Marcell Jankovics
Marcell Jankovics is an emblematic figure of Hungarian animated cinema. Beyond his work in film, he achieved distinction in several other fields: as a cultural historian, the author of popular works on cultural history, an illustrator, and a creator of numerous television programmes. His body of work has become a defining part of Hungarian culture.
Guided by a holistic mindset and the principle of “creating while preserving”, Jankovics balanced independence, the desire to follow his own path, and respect for tradition – qualities that complemented and reinforced one another. He was the kind of creator who, beneath the apparent progress and ever-changing surface, sought permanence, yet remained experimental, keen to exploit the technological possibilities of his time. “…accept the order and laws of the world, learn to live with them, but do not rebel against them, for it is hopeless”, he wrote in A Nap könyve (lit. The Book of the Sun). This sentence could well serve as a guiding maxim for his own life.
Jankovics originally trained to become an architect – a path denied to him due to the disadvantages of his cadre file (a record used under Hungary’s socialist-era political and social classification system). Nevertheless, the consciousness, careful planning, editing, and precision inherent to architecture consistently manifested in all his creative work, whatever the genre. Animation was the field in which he could first reveal himself. Although it was a path born of necessity, his difficult childhood experiences had taught him adaptability: how to navigate constraints and opportunities while maintaining a sense of inner freedom. True to his exacting standards, he expanded and imbued this essentially entertaining medium with new significance. In his animated films, as in poetry, he regarded compression and condensation as guiding principles, and the exploration of inner landscapes and dreams became increasingly central to his oeuvre.
The 1960s
The talented young animator, distinguished by a unique vision, soon received opportunities to test his abilities. In the early 1960s, during the first phase of his career, he produced commercial films and later became the director and character designer of the series Gusztáv (lit. Gustav). He regarded the series as professional training, yet it did not resonate with him emotionally: he disliked episodes that mocked the petty failings of the common man, finding them offensive to his social sensitivity. Although he could showcase his sense of humour, the role felt restrictive and uninspiring; he longed for deeper, more meaningful tasks.
He sought to free himself from the obligatory gags and animation themes demanded by the era. Throughout his career, his artistic attitude was marked by a commitment to usefulness: to disseminate knowledge (introducing Hungary’s cultural heritage and history to a wider audience), to strengthen Hungarian identity, and to foster a healthy, distortion-free, and moderate vision of community.
During the production of his first series, he was already given the chance to create feature films and thus experiment with various genres. He directed Szilveszteri legenda (lit. New Year’s Legend, 1965) based on a short story by his contemporary Ferenc Karinthy. In 1967, he completed the short film Tendenciák (lit. Trends), an animated vision of humanity’s future built on collage elements and line metamorphoses. This film, though a waypoint on the path to finding his true artistic direction, is notable for preserving much information about the era of hand-drawn animation.
1968 marks a significant professional turning point in Jankovics’s career with the creation of the commercial film Álmok szárnyán (lit. On the Wings of Dreams), which won the Golden Cedar Award in Beirut, 1970. The short film was commissioned by Air India. Painted with acrylic on celluloid, the intention was not to imitate oil paint, but to aim for diluted, watercolour-like effects. In this film, he employed the technique of animation metamorphosis, based on sequences of free yet logical and meaningful associations. He extended Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage of attraction – the idea of 1+1=3, that a third emerges from two images or thoughts – translating it into the language of animation: film editing is replaced with animated transformation. This technique would later become his trademark, dominating his feature-length animated films: beyond rhythm, it is the layering of associations, visual ideas and thoughts that gives his films their dynamic and unmistakable character. His style and content were also already defined by the use of archetypal images and cultural references – visual quotations of cultural history. The imagery in his commercials was aesthetically refined, with formal transitions enriching the visuals with successive layers of meaning. “Everything can be transformed into anything, but not everything has meaning”, he believed, deliberately avoiding superficial or self-serving ideas and transformations that are merely amusing.
In 1969, he completed Hídavatás (Inauguration), his first successful, award-winning animated film that was no longer a commercial. Here, he perhaps first consciously employed colour dramaturgy to evoke emotional effects. Although he did not write the screenplay, a fact perceptible in the work, the animation itself was technically superb. Sensitivity to situational humour appears in this film as well, alongside an exploration of aggression and the manipulability of the masses.
In 1970, he produced his first black-and-white film, Mélyvíz (Deep Waters). The dramatic effect was enhanced by a visual style reminiscent of linocuts and lithographs. Structurally, his works were carefully composed: after a rising sequence comes the dramatic climax – beyond the halfway mark and slightly beyond the golden ratio – followed by a gentle resolution, akin to romantic narrative curves. In Deep Waters, the human face is broken down into geometric shapes, which disintegrate into lines, symbolising irreversible destruction through animation metamorphosis. The protagonist cries for help – his voice is that of Jankovics – but his cry falls on insensitive, deaf ears visually amplified by the paradoxical setting of the entire drowning scene taking place within a giant labyrinthine ear.
In 1971, he created the object-animation film Mással beszélnek (lit. Line Busy), addressing alienation and mutual indifference. This is the only film in which he used this technique, functioning as a contemporary record in a pitifully underdeveloped country of deliberately suppressed progress – the “era of tapped telephones” – in which the phone, in its ultimate despair, converses with itself. In the same year, 1971, he also produced the gag film Az élet víze (lit. The Water of Life).
János vitéz (1973)
The first true success – both in the eyes of critics and of the wider public – came with János vitéz (Johnny Corncob, 1973), a feature-length animated film. From the standpoint of film history, it is a singular achievement: the very first full-length Hungarian animated film.
The central message of the work – faith in fidelity transcending the earthly world, in eternal love and justice – was what gave the film its deep appeal. Its decorative imagery, luxuriant in colour, the ceaselessly changing and evolving spaces, the movement, and the passionate, energetic scenes enchanted children and adults alike. The profession too acknowledged the novelty of its visual language and the director’s assured craftsmanship, though for a long time, critics struggled to place the work within the canon; this uncertainty was reflected in the contradictory reviews and analyses that followed its release.
In his feature films and illustrations alike, Marcell Jankovics frequently resorts to condensation, as though attempting to press into the image every association that springs to his mind at each given moment. The wider the scope of experience, the sharper the instinct for observing the world, and the greater the store of knowledge, the broader this circle of associations becomes – allowing the imagination to stretch further across time and space. These associations are not scattered fragments but converge and entwine, like shards of coloured glass assembled into a luminous, coherent picture by a unifying force.
The director builds upon the archaic, analogical mode of thought embedded in the depths of human consciousness. He fuses together these deeply coded images – “load-bearing pillars” of the soul – into a unity that transcends culture and epoch. Thus, the complementary motifs of tulip and heart; the pair of doves spiralling into one another in patterns reminiscent of yin and yang (symbols at once of Hungarian folk art and Chinese universalism, which are likewise interwoven in pentatonic music); these all coexist harmoniously within the film. What may appear eclectic is in fact the manifold manifestation of a universal organising principle, differently expressed in each culture. The coherence of the whole is ensured by the unity of the drawing style, the vision, and the underlying philosophy. The directorial solutions of Jankovics are novel and original, the visual realisation imposing. He does not imitate but works with sources, rethinking and extending them. He creates like a river: it receives tributaries and brooks, but its course remains true, unaltered, flowing irresistibly towards the greatest water, the fullness of being.
Jankovics is drawn to positive, exemplary heroes, and it is easy to identify with Petőfi’s hero [Johnny Corncob is based on János vitéz – John the Valiant – by Sándor Petőfi, Hungarian national poet, 1823–1849]. He could rely upon his inherited family reverence for tradition, and the patriotic theme was naturally congenial to him. Upon this framework he raised the “house,” the bricks of which were provided by his erudition, his magical imaginative world, his creative experimental spirit, his profound knowledge of symbols, and his folkloric and ethnographic research. Yet he also gave space to humour – even in hopeless situations – often robust, exuberant, and highly eroticised.
The theme itself had enjoyed a second flourishing with Pongrác Kacsóh [Hungarian composer, 1873–1923] and his folk opera János vitéz (John the Valiant) at the age of Hungarian Art Nouveau, nourished by folk art. Though Jankovics did not concern himself with the folk opera, he was drawn to the Hungarian Art Nouveau (the Gödöllő school and artists’ colony, the architecture of Ödön Lechner). He perceived – or perhaps at first only intuited – that at the deep stratum of the original text lay a mythical, archetypal mental structure. The stages of the hard-pressed hero’s elevation and development, the sequence of increasingly difficult trials, the vertical journey (from the earthly realm to the celestial) are themselves symbols of the path of human cognition. Johnny shared this road with many companions in cultural history: Faust, and Madách’s Ádám in Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man).
What characterises Johnny Corncob – and indeed the entirety of Jankovics’s feature films – is an expressive, visionary imagery, a voyage into the subconscious, into the deepest layers of the human psyche. Jankovics is not concerned with psychology, with the particular and the contingent, but with the general and the archetypal. He is not interested in the mass man, in the drabness of daily life, or in earthly trivialities, but in heroes, in obstacles, in the Path, in superhuman struggle, in the clash of darkness and light, in mission, in trials, in fidelity and commitment. Light must triumph over darkness; the solar hero cannot fail – even if victory is deferred to the supra-human, transcendent realm of ideals and essences. Yet he reminds us that evil is ineradicable: it may lie dormant for a time, but it will rise again and again. The struggle is primordial and eternal. It begins on Earth and concludes in the higher world. This does not carry Jankovics into the blinkered idealism of false illusion: he knows well that here, in the earthly realm, the hero may suffer irreplaceable losses, even leaving behind his own mortal body – or his beloved. The white-golden Fairyland becomes the symbolic space where the possibility of resolution resides.
The folkloric quality of Jankovics’s imagery provided audiences with a sense of homeliness and hope, a secure foothold. In the 1970s, turning to folk culture was not prohibited by the cultural politics of the day; indeed, under close supervision and within strict boundaries, such works could even be rewarded with prizes.
Johnny Corncob also employs devices familiar from Yellow Submarine (1968), with echoes of Heinz Edelmann’s pop-art stylisations. Yet here “depiction from below” assumes a new ideology, a new artistic conception: Johnny treads firmly upon the earth (the physical plane), the soil providing security, yet his head (the intellectual sphere) reaches the heavens. This graphic conception of rooting in the ground while aspiring upwards to the immaterial realm of ideals is at once beautiful and heroic – fitting for Jankovics, who always had a natural inclination towards the celebration of heroism.
He makes bold use of the possibilities of animation metamorphosis: the film revels in the succession of images transforming logically into one another. A key motif in the story is the traditional shepherd’s cloak, which at the outset marks the hero’s social station, signalling his limited space for action; it is slung over his shoulder as provision for the road. This heavy, burdensome cloak, once Jancsi becomes a hussar, transforms into a fluttering mantle, and finally into wings with which he may soar freely.
Stylisation means deliberate renunciation: here Jankovics forgoes many devices, including facial mimicry. Without expressive features, emotions are indicated pictorially: upon mask-like faces, love blushes as a heart, passion flares as a rose, sorrow trickles as a teardrop. If Johnny is joyful, colours brighten around him; if sorrowful, the environment grows sombre. Objects too come alive, moving in sympathy with him.
Iluska and Johnny appear almost like puppets, untouched by time: they do not “age.” Iluska’s legs are doll-like, stout, almost childlike – fitting, as they have known one another since childhood – and in love time is suspended. Formally, Johnny and Iluska are linked to the Sun, while the Moon and Night are associated with the witch and the figures of darkness. Constant graphic attributes are of vital importance: the rose of fidelity upon Johnny’s breast, the curled moustache that defines his nose, the “world-striding” boots. These ensure the hero’s recognisability amid all his transformations.
In the making of this work, Jankovics discovered something that would later shape his entire outlook. In Fairyland, the wings of Johnny bear a heart, those of Iluska a tulip, and the two fit together. This marked his first true encounter with folk art. It was here that he found kinship with Mihály Hoppál [Hungarian ethnographer, b. 1942], whose ethnosemiotic analyses of symbols paralleled Jankovics’s intuitions – evident in his study Tulipán és szív – Szerelmi jelképek a magyar népművészetben (lit. Tulip and Heart – Love Symbols in Hungarian Folk Art, 1990).
This film too places strong emphasis upon the dramaturgy of colour. By convention in animation, characters’ colours are static. Here, however, the hero assumes innumerable chromatic variations, reflecting his situation and emotions. Thus, the ever-changing hues of the background and the figures resonate with one another, shifting in harmony. Colours are symbolic, setting the mood; and Marcell Jankovics proves a master of atmosphere.
The 1970s
With Johnny Corncob, Marcell Jankovics broke free from the clichés of his era’s animation – its formulas, its forced humour. In 1974 he created what many consider his finest work, Sisyphus (1974), a short film. It is, in essence, a self-confession clothed in the tale of a mythological hero: one single impulse, one message, thought in epigrammatic concision. The film is marked by its minimalist means. Jankovics produced 1,800 drawings in six weeks, with the help of just one assistant. The few minutes of screen-time brought immense success. As in many of his works, the hero is faceless; it is not the individual that interests him, but the universal, the generalisable.
What mattered to Jankovics was that the various acoustic and visual effects should reinforce one another and shift together. He plays with the thickening and thinning of brush strokes: thicker at the inhalation needed for exertion, thinning at the panting exhalation. The hero’s body itself dwindles, consuming itself in the pursuit of his heroic task, until by the film’s end the colossus of muscle has shrunk into a tiny, emblematic figure. This work of epigrammatic brevity remains one of the most exquisite examples in the history of animation of the agonising struggle both of the artist’s personal fate and of human existence.
That same year (1974) he also completed Add tovább, szamár a végállomás! (lit. Pass It On, the Terminus Is the Donkey!), a short film depicting aggression as a pathological contagion, reflecting the typical behaviour of the frustrated “mass man.” Jankovics painted it with a felt-tip pen that left marks directly on the celluloid and could be smudged with the finger. The film offers no hero, no foothold for identification; it merely signals, shows, describes a phenomenon. Jankovics himself composed its score, an acoustic world built from electronic effects.
For three years thereafter, he produced no personal film, though he continued working (the second Gusztáv series was launched during this period) and wrote his essay Mítosz és világkép (lit. Myth and Worldview), which would provide the theoretical foundation for his later feature Fehérlófia (Son of the White Mare) as well as for his popular science books.
In 1977 Jankovics returned with Küzdők (The Struggle), a short film that earned him the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The film is an allegory of the self-consuming habitus of the life of an artist, of the vocation that places existence itself at the service of creation. At the same time, the statue carving away its creator may be read as an allegory of the parent–child relationship: ageing life, worn and fading, yields its place to the new and increasingly vigorous young life. This film too was partly drawn with the finger: scratching, smudging, erasing, he experimented with the unconventional possibilities of this medium. There is no music; its intense auditory atmosphere is created by realistic sound effects.
At that time short films were expected to end with a punchline, a gag – they were regarded as aphoristic films. Jankovics, however, refused to conform. His Deep Waters was made without such a closing twist – and it was this version that proved successful. On the strength of that precedent, he was permitted to conclude Sisyphus without a gag.
Together the three black-and-white shorts – Deep Waters, Sisyphus, and The Struggle – may be regarded as parts of a triptych, their themes encoded as mythological allegories. With these stripped-down, formally daring, and idiosyncratic short films, Jankovics sought to provoke catharsis, to unsettle and to prompt thought. His creative temperament here is contemplative, pensive, self-tormenting. These films brought him professional success; yet his heart inclined always towards the heroic tasks: the feature-length films, for whose realisation he would struggle for years.
Magyar népmesék (Hungarian Folk Tales)
In 1977, Jankovics embarked upon the series Magyar népmesék (Hungarian Folk Tales), which he oversaw as scriptwriter, director, and designer until 2002. Like Johnny Corncob, the series drew upon the traditions of Hungarian folk imagery and modes of thought. The principle of circularity, of eternal return, served as a conceptual foundation that shaped even the visual world. The tale belongs to a timeless realm, to dream-time, yet remains intimately part of lived reality.
The series originated with an idea of Ferenc Mikulás [Hungarian film producer, b. 1940, director of the Kecskemétfilm Animation Studio]. Jankovics was invited to take part on the strength of Johnny Corncob’s success. It was he who devised the concept: that there must be an arresting title sequence; and that for each tale, within its given graphic style, the motifs characteristic of the region from which that particular version of the story derived must be used. Of equal importance were composition, the representation of the Hungarian folk-art system of symbols, and the evocation of mythical structures. A central motif of the tales is the journey – its aim being the discovery of the feminine figure, yet the journey itself unfolds in a symbolic space.
In the first series Jankovics himself designed the characters and storyboard, a task he returned to in the third and fifth series as well. In the second and fourth he served “only” as supervising director. Yet he was recalled time and again, and to this day is regarded as the series’ “spiritual father.”
Fehérlófia (Son of the White Mare)
In 1981 Jankovics released his second feature film, Fehérlófia (Son of the White Mare), which brought him international recognition – indeed, it was awarded the title of “The Greatest Animated Film of All Time” at the Los Angeles Olympiad of Animation in 1984 in 1984. This achievement was preceded by years of preparatory research. The director gave lectures and wrote popular studies on archaic worldviews, mythology, and the connections between folk tales and the starry skies.
Jankovics sought his own story, a narrative grounded in eternal recurrence and cyclical order. Such a conception the reigning authorities in Hungary deemed ideologically erroneous, for it contradicted the official worldview, which placed its faith in linear “progress.” He was therefore advised to submit three folk tales for adaptation; of these, the story of Fehérlófia was accepted. Even so, the cyclical cosmology remained a guiding principle of the work. Jankovics employed circling and curved tracking shots, all serving the idea of recurrence and the significance of return.
For the foundation he turned to the mythological traditions of the Huns, Avars, and early Magyars, totemistic in character, building his stylised “iconography” from archetypal images and symbols. Numerical and chromatic correspondences are of special significance; analogies function on every level. The three heroes embody the three faces of the Sun: the rising Sun can be linked with Vasgyúró (“Ironrubber”, coloured green), the noonday Sun with Fanyűvő (“Treeshaker”, yellow), and the setting Sun with Kőmorzsoló (“Stonecrumbler”, red). The same principle governs the three princesses and the dragons. The underworld and the celestial world mirror one another: opposites in sign yet organically united. The film’s metamorphic animation sequences draw upon archaic chains of symbols – the depiction of birth is a beautiful example of this.
Colour dramaturgy was of vital importance here as well. Jankovics painted the storyboard pages in luminous watercolours, and the sequence of red–yellow–green–blue–violet recurs consistently throughout the film. Dream-like quality was equally essential: the adult heroes speak with the tone of those who once sang lullabies to ethnographers. In earlier conventions, figures on the celluloid had to be distinct from their backgrounds; here they were to form an indivisible unity. The high aesthetic quality of the backgrounds is a testament to the work of his collaborator László Hegedűs 2.
In Hungary the reception did not approach the success of Johnny Corncob. Whereas Johnny Corncob was brisk and dynamic, Son of the White Mare moves with a slow, swelling rhythm, filled with structural repetitions; the pace was alien to the expectations of audiences. The reasons for its “failure” may be sought in distribution, but also in the fact that after years of centrally orchestrated indoctrination, audiences were not yet ready to embrace such an intellectual achievement. Decades would have to pass before the film found its rightful place in the hearts of Hungarian viewers.
After Son of the White Mare
Following the release of Son of the White Mare, Marcell Jankovics found that opportunities within his own studio were scarce. He therefore developed a strong association with Kecskemétfilm Animation Studio, continuing his stewardship of the series Hungarian Folk Tales, and embarking upon a new project, Mondák a magyar történelemből (Legends from Hungarian History). The latter differs in character from the folk-tale series: it draws upon the visual world of the Képes Krónika (the Illuminated Chronicle [a 14th century Hungarian chronicle]) and upon historically grounded musical sources (Gregorian chant and medieval student songs), its chief purpose being the dissemination of historical knowledge. Jankovics would later employ this series as a point of reference for a television programme edited by Erzsébet Csonka.
He also produced a four-part short series entitled Tangram, though this passed virtually unnoticed. Based upon the traditional Chinese puzzle composed of black geometric shapes – Jankovics animated its collage-like manipulation to create four films, conceptually set within the domains of water, air, earth, and humankind. Around the same period, he prepared seven illustrated storyboards and numerous character designs for an American-commissioned Bible series, though in the end only a single episode was realised: Teremtés (The Genesis / Creation).
As a counterpoint to Sisyphus (1974), and prior to embarking upon The Tragedy of Man, Jankovics made Prométheusz (Prometheus, 1992). In this work the mythological hero receives the flame upon the mountain – a symbol of youth – but by the time he descends, only a few embers remain, and as the light fades in his hand so he himself diminishes too. The film is an allegory of ageing. Its reception, however, did not equal that of Sisyphus, perhaps owing to the sombre theme, or perhaps because it was evident that the creator could not fully identify with renunciation, with the relinquishing of strength.
His next feature-length film was Ének a csodaszarvasról (Song of the Miraculous Hind, 2002), undertaken at the request of Levente Szörényi [Hungarian composer, b. 1945]. Jankovics’s intention was to reinterpret the Hungarian primordial myth, offering an astral-mythological reading. The film’s basis lies in his scholarly study of a jug with four medallions from the Treasure of Nagyszentmiklós [a famous ninth-century Avar gold hoard]. These medallions may be seen to correspond to the four seasons, and their circular form illustrates with elegance the eternal cycle; moreover, the images resonate with four historical epochs. This richly layered object served as the foundation for the film: its four-part narrative unfolds the story contained within the vessel, as the artist metaphorically releases the spirit from its golden urn.
Conceptually, the film rests upon the correspondence of “above” and “below”: earthly events are shown to possess archaic, mythic, and cosmic roots. On the visual plane, realistic scenes of life transmute into symbolic images; real animals become mythic ancestors – and the reverse. Animated metamorphosis remains the central organising device: earthly and celestial, present and mythic, corporeal and spiritual realms continually flow into one another. Some critics reproached the work for excessive didacticism, for a tendency towards a picture-book historicism; yet others praised precisely this aspect as its virtue.
Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man, 2011)
This monumental undertaking, decades in the making, is the spiritual product of resistance – against both humanity’s annihilation and personal mortality. Jankovics regards the work as as relevant and urgent today as in the age of Imre Madách [Hungarian writer, 1823–1864, author of the original play], discerning parallels between that period and contemporary Hungary, where one may observe the resurgence of unbridled capitalism. Time and again the same dilemmas confront us: demagogic populism, a distorted democracy, social callousness, moral crisis in public and private life alike, and the estrangement of ideals from reality.
In his abridged adaptation of Madách’s drama, Jankovics sought to preserve proportion in line with the author’s conception, while concentrating upon the historical scenes rather than the framing narrative. The exceptionally long production (the 160-minute animated film required twenty-three years to complete) inevitably bore the marks of technological change, differences that could not later be effaced. The aim of the artist was to render the philosophically dense and rhetorically weighty text more “readable” by means of imagery.
As an intellectual artist, Jankovics emphasises the role of inner monologues and reflections. He does not shrink from the pathetic, nor from satire; humour also has its place (in the London scene, Eve is depicted almost as a Lolita-like figure), as does eroticism (notably in the Roman scene), for all of these belong to the truth of human life.
In his use of colour, the director drew upon the visual memories and stylistic features of each historical era, also borrowing from the symbolism of the Tarot. Lucifer, as the representative of darkness, is portrayed with a canine countenance in keeping with mythic tradition: the dog, humankind’s companion, becomes here not only a companion but a tempter.
Backgrounds and figures return from scene to scene, transformed in appearance but recognisable through their attributes. They evoke the epoch, the zeitgeist, and are presented in the art-historical style most characteristic of their time. Egyptian reliefs, Greek vase-painting, Roman mosaics, Byzantine iconography, codex illumination, engravings, and mass-produced graphics all reappear; in the phalanstery scene the comic-book style predominates. These artistic modes form the scaffold, the frame upon which content rests. The ideas unfold within the artistic logic – or illogic – of their age, revealing that era’s historical relation to truth and to morality. Historical artefacts themselves – Greek vases, Roman statues, mosaics, engravings of the Copernican age – are brought to life, set in motion; in the Paris scene the mass undulates as a tricolour wave. Animated metamorphosis remains the fundamental expressive tool.
The London scene is the boldest: here Jankovics ventures furthest in adapting the text, and perhaps for that reason it is the most successful. It abounds in allusions, in contemporary analogies, in micro-narratives that take on lives of their own. He does not simply illustrate; with his personal vision he becomes a true co-author, carrying further the ideas latent in Madách’s text. Whatever criticisms may be levelled against it – just or unjust – the film remains a worthy homage both to Madách’s masterpiece and to the cultural history of humankind.
Television Career
By the late 1980s, Marcell Jankovics had turned to a new field: television and programme-making. The productions that emerged were public service broadcasting in the very best sense – programmes centred upon knowledge and culture. Their conception fitted seamlessly into the arc of his life’s work. Between 1988 and 1998 he regularly produced educational television programmes, serving as scriptwriter, presenter, and director, ultimately creating 440 broadcasts together with his colleagues. These were thematic in character, often exploring precisely those subjects about which Jankovics also wrote in his books. Mythology, Hungarian folk traditions, Christian symbolism, astral mythology (notably the series Zodiákus [lit. The Zodiac]), legends and history were all given pride of place.
In virtually every programme he drew attention to the central role of cyclical time, to the correspondences and analogies between the earthly and the celestial. The “cyclical” conception of time is that of agrarian societies; the “linear” conception, by contrast, corresponds to the mindset of “modern man”. The latter, with its focus upon the instantaneous and the unrepeatable, easily entails a rejection of tradition and of the past, making generalisation impossible. From this emerges the perpetual present tense, framed by the “second reality” of television, its calendar the pages of the broadcast listings. Recognition of cyclical time, by contrast – of the movements of planets and stars – enables planning and restores to humanity the archaic sense of being part of the Cosmos.
Jankovics considered it essential to remind his audience that to think in terms of the stars is an ancient and necessary act: humanity once observed the changes in nature and linked them to the courses of the heavenly bodies. Early thought was necessarily “mythopoetic”, for there was as yet no scientific vocabulary with which to speak. This mental framework, thousands or even tens of thousands of years old, survives both in tribal cultures and in peasant societies. The ancients “inscribed” the moments of festival upon the heavens: in the theatre of the Milky Way and constellations they cast the visible planets (the gods) in the principal roles. Thus, they sought to obey the divine will: “on earth as it is in heaven”. The system was valid in every aspect of life: what was read in the stars reappeared upon altarpieces, in idiomatic expressions, in seasonal customs, in festive ornaments and ritual objects. For Jankovics, mythology was at least as important as historical fact, and he never ceased to remind his audience of it. Whenever budgets permitted, programmes were enlivened with location shooting: it was amidst the authentic sites and artefacts that the words gained their proper resonance.
Another significant series was Monda és történelem (lit. Legend and History), while numerous broadcasts were devoted to Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, exploring their astronomical symbolism, folk customs, and the notion of sacred time – topics to which Jankovics also returned in his books.
Together with ethnographer Mihály Hoppál, he created Sámánok Eurázsiában (lit. Shamans in Eurasia), a work half-documentary, half-animated. Incorporating footage shot on original sites and artefacts preserved from shamanic cultures, it employed the symbolic language of animation to illuminate the characteristic features of that worldview.
Author of Popular Scholarly Works
The popular scholarly books of Marcell Jankovics deserve a distinct “shelf” within his oeuvre. His fundamental conception – that his diverse activities in books, films, and lectures should remain organically connected – was carried through here as well. He did not approach his subjects with the conventional ethnographer’s stance but rather with the sensibility of a creative artist. Not content merely to systematise, he dared to think, to associate freely, and to uncover hidden correspondences and analogies, drawing upon the solid foundations of painstaking research. Thus, his volumes are not conventional academic works. His preoccupation with symbols, astral symbolism, and cultural history shaped the themes of his books.
His first publication appeared in 1987: Csillagok között fényességes csillag – A Szent László legenda és a csillagos ég (lit. Shining Star among the Stars – The Legend of Saint Ladislaus and the Starry Sky). Thereafter came smaller studies, followed, from 1988 onwards, by a steady flow of volumes, both as sole author and co-author. Among his independent works, Jelképkalendárium (lit. Calendar of Symbols, 1988), A fa mitológiája (lit. The Mythology of the Tree, 1991), Ahol a madár se jár (lit. Where Even Birds Do Not Fly, 1996), A Nap könyve (lit. The Book of the Sun, 1996), A szarvas könyve (lit. The Book of the Stag, 2004), and 3+1, A négy évszak szimbolikája (lit. 3+1: The Symbolism of the Four Seasons, 2008) form a coherent arc. At times he circled around a central theme or symbol (The Mythology of the Tree, The Book of the Sun, The Book of the Stag); at others, he pursued the trail of a legend (Shining Star among the Stars).
Calendar of Symbols examines the customs and traditions connected with feast days, their origins, the structure of the calendar, their imprint upon folk practice, and their survival in urban folklore.
The Mythology of the Tree places the tree at its centre as a symbol of Time and of the Milky Way, tracing the cultic roots of tree veneration, the role of the World Tree in different cultures, its ethnographic, cultural-historical, and civilisational traditions, and analysing its impact as an organising principle upon artists such as Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka [Hungarian painter, 1853–1919].
The Book of the Sun is likewise a compendium, collecting myths and conceptions of the Sun, seeking correspondences in the deeper strata of culture, and tracing the cult of the sun across regions, its persistence in objects, rituals, beliefs, and religions, emphasising its role in the rise of monotheism.
The message of The Book of the Stag is plain: to remind us of our forgotten past and our roots. Jankovics took the cult of the stag or hind as his guiding thread in weaving together this narrative. It also stands as a valuable companion to his film Song of the Miraculous Hind.
Shining Star among the Stars (1987, 2006) seeks systemic correspondences between the legend of Saint Ladislaus [László I of Hungary, canonised king, reigned 1077–1095] and the constellations traversed annually by the Sun. The volume, like his others, is enriched with bibliographies, lists of sources, and indexes of names and subjects.
As co-author, Jankovics contributed to Jelképtár (lit. Dictionary of Symbols), which has become one of the most popular works in the field first published in 1990 and reissued many times since. Where Even Birds Do Not Fly (1996) and Mély a múltnak kútja (lit. The Well of the Past is Deep, 1998) are collections of studies. The highlight of the latter is the chapter A kultúra genetikája (lit. The Genetics of Culture), which synthesises ideas Jankovics had developed over years of lectures: a unique and complex cultural theory whose chief quality is universality. He was preoccupied alike with the cultures and belief systems of smaller communities, their sense of cultural identity, and with globalising world culture. He examined how symbols and emblems might be interpreted within a given system and even attempted a definition of culture itself.
His autobiographical work, Lékiratok I–II. (lit. The Leak-letters, 2007), was pulped after the author lost a lawsuit for alleged infringement of personality rights. Yet it was a text of literary value, worthy of a place among Hungary’s great diaries.
In 2007, together with the photographer Méry Gábor, Jankovics began to produce albums devoted to the churches of Upper Hungary (today mostly in Slovakia) and their winged altars. The first volume was A lőcsei Szent Jakab templom szárnyas oltárai (lit. The Winged Altars of St James’s Church in Levoča, 2007). To date, seven volumes of this series have been published.
The Illustrator
As an illustrator, Marcell Jankovics also left behind a considerable body of work. His book illustrations, though functional in origin, stand on their own as autonomous works of art, many of which have been exhibited in galleries. In his approach to illustration, Jankovics acted as a creative collaborator and intellectual partner: the images complemented the text, enriching it with fresh hues and layers of meaning. Essential for him was that the text itself – his source material – be of genuine literary or cultural worth.
He regarded Arnold Gara [Hungarian graphic artist, 1869–1941] as his exemplar, admiring his graphic universe in which every level – flora, architecture, costume, and the rich diversity of human character – was rendered with painstaking detail maintaining attention. Gara’s art retained an elevated quality that seemed to lift the viewer above the mundane. This was the guiding principle in Jankovics’s own compositions. Whether in his watercolours, ink drawings, or graphics, there was always a touch of the fairytale, even when the subject was not itself a tale. For many years he illustrated only folk narratives and stories of King Matthias Corvinus [Hungarian king, reigned 1458–1490], but later he turned also to contemporary authors such as Mária Anga, Laura Iancu, and Zsuzsanna Mirtse, as well as to musical book-inserts, notably for the Hangzó Helikon series [a Hungarian collection of music-and-book publications].
After experimenting with comic art, his first major illustrative commission was for Nazim Hikmet’s [Turkish poet and playwright, 1902–1963] collection of Turkish folktales, A szerelmes felhő (A Cloud in Love). His primary concern was how to adapt the miniature tradition of Central Asia – Uzbek, Turkmen, and Turkish forms – into a contemporary visual idiom.
His illustrations for Mesék és mondák Mátyás királyról (lit. Tales and Legends of King Matthias), a volume that went through several editions, recall the illuminated initials, decorations, and motifs of the Corvinae [the codices commissioned by King Matthias]. In one of his tale-pictures, Jankovics symbolically linked these motifs to the mythic aura surrounding Matthias’s figure. It is possible, too, that the stained-glass windows of the Mátyás pince [a well-known Budapest wine cellar], which he frequented in his youth, also influenced his imagery. On every page he strove to construct a complex web of motifs. He deliberately eschewed verism; rather than anchoring the figures in realistic space and perspective, he lifts them, sets them afloat, drawing dreamlike, magical motifs from the text to lend the illustrations multiple layers of meaning. His backgrounds incorporate and elaborate vegetal ornaments. Characteristic are the figures moving against enlarged, decorative backdrops, the narrative unfolding in the foreground while, at times, the background leans forward – say, in the form of a golden-red rose vine or a gourd tendril. A distinctive vein of humour runs through these works: occasionally, acquaintances of the artist himself appear, cast in varied roles and costumes.
This principle animated his work in Parazsat evő paripa (lit. The Ember-Eating Steed), and its expanded version, Fortélyos öreg (lit. The Cunning Old Man). Here the foundation lay in folk art: ethnographic artefacts and their decorative motifs served as the point of departure, gaining new life within the pages of the tales.
[2013]