Gulyás János was born in 1946 into an intellectual family. Together with his older brother – later his creative partner – Gyula he grew up in the heavy-air Budapest of the 1950s, yet already with the desire to become a creator.
Amateur films
János Gulyás began making amateur films at a very young age together with his brother, Gyula. They joined the then highly active amateur film movement, regularly participated in various national showcases, and won numerous awards with their early works. They experimented with a wide range of genres, from film etudes to fiction and documentary films, even including animation. They founded and ran the film association called Cinema ’64 Studio.
Whether receiving awards at various amateur film festivals provided sufficient positive feedback is hard to say. The most significant enterprise of the Gulyás brothers at the time – the work titled Valóság – síppal, dobbal avagy tűzön, vízen át (Reality – With Whistles and Drums, or Through Fire and Water), shot over several months with four cameras and based on Antal Végh’s sociography Állóvíz (Stagnant Water) – was something even the festival organisers did not dare to show. Relying on disinformation, they hid it from viewers.
The documentary depicts a village plunged into deep poverty, and this work left a lifelong mark on the Gulyás brothers:
“Even the shooting itself was more than wild romanticism: it was one thing to read about, and another to actually see the conditions in which people lived there in the Nyírség. Based on the interviews, it seemed that the locals had no idea why they were so poor. The Party Committee took us seriously, so the district sent out a petty official who had no choice but to give us a statement. He just hemmed and hawed… It also became clear that systems of redistribution existed in Hungary: what the county received, half or two-thirds of it was swallowed up by the county seat, leaving nothing for those living on the periphery. There were unemployed people here even when vagrancy was punishable by law. […] The small crew trudged through mud, we slept in a storeroom, János on a workbench, and meanwhile the film reels had to be rewound, numbered, catalogued.” [1]
They confront – and force the viewer to confront – the inhuman indifference that forms the very essence of the system: everything and everyone is considered a real factor only insofar as their existence fits into the system’s ideological self-image that dresses naked authoritarianism in the empty phrases of “class struggle”, “the socialist type of human being”, “building communism”, and similar concepts. At the same time, they emphasise the importance of naming the actual situation: one cannot reflect on the world around us solely in artistically refined films born of rich visual imagination at a time when no forum exists where its fundamental reality can appear at all.
Studies
After several unsuccessful attempts, János Gulyás was admitted in 1970 to the mid-year cinematography class of the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts. The cinematography teachers György Illés and János Zsombolyai mostly provided professional explanations and assessments during the first year’s studio photography and lighting exercises. From the following year, however, due to their film commitments, chief lighting technician Béla Bolykovszky supervised the 35 mm cinematography exercises.
After graduation, he declined the television position offered by MTV, choosing instead to remain a freelancer, supporting himself through photography, 6×6 slide work, and studio camera jobs (quiz shows, studio discussions, recording announcers). Later, at the Híradó és Dokumentum Filmstúdió (Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio), he worked as cinematographer (and sometimes director) on dozens of newsreels and 17-minute documentaries, becoming familiar with 35 mm cameras, lenses and techniques.
As a cinematographer, János Gulyás thinks in processes. His camera does not simply follow events; even in a simple interview it is constantly scanning, observing, perceiving the environment. It lingers on objects and gestures, but this stepping away from the main process is not a cutaway illustration – it remains part of the same process. He does not merely observe a situation from the outside, nor does he simply immerse himself in it for aesthetic effect – he enters into a relationship with it. He achieves the strange effect whereby the camera, which is of course outside the frame since it creates the frame, nonetheless becomes part of the situation – not merely of the depicted situation but of the lived situation – becoming not only its subject but also its object.
If we consider that he began applying this cinematographic attitude in an era when even the simplest newsreel shots required a busload of personnel, extensive lighting setups, and heavy technical apparatus, we can conclude that the fresh perspective of János Gulyás (and a very few others) was fundamentally important for Hungarian documentary filmmaking – not only for documentaries but also for the documentary fiction film movement of the time, the so-called Budapest School.
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).
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.
The Documentary Studio
After the regime change, the renewed Hungarian Television became the most important medium. As it was still the television, it played a central role in providing information. Commercial broadcasting – which would eventually push the state channel practically to the sidelines – had not yet begun. In this environment MTV, financed by the state and operating under the constant pressure of successive governments while trying to exist as an independent medium, stood permanently in the crossfire of debates. The history of the Documentary Studio led by János Gulyás, however, is emblematic. A workshop capable of thinking in terms of the entire spectrum of Hungarian documentary filmmaking could come into existence, first under the leadership of János Gulyás (with the involvement of Gyula Gulyás), in 1993, seeking to free itself precisely from political, censorial and interest-serving attitudes. Clearly recognising from the transformations of film production that documentaries intended for theatrical release were becoming increasingly difficult to make, the genre – out of necessity, due to changing viewing habits – could survive only on television screens. Never before and never after was the television’s documentary output so rich. Never before and never after did MTV take such an active role in the creation of documentaries as during the two years the Studio operated under the Gulyás leadership. More than ten documentaries a month could be scheduled, including in-house productions as well as films from the Hunnia, Dialóg, Fórum and Opál Studios, and also from the Historical Interview Archive and both Fekete Doboz groups. Thirty-two previously invisible documentaries of the Balázs Béla Studio were finally broadcast. János compiled and commissioned reports from international documentary festivals and acquired works at these forums as well.
Political attacks on its existence culminated in its dismantling under the new, socialist government’s appointed president (Ádám Horváth). The new MTV leadership, thinking in terms of “sides”, considered the entire workshop an ally of the conservative camp, ignoring its actual impartiality, and on this basis (and because it did not envision the coming battle for advertising revenue with the emerging commercial channels being fought by allocating airtime to supposedly “time-stealing” documentaries) allowed it to wither, imposing increasingly humiliating conditions and thereby forcing the departure of one of the nation’s most significant filmmakers – a director whose artistic integrity and collaborative ethics had never been in question – from the head of the Studio.
Self-made films
Gulyás János’s career did not diverge from his brother’s as the result of a sudden and radical decision. The transition was gradual. They were still making films together in 1993 and even in 1997. It is more accurate to say that certain films begun jointly were completed by János alone (the reverse is less true). Among these we may include the previously discussed First World War tetralogy (more precisely its 1st, 3rd and 4th parts) and the final piece in the series of films made with Alfonz Medve. [5] The film Ne kavarj! (Don’t Stir Things Up!, 1997) essentially presents the greatest social transformation at the end of the century – the impact of the regime change on rural life – through the fate of the man whose life turns had already served as an exemplary model of peasant existence under Kádárism. Medve Alfonz’s turmoil in the 1990s reflects the failure of the regime change, and his disillusionment mirrors the sense of squandered opportunities that permeated – and continue to permeate – Hungarian society. We see this formerly vigorous leader figure, once capable of defying any difficulty, weaken and suffer defeats in struggles, the champion of “all the same”, “dafke”, survival. The earlier title Ne sápadj! (Don’t Turn Pale!) still alluded to regathering strength and resilience. Ne kavarj! already speaks the idiom of the new times. The new era in which cleverness has been replaced by manipulation, when advancement is secured not by performance but by manoeuvring and unworthy advantage.
Artistic films
The artistic protagonists of Gulyás’s films are not triumphant celebrities whose artistic canonisation has been completed, but rather possessed creators driven by a sense of vocation, who managed to produce significant bodies of work despite circumstances, despite exclusion, even persecution. Even the most recent film, Lujos (2013), portraying Pál Kő, does not bring us closer to the celebrated, Kossuth Prize–winning artist, but to the creator who continually encountered obstacles, who indeed received various honours, yet whose public works include several seriously exposed to decay (among them the wooden sculptures in the Mohács memorial park, considered his most important pieces).
What interests János Gulyás is not arrival, but struggle. Not the pedestal, but incompletion, marginalisation – and the strength that emerges precisely from this marginalisation. The most significant works of his career, his historical films, also point in this direction.
Historical films
Felvidék (Horná zem), Kárpátalja (Transcarpathia) and the Soviet labour camps; ’56 and the subsequent reprisals; the oppositional organising of the Kádár era, the samizdat circles – János Gulyás carries forward the momentum already visible in his earlier films made with his brother, continues to pose questions about the country’s past, and – interestingly – his answers still do not, and once again do not, coincide with the official positions or the topoi of a controlled public discourse.
Did anyone know that even after Trianon we managed to lose further territories? That after the lost world war Hungary was not only subjected to the deeply unjust – and not even intellectually defensible – stigma of collective guilt, not only treated with contempt by the victors, but that additional Hungarian lands were also claimed? Már szlovákok voltunk? (Were We Already Slovaks?) (1994) surveys the last half-century of the five villages which, after the Second World War and in accordance with the peace treaties concluding it, came under Czechoslovak jurisdiction.
The two films completed in 1996 (Gyermekdeportálások – 1956 [Child Deportations – 1956], Semmisnek kell tekinteni… [To Be Considered Null and Void…]) express the same concern with multiplied force. Here too we may ask: did anyone know that after 1956, again as a form of reprisal, Hungarian citizens – including children – were deported to the Soviet Union? Yet the film goes beyond this outrageous and tragic fact. The true horror actually begins with the return home of its protagonist, Árpád Szlama, former officer and revolutionary. For out there, in exchange for being allowed to return, he was “recruited” by force by the secret service. He had no intention of reporting on anything, so he chose emigration instead. He returned only to rescue his wife, kept as a hostage. He served 15 years. He was tortured, crippled; the wife for whom he had undertaken all this left him. Never, at any time, to anyone, was he allowed even to tell his story. Nor were the other deportees.
The film’s reception was highly characteristic. On one hand, the reporters involved attempted to appropriate the film, to rework it to their own liking – with the consequence that television channels refused to broadcast it. On the other hand, even those who did see it (it was screened briefly in a small cinema on the Körút) received it without much understanding.
László Eörsi levelled harsh accusations in Élet és Irodalom: “In these films, inaccuracies, untruths, exaggerations and nonsense follow one another. It seems the author is satisfied with a sensationalist title and is not inclined to bother with tracking down evidence.” [6] János Gulyás, naturally, counters with a question: given that “documents” are known to have been systematically manipulated by the authorities, how are they more reliable sources than the memories of eyewitnesses, of suffering individuals? “...I place greater emphasis on the person, on the human face and gestures, whose authenticity is more important to me than the people’s courts’ or agents’ documents produced under dictatorship and manipulated multiple times.” [7] (Tellingly, Eörsi’s articles are available in ÉS’s online archive at a single click – while Gulyás’s reply is not.)
Ám János Gulyás soon had to face even harsher criticism, attacking his integrity even more. The work Szamizdatos évek (Samizdat Years) (2003) blew a fuse on the so-called ‘liberal’ side of a country that by the 2000s had become completely divided. The film questions perhaps the greatest political legend of the post-regime-change years when, by giving voice to direct witnesses and participants, it offers an unusual overview of the underground organs of the so-called democratic opposition of the 1970s and 1980s, above all the emblematic samizdat Beszélő (lit: Speaker). In the film, János Gulyás presents the undeniable merits of the samizdat. The speakers recall the details of what was indeed a dangerous undertaking, personal examples of steadfastness. But there is more here than the uplifting parables of veterans reminiscing about heroic times. The former head of the secret service (József Horváth) is given the floor, who was kept precisely informed of the opposition’s smallest movements – and consciously did not intervene, but only to the extent that it was also in the party-state’s interest (and these interests are described by former functionary Imre Pozsgay). In other words, this underground network was partly controlled, partly manipulated. This in itself is an embarrassing claim, one that places the whole legendarium in heavy quotation marks. But even more embarrassing is recognising in the internal movements, actions and gestures of the samizdat community that the movement was also being manipulated from within, used for their own interests by its loudest voices, animators, informal leaders – who, unlike the expendable and at times actually sacrificed foot soldiers, the nameless many, either do not appear in János Gulyás’s film (because they do not wish to), or afterwards demand that the footage recorded with them not be used by the director.
This film too pokes at taboos. It questions the origin-myth, the carefully maintained myth of heroic dissidence. The reaction was not long in coming. Through the intervention of one of the film’s participants, its TV broadcast was blocked for a time, and at the national Film Week the pre-jury eliminated it from among the films deemed worthy of competition. Ferenc Dániel called János Gulyás’s work a ‘picture-report calumny-aria’ [8], accusing not only him of dishonesty but also his former ‘comrade-in-arms’, Ádám Modor, who assisted Gulyás, and István Orosz, who had once played a key role in printing Beszélő but who in the film paints a rather negative picture of his former colleagues (calling the latter a ‘Tartuffe-like martyr’).[9]
After this, János Gulyás continued to explore the histories of illegal papers and publishers. The three parts of Ismeretlenek (Unknown People) (2004–2009), and then Katalizátorok (Catalysts) (2009), were created partly with the collaboration of Ádám Modor. These films did not stir up storms like Szamizdatos évek. They were surrounded instead by silence – but a telling silence. But why? ‘János Gulyás’s film is about those avant-garde, self-willed, outspoken tough guys (and their women) who were unbuyable oppositionists before the regime change, and who remained outside the political mainstream even after it.’ [10]
Public Life Films
János Gulyás has always been interested – even in his joint works with his brother – in the true face of reality, the side that can be grasped, understood, and therefore expressed and depicted. His passionate commitment to truth is just as evident in his public-life-themed films as in his historical works. His personal tone, the expression of his own independent opinion (always formed through a thorough examination of the subject, striving for impartiality while openly assuming his own perspective) has always been characteristic of his films. This was paired with sensitivity to the fate of the fallen, the outcast, and the defenceless.
At the Klenovec First Roma Festival, the film Ahol cigány van, ott már gond van… (Where There Are Gypsies, There Is Already Trouble…, 1995), and its continuation, Mary története (Mary’s Story, 2000), received special awards. These are “follow-up” works that accompany a person’s life over a long period, telling important things through the fate of a young mother and a social worker. In the continuation (Mary’s Story), we follow Mary’s life after leaving the Rákospalota Girls’ Home. We learn about her past (the Fót Children’s Town, childhood abuse, a marriage that ran aground) and her present (social work at the Pomáz Work Therapy Institute). Eventually the woman who helps drug addicts, alcoholics, and the homeless becomes homeless herself, and out of necessity gives her own daughter into state care. The circle closes.
The 2007 film Civil jelentés (Civil Report) again managed to become a scandal-film, although in this case those to whom its creation was inconvenient chose the method of silence and obstruction. It examines the 2006 demonstration that ended in a rubber-bullet police attack and its perception, its appearance in the media: using classic investigative documentary methods, confronting political statements and declarations (above all the offhand and cynical remarks of Hungary’s then prime minister, which partly triggered and partly commented on the violent events) with the testimonies of the victims of the abuses, as well as presenting the work of the Civil Lawyers’ Committee demanding investigation of the acts of terror. It does all this with abundant archival material: partly footage from various television stations, partly the filmmakers’ own recordings (the Gulyás team – in this case János and his filmmaker son – were in the thick of events as they unfolded). Once again, an astonishing, infuriating film, 100 minutes of horror, one of the most significant documentary films of 2007 (if not the most significant) – and, as usual, excluded from the Film Week for laughable formal reasons. The director could take comfort in the special prize at the Csíkszereda Dok.Ro (2008) and a grand prize in Los Angeles.
Csak csendben, csak halkan (Just Quietly, Just Softly) – expresses, already in its title, János Gulyás’s view of the strategy of the government and political system at the time (2009), in his film about the closure of small rural schools. János Gulyás dedicated two films to the Devecser (Kolontár) red sludge disaster. János Gulyás has the energy, the time, the strength to listen to these stories, to return again and again to follow the changes. He wants to understand, and he wants others to understand, what happened in Devecser – because he wants to understand and wants others to understand what happened, what is happening to us, to ourselves. News reports are needed too, but they cannot reveal the essence. One must go there, lean close, bear witness. This is what we were. This is what we are. As Gabriella Lőcsei wrote in connection with the Devecser film, her words may be taken as a summary of János Gulyás’s oeuvre as well:
„For more than fifty years János Gulyás has been filming what his first appreciators called the laws of motion of Hungary. In the beginning he worked as an amateur filmmaker, together with his brother, Gyula Gulyás. Over time, however, society came to regard both of them as documentary filmmakers. As obsessive documentary filmmakers, because no matter what walls they ran into, and no matter how many prohibitions blocked their way, they always filmed in the thick of life. If, centuries from now, someone wishes to know what essentially took place here between 1962 and 2012, they will not be able to bypass the oeuvre of the Gulyás brothers in their research.” [11]
[2015]
[1] Erzsi Báthory: “„A dokumentumfilmezés felől nézzük a produceri rendszert" ("We look at the production system from the point of view of documentary filmmaking") - Conversation with Gyula Gulyás and János Gulyás, Filmkultúra, 2009/4.
[2] Filmvilág, 1980/12.
[3] Spiró György Spiró: Pofonok völgye… (Valley of Slaps...) Filmvilág, 1980/12.
[4] Péter Pál Tóth: Dokumentumfilm és kreativitás (Documentary and Creativity), Filmvilág, 2010/7.
[5] Since János's individual oeuvre is not only significant in a professional, artistic sense, but also impressive in terms of its quantity, it is multifaceted and extensive (there is probably no one, specifically no one, who has made more films than him in Hungarian cinema: more than forty after 1993 alone - if we consider the series, sometimes comprising 12 episodes, as a single batch!), it can therefore only be dealt with in a tangential manner. A whole book could be devoted to an overview of this vast oeuvre.
[6] ÉS (Élet és irodalom), 2001/7.
[7] Az Eörsi-féle tényverziók. In ÉS, 2001/11.
[8] Szamizdatos évek – Motyog a tanú, zötyög a felvevőgép
(http://magyar.film.hu/filmhu/magazin/szamizdatos-evek-szakma-kritika.html)
[9] Later, Orosz got into a sharp dispute with László Eörsi - and he did not hesitate either to call his debate partner a liar.
[10] Gabriella Lőcsei: Csöbörből vödörbe. Magyar Nemzet, 2006. 06. 18.
[11] ibid.