who has always been looked down upon, although in reality he is the one who sustains the country, not only through his labour but through preserving his own cultural identity. In the life story of Alfonz Medve we see reflected everything that has happened in the Hungarian countryside over recent decades: we become acquainted with peasant thinking (whose worldview, honed over centuries through nature-based experience, proves at least equal – if not superior – to the urban “trousered” people’s rational or the intelligentsia’s intellectual ways of understanding), and with the unadorned wisdom of a man who has seen much and endured much in order to survive. This man, however, is not placed on a pedestal; he appears with all his vulnerability: his strengths and weaknesses, his love of life and his cunning. As a human being. At the same time, we see the internal dynamics of the peasant world completely transformed by collectivisation: the creative application – and at times the circumvention – of laws, and the achievements gained at great cost, only to be neglected or deliberately destroyed by those in power. From all this it becomes clear that the law is what is inhuman and divorced from life, not the peasant who situates himself outside it – the peasant who, like Alfonz Medve, is at times imprisoned precisely because he considers the interests of society (in this case, his own community, his village) more important than written statutes. Not incidentally, the inhuman operation of political power – which disregards the real needs of society – is exposed (as it is, in essence, in every Gulyás film).
Magyarok és az első világháború (Hungarians and the First World War, 1981–97)
The film tetralogy begun in 1981 differs from the earlier works in that it is built on interviews. The veterans of the First World War – who, at the time of filming, were already well over eighty – do not merely recount their wartime experiences; they articulate things that had been surrounded by more than half a century of silence. From their accounts there emerges, on the one hand, a history of the Great War shaped through individual viewpoints and personal experiences, and on the other hand the very nature of this long silence itself becomes visible. The four years of war – one of the gravest tragedies of Hungarian history, ending in national dismemberment – had served during the Horthy era as justification for the extremist politics that would inevitably lead to yet another catastrophe: defeat in the Second World War and moral annihilation. After 1945, however, the First World War vanished from public consciousness as though it had been nothing more than a mournful but necessary prelude to the triumphant rise of communist ideas (a victory that was temporary in Hungary but proved lasting in the Soviet Union). Those who had lived through and suffered its battles and consequences interested neither public opinion nor, very often, even their own families. For this reason, what happens in the Gulyás brothers’ First World War films is something different – in a certain sense more – than a simple evocation of history: it is therapy, a confrontation with an immense trauma and an attempt at working through it. The first part, Meggondoltan, megfontoltan [Deliberately, With Consideration], deals with the outbreak of the war and the southern and eastern fronts. The second part, the Nyon Festival–awarded Én is jártam Isonzónál [I, Too, Have Been There at the Isonzo], examines the events on the Italian front. Central to this film – indeed, forming its backbone – is a commemorative journey to Italy. A busload of veterans travel to the region of the former battles, visiting battlefields and memorial sites, and the deeply moved old men take part in a joint commemoration with their former enemies, the Italian veterans. Beyond the recounting of wartime experiences and the catharsis of this meeting, the film sharply reveals two very different ways of approaching the Great War: the Italian soldiers lived their lives honoured as heroes, while their former Hungarian opponents were consigned to suppression, denial and disregard. The third part, Soha többé katonát nem akarok látni [I Never Want to See a Soldier Again], concerns the end of the war, the subsequent revolution and communist takeover, and the simultaneous efforts at national defence. The fourth part, Rablóbéke [Robber’s Peace], examines the Treaty of Trianon and its consequences.
Törvénysértés nélkül (Without Breaking the Law, 1988)
Between 1949 and 1953, the punishment which went by this name was officially meant to target those who, for various reasons, were deemed enemies of the people’s democracy. In practice, it meant that individuals – often entire families – who had committed no crime (and could not have been charged with any) were stripped of their homes and property solely because of the vague, never clearly defined category of political unreliability. These people were relocated far from their original places of residence, usually to isolated farms, sometimes even to pigsties or barns intended for sheep breeding, where they were forced to perform compulsory labor while being deprived of all human rights.
This system was abolished by the first Imre Nagy government (partially, since many deportees were not allowed to return to their homes and never recovered their confiscated belongings), but speaking about their plight remained strictly forbidden for decades. The Gulyás brothers’ film broke this taboo. It is not only an act of political courage but, in its aesthetic consistency, also one of the most significant Hungarian films of the 1980s – indeed, likely of Hungarian film history.
The method resembles that of the Isonzo film: interviews, returns to the sites, faces, speech and silence. A deliberate renunciation of archival footage. A sparse structure that seems simple at first glance, following events chronologically. This is precisely why the film’s impact becomes elemental when that chronology suddenly – at first almost imperceptibly to the viewer – breaks.
“Almost every person’s story begins with the account of their own deportation. These testimonies – coming from people of different regions, different social positions, levels of education and convictions – repeat themselves almost ritualistically. Until, at the end of the first part, when we are already deep into the film, a couple appears whom we have not yet seen, telling their own story. The reflex created by the film kicks in: we pay attention to differences too, but it is the repetitions that stand out. We begin to relate everything to the context of what we have heard so far; we imagine it – because we have no other reference point. Yet there are disturbing moments that fill the atmosphere with a strange tension. For example, they recount that men and women were separated – this is new information. Then one sentence suddenly places the entire situation, and in fact the entire film, into a completely different dimension: ‘Mengele was standing there.’ The shock, the realisation, is indescribable. They have not been talking about the Hortobágy up to this point. And yet they have – because the mechanism of the two tyrannies does not differ. The couple, of course, later ends up on the Hortobágy as well; in reality, they do have a basis for comparison. Thus on the Hortobágy – not according to the statistics of inhumanity, but in its essence – Auschwitz continues.
All this can only play out on the faces. How banal and foolish it would be to smear over this story by dramatizing external events!
The greatest paradox of filmmaking is precisely that not everything must be shown, indeed not everything may be shown. The task of film – not only of documentary film, but of cinema as such – is to express, through images, the unshowable, the unrepresentable. The real film unspools inside. There is no shot that can compete with the inner image that the outer, film-created evocation can bring forth. This is the truth of cinema, and the truth of these ‘talking heads’ as well.” [5]
The documentary, ahead of all feature films, won the Grand Prize at the 1987 Hungarian Film Week (and one additional prize as well). It also received a Silver Award in Chicago – although at the time Hungarian newspapers did not report on this, and even the Gulyás brothers themselves learned only years later, after the regime change, that the award had been accepted by some state employee, as well as the prize money (which can no longer be determined), that too disappeared with it. The award resurfaced only a decade later: the Gulyás brothers received its copy from Chicago.
In any case, the film and the prizes finally brought state recognition to the Gulyás brothers. In 1988 they received the Balázs Béla Award. In the same year they were also given two other awards (the Award for Hungarian Art and the 15. March award), then had to wait nearly a decade and a half for their next major recognition (Artist of Merit).
Málenkij robot (Malenky robot, 1989)
The years preceding the regime change were perhaps the most crucial period for a cinematic genre devoted to examining the so-called white spots of Hungarian history – the long-silenced past finally being brought to account. Film played an extraordinarily important role in dismantling the communist system of lies and, consequently, in ensuring that by the time the regime change arrived, more or less everyone understood the necessity of transformation (even if hardly anyone dared to hope it would truly happen). And it was especially important that documentary films finally allowed the real world to be seen face to face – above all, the confrontation with our own stolen, denied past. The Gulyás brothers’ role in all this was decisive.
In Málenkij robot, the prisoners deported to Siberian concentration camps – forced to work there for decades and never later receiving any form of compensation (neither moral nor material) for the vile crime committed against them by the Soviet system – recount their horrific stories on Hungarian film for the first time. The teenage leventék deported from the village of Dudar committed no war crimes whatsoever; nothing justified their decade-long imprisonment under inhuman conditions in Siberia other than petty revenge and the power-technical act of intimidation that the Soviet empire, which had brought Hungary into its sphere of influence, placed above all else.
The Gulyás brothers once again build their film from the survivors’ testimonies, touching also upon their later humiliations suffered after returning home. The two-part work is a staggering chronicle of suffering. At the same time, it also provides an exact picture of the mechanisms of repression and denial that later took hold.
Balladák filmje I. és II. (Film of Ballads I and II, 1989)
Another taboo topic – perhaps even more difficult to approach and to make part of public discourse than the theme of suppressed or rewritten historical facts – was the fate of Hungarians living beyond the country’s borders. The situation became especially critical in Romania during the 1980s, where the dictator, by then having abandoned every trace of restraint and showing increasingly visible signs of madness, announced the so-called village-destruction program. Under the slogans of urbanisation and more rational economic organisation, this plan in fact aimed at eliminating rural life altogether and placing the rural population under even stricter control. This gravely affected Transylvanian Hungarians – indeed, endangered their very existence. In this context, coming forward with the Film of Ballads project was more than an act of artistic courage: it was a determined, mobilising political act – simply by presenting what the culture of Transylvanian Hungarians (and other nationalities) actually was.
In Transylvania, the Gulyás brothers systematically and deliberately recorded everything they considered worth preserving: rituals, folk customs, objects and traditional dress, music, song, ballads – all elements of the region’s cultural heritage. Alongside these visually striking, colourful and compelling materials, they captured something perhaps even more important: the simple details of everyday life. Sowing and harvesting, herding animals, weaving, baking bread, handling animals, plants and the environment, children’s games and adult pastimes. They were never even tempted by the romantic, kitschy pseudo-patriotism that later became so uncomfortably fashionable.
Using a smuggled camera, travelling in utmost secrecy, the filmmakers reached these places and recorded the remnants of a culture close to us – one that belongs to us in the most intimate sense, yet one we had never truly seen – and its slow erosion.
In the two parts of Balladák filmje, the ethnographer Zoltán Kallós served as the directors’ guide through remote villages and uncharted paths, thereby sharing with the world the treasures he had researched with devoted effort throughout his life. The film, constructed from episodes, bears this peculiar fragmentariness – the struggle against technical constraints – as an integral part of its form.
Films about Szék
On the same foundation rests their filmsociographic work made in Szék, an ethnic Hungarian village in the Mezőség region of Transylvania. In one of the Gulyás brothers’ last collaborations, they once again summarise everything they created together as filmmakers. The film contains their characteristic decades-long tracking of events: Széki lassú (Slow Dance of Szék), completed in 1993 but containing footage from as early as 1969, spans from one wedding to another – only the second time, it is the daughter who gets married. The following year’s Kinő az ember a meséből (One Outgrows the Tale) commemorates the village’s long-deceased storyteller, the passionate and larger-than-life Klára Győri. The film once again displays the sociographic sensitivity and reflective approach that always characterised the Gulyás brothers. They visit Szék almost as family members or very close friends. People open up to them, and the presence of the participants is unforced, natural.
“The dramaturgical framework of Slow Dance of Szék is built on confrontation. The filmmakers seek out the protagonists of their documentary footage from Szék shot twenty-five years earlier. The film therefore does more than report on the life and transformations of a Transylvanian community; its true protagonist is time itself. We see the faces young, then wrinkled, older, after a quarter of a century, marked by the weight of difficult decades. Capturing the passing of time is one of the unfailing wonders of the moving image. Nothing is required but a quarter century of patient waiting. The rest is accomplished by the merciless scenarist – time.” – writes György Báron.
And indeed, here too, there are changes. Slow but relentless changes that unsettle, and in their unhurried tempo – perceptible only across decades – gradually engulf the old village. In 1969 one notices at most hairline fractures in a once coherent worldview; a quarter century later it appears in shards. Not only human lives are destined to perish – communities, cultures, entire peoples are too, the film suggests.
The brothers continued to make films together afterwards (Túlvilági beszélő, Kicsi, mérges öregúr, Mint miközülünk egy [Speaker from the Otherworld, Little, Angry Old Man, One of Us]), yet in 1997 their artistic paths diverged for good. In their individual films, both Gyula and János continue to build on the common foundations they once developed together.
Self-made films
Mámo (1997)
A portrait of an elderly woman from Parajd (Praid, Transylvania, Hargita County, a village near Szováta), a certain Mrs József Nagy, is drawn by Gyula Gulyás. She is a completely ordinary widow; her name is completely ordinary – and her life is completely ordinary as well. That is, it is full of struggle and suffering, including a disabled child she must continue to care for even at her age. Every two or three years the director returns to visit her, registering the changes – this too is a “follow-up” film, naturally – and he grows ever closer to her. In this quietly moving film there is a single twist, a single but quite bold directorial decision. Because of her illness the woman is forced to walk bent at the waist. The director takes a bold leap and films the entire work from this camera angle. From waist level. The unusual perspective creates a strange visual world. It reveals an unknown face of reality.
Gyula Gulyás’s solo works came to be defined by taking stock, by accounting, by confrontation. Looking back on things once considered significant, true or even inspiring in their time – but which, viewed in another light, acquire a wholly different meaning.
Tanítványok (Students, 1999)
These works also include his fiction films. Even his former amateur film – Students, completed in 1967 and restored in 1999 with a new sound mix – belongs among them. Its story is unusual: In a small-town secondary school a regime of terror prevails, based on cruel, total control, intimidation and an informer network. When a once-expelled student returns, everyone projects something different onto his appearance: some see freedom, others rebellion, revolution, change, some kind of redemption. Although he himself wants nothing more than to be left alone, when rebellion finally breaks out – and is quickly crushed by the overwhelming force provided by students loyal to the system – the authorities who recognise an enemy in him (and by this point it is no longer merely the form master exercising autocracy within the school who is at issue, against whom the actual revolt was launched) physically destroy him. The film’s oppressive atmosphere evokes Orwell (whom Gyula Gulyás could hardly have read in 1966). The obscure, ambiguous events, the stylised, theatrical, even ritualistic scenes, the elliptical dramaturgy, the emblematic characters who can be understood not through psychological motivations or social determinations but through the roles they play in modelling power structures, the jagged dialogues all depict a world rendered unlivable by the absence of freedom and by the hopelessness of achieving it. Through its model-like structure the film does not depict but conjures, with elemental force, the world of oppression and the inevitability of failure in acting against it.
The film clearly connects to the modernist tendencies of the early 1960s, especially to Jancsó’s works, yet it speaks in a wholly individual voice. The sung, chanted, threatening mass scenes that appear in it do not imitate, but actually anticipate (!) the linked-arm, mostly movement-song–based group marches that later became one of the stylistic hallmarks associated with Jancsó, appearing in his films only from Fényes szelek (Sparkling Winds, 1968) onwards. Since Jancsó was chairman of the jury at the very amateur film festival (1968) where Students was, by party order, denied the grand prize, he naturally knew Gyula Gulyás’s work. It may not be overly bold to suppose that this amateur film, largely forgotten for three decades, might also have inspired one of film history’s greatest directors at the time.
In any case, the director’s prize at Mediawave for the 1999 restoration and the Film Critics’ Award for Best Short Film in 2001 (since Students runs 61 minutes) indicate that this early work lost nothing of its power over those thirty-two years.
Fény hull arcodra (Light falls on your face, 2001)
The only fiction film created under professional circumstances was based on a work by László Király, Transylvanian poet and short-story writer. In an abstract space (somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps in Hungary), in an abstract time (after some war, perhaps following the suppression of the 1848–49 War of Independence), among abstractly conceived protagonists (a hiding war veteran, his beloved – who is the widow of the superior of his current lover – and the reclusive scholar who temporarily shelters them), a poetic parable unfolds. A parable of homelessness, of being thrown into the world. The three of them embody exclusion and consciously chosen detachment in an environment willing to achieve consolidation even at the price of compromise and submission, surrendering control to herd-minded violence. Numerous similarities can be found between the meticulously crafted, finely textured visual world of Light Falls on Your Face and the rustic, distressed textures that characterize the visual impact of Students.
The film is akin to Amerikai anzix (American Torso) not only because of its theme, its atmosphere, its profound despair arising from the recognition of the unchangeability of things, but also because of its innovative visual solutions. Gábor Bódy’s career-defining film (one he never surpassed during his short life), whose sketch-like story is likewise connected to the defeated freedom fight, is like an artefact from the nineteenth century – a film fragment from the pre-cinematic era. In Gyula Gulyás’s fiction film, the presence of a special optical observing–image-making device – imagined only in this form, simultaneously a periscope, telescope and camera obscura – is of no lesser importance. Through it, certain sequences of the depicted events appear, providing a unique frame, viewpoint and observer’s position not only for the scholar within the film, but for the viewer as well. The unusual film-poem also reflects on perception itself, on the narrow limits of human sensory experience. It is not an easy work. At the 2002 Film Week it was honoured with the rather complicatedly named “director’s prize for a work possessing the strongest cinematographic value and employing the tools of visual expression”.
Szembesítés (Confrontation, 2000-2014)
This monumental project, currently consisting of eight 50–60-minute parts, examines the events in Marosvásárhely in 1990 (the peaceful demonstration in support of the Hungarian school, and the brutal reaction to it – in other words, the pogrom), as well as their consequences (the protection of the perpetrators, the imprisonment of the victims, and the severely deteriorated relationship between the local Hungarian and Romanian communities). It follows the unfolding of events from multiple narratives and perspectives. These events, occurring only a few months after the Romanian revolution – which had initially given grounds for great hope regarding Hungarian–Romanian coexistence – revealed how deeply intolerance, hatred of Hungarians, and a paranoid fear of possibly losing Transylvania had permeated Romanian society. They also showed that peaceful coexistence based on mutual respect has no chance so long as identity itself rests on false premises. The film exposes the motives of the Hungarian community’s peaceful demonstration, the violent reaction not merely tolerated but actively supported by the authorities, and finally the disgraceful cover-up (the whitewashing of the criminal, vandalistic rampage and even the shifting of blame onto the defending Hungarians), which completely undermined the credibility of the newly empowered “revolutionaries” in the eyes of the Hungarian community.
Anyone who watches this film can, even if they knew it from nowhere else, learn with considerable accuracy about the facts and the real motivations behind those facts. At the same time, the film is not only an extensive tableau, but also an articulation of a far more universally valid idea. What appears here is social and political violence as such. The anatomy of this violence unfolds with astonishing authenticity. And with it comes the recognition that sometimes the only tragic choice available to a person is whether to become a participant in – or a victim of – the violence that is incited in the service of higher political aims.
Idézés (Summons, 2009)
After works on fine-art themes, a portrait film dedicated to anthropologist Ernő Kunt titled Az ember néha képpé válik (A Man Sometimes Becomes an Image), and a half-finished sculptor portrait Öngörgető (The Self-Rolling One) about Gábor Pogány, the director once again created a film connected to his own most personal past. Idézés (Summons) is a disconcerting portrait of an old creative comrade-in-arms. Tamás Micsinay (later Mikes) was a member of Cinema ’64 just as the Gulyás brothers were. Part of the inner circle of friends, he was a strange, unreadable man whose broad culture, supposedly destined talent, and steadfast resistance to the communist system were taken for granted by everyone around him. Most people agreed that he had been a colourful personality, regretting that his seemingly epoch-making talent never fulfilled itself. His relatively early death also appeared as a tragic, and in its tragedy typical, fate – like so many gifted individuals crushed because of their political views.
However, the film takes an unexpected turn. After the regime change, while researching files in the Historical Office, Gyula Gulyás discovered – through the shockingly extensive agent reports – that his amateur-filmmaker friend had in fact been an informant of the III/III. He had provided abundant information to state security about the very friends and colleagues who admired him and placed their trust in him. The film attempts to unravel this confused, unbelievable, unpleasant affair – one that is nonetheless hideously characteristic of the era – fully acknowledging the impossibility of understanding it, recognising that the motives cannot be reconstructed, leaving only astonishment and bitter disillusionment.
“An established method of the Gulyás brothers is to show the material to the participants, and footage from this screening also becomes part of the final film. At this screening sits Tamás Micsinay’s daughter. Including her in the process of understanding overrides, in my eyes, every flaw of the film. When, in the first part, the agent’s likeable adult daughter appears for the first time, the viewer’s heart stops. It turns out she knows nothing of her father’s past and speaks of him with affection and respect. After a while, she herself brings up the accusations. We do not see how she reacts to the documents placed before her, but her situation echoes a sentence by László Rajk: that what matters is not what the unmasked informers feel, but what their children feel. We may rage at those informers, widely respected and placed in high office, who were exposed only after death, but their story becomes complete only with the shame and pain borne by the family. This time, the child of the guilty does not need to learn the truth from the press, nor is she left alone with the disgrace; instead, together with the victims of informing, she is given the chance to process the facts – and this is, unquestionably, the moral triumph of the Gulyás style of filmmaking.” [6]
Gyula Gulyás and János Gulyás may now be travelling in separate “vehicles”, yet they remain on the same road they – among others – helped discover, a road that still leads toward discovering truth. Over time this road has not become smoother; indeed, it has become increasingly uneven and difficult. Yet they have fought and won their own artistic revolution, one that can be considered deeply successful.
[2015]
[1] Mihancsik Zsófia: Filmek a föld alatt – Conversation with Gyula Gulyás, 2007/7.
[2] Báthory Erzsi: „A dokumentumfilmezés felől nézzük a produceri rendszert" – Conversation with Gyula Gulyás and János Gulyás, Filmkultúra, 2009/4.
[3] Filmvilág, 1980/12.
[4] Spiró György: Pofonok völgye… Filmvilág, 1980/12.
[5] Tóth Péter Pál: Dokumentumfilm és kreativitás, Filmvilág, 2010/7.
[6] Bori Erzsébet: A velünk élő spicli, Filmvilág, 2011/4.