In the course of Hungarian film history, a number of enduring creative partnerships have emerged (for example Miklós Jancsó – Gyula Hernádi, Béla Tarr – László Krasznahorkai). Yet the “triumvirate” formed by Barna Kabay, Imre Gyöngyössy, and Katalin Petényi may be regarded as unique, since their bond was not merely a professional collaboration and friendship, but a mission in the fullest sense of the word. A mission on behalf of the oppressed and the exiled, against the forgetting of ordinary people or exceptional individuals battered by the storms of history, and against irreparable historical injustices. This shared mission continued even after Gyöngyössy’s death in 1994, expanding to include Bence Gyöngyössy, the son of Gyöngyössy and Petényi, who remains active as a director. Thus, whichever of their careers one examines, a joint and consistently constructed oeuvre comes into view, characterised equally by a distinctive form of documentarism, by lyrical and grotesque modes of stylisation, and by a pronounced sensitivity to both history and contemporary realities.
A Fortunate Choice: Career Change
Barna Kabay initially embarked on an engineering career under parental pressure, although it was film that had always attracted him more strongly. Fortunately, during the two years he spent at the Budapest University of Technology in the second half of the 1960s, he frequently encountered young filmmakers, and thus gradually but decisively turned towards the art of cinema. The decisive encounter took place on the set of Aranysárkány (The Golden Kite, 1966), László Ranódy’s adaptation of a work by Dezső Kosztolányi: it was here that Kabay met Imre Gyöngyössy, the film’s co-director. “Imre’s personality, his extraordinary erudition, his worldview, and his professional mastery as a writer had a profound impact on me. He supported my ambitions in film [1],” Kabay later recalled. Reflecting on their shared artistic work in his autobiography, Gyöngyössy wrote: “In our films, I sense an identical aspiration: we always passionately sought, behind the small-realist surface of images, the ‘invisible’ lines of force – the fate of humanity within the dramatic destiny of the individual, and within the individual’s memory-images the truth-seeking remembrance of human culture, reaching back into legend [2].” Their creative partnership was soon joined by Gyöngyössy’s wife, Katalin Petényi, who was trained as an art historian.
The ars poetica of the triumvirate followed almost inevitably from Gyöngyössy’s own tragic past: the impulse to represent and explore the fate of the oppressed, the exiled, and those unjustly punished. The poet-director – a former pupil of the Pannonhalmi Bencés Gimnázium (Benedictine School of Pannonhalma) and later a student of Italian and French at the Faculty of Humanities of ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) – was sentenced during the Rákosi era, in the context of the attacks launched against the Church, to three years’ imprisonment in a show trial. His rehabilitation did not take place until 1994; throughout the Kádár period he was regarded as a “suspect” element, with the result that until the political transition his poems were published only in Italian. Gyöngyössy was thus silenced, persecuted, and effectively cast into exile in a manner no less unjust than the protagonists of their joint documentary and feature films: the Greeks who fled their homeland to Hungary after the civil war following the Second World War in Memento (1975), or the Romanian family threatened by the Securitate and escaping to the West in Európa messze van (Europe Is Far Away, 1995).
In 1968, Barna Kabay was admitted to the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, enrolling in the class taught by Károly Makk and Miklós Szinetár. This decision caused his father to resent him for years, as he believed his son had “abandoned the secure for the uncertain” – that is, he had left the engineering faculty behind. Through Imre Gyöngyössy, Kabay came into contact with Sándor Sára, István Gaál, and Zoltán Huszárik; through István Dárday he also encountered the tradition of documentarism, which would come to permeate his entire oeuvre. Kabay, Gyöngyössy and Petényi did not collaborate solely on documentaries. By aligning themselves with the movement known as the Budapest school, they also produced docu-fiction and documentary feature films (for example Két elhatározás (A Quite Ordinary Life, 1978). Moreover, a documentary style is equally characteristic of their feature films (Gyöngyössy’s Meztelen vagy (The Legend About the Death and Resurrection of Two Young Men, 1972); Gyöngyössy–Kabay’s Töredék az életről (lit. Fragment of a Life, 1979)). In many cases, the triumvirate addressed the same subject in both a feature film and a documentary – as can be seen, for instance, in the relationship between Jób lázadása (The Revolt of Job, 1983) and Add tudtul fiaidnak (lit. Tell Your Sons, 1985). “As a rule, we prepared our feature films through our documentaries,” Kabay explained. “We believed that a screenplay could only be authentic if, beforehand, we spent years visiting the original locations, speaking with contemporaries and historians, and recording their memories [3].”
From the Grotesque to a Great Resolution
Even before completing his degree, Barna Kabay secured a position in the Drama Department of MTV (Hungarian Television). In 1974, together with others – among them György Fehér – he co-founded the Fiatal Művészek Stúdiója (Studio of Young Artists), which primarily provided a creative workshop for filmmakers thinking and experimenting in a new cinematic language. Kabay acquired his experience as a writer-director at the television largely through literary adaptations (for example Hököm színház [lit. Hököm Theatre, 1972], based on a tragicomic work by Frigyes Karinthy) as well as through original ideas. Already at this stage it became evident that the plight of the oppressed was a central concern for Kabay – a concern powerfully exemplified by his first full-length feature film, Giordano Bruno megkísértése (lit. The Temptation of Giordano Bruno, 1974), which received the Grand Prize at the Veszprém Television Festival, and by Janus Pannonius (1974). The former explores the final days of the scholar imprisoned by the Inquisition and condemned to death at the stake for his forward-looking scientific and philosophical views, as representatives of tyranny attempt to force him into compromise. The latter examines the flight and death of the Renaissance poet accused of conspiracy against King Matthias. “What matters is not whether we make a television programme or a feature film. What matters is making visible a reality that is ethically clarified, professionally precise, and represented with responsibility [4],” the director declared in connection with his first cinema film.
The director’s first independently directed feature film was Legenda a nyúlpaprikásról (lit. The Legend of Rabbit Paprikash, 1975), adapted from the 1936 novella by Józsi Jenő Tersánszky. The screenplay was co-written with Imre Gyöngyössy, while Katalin Petényi participated in the production as a consultant. Legenda a nyúlpaprikásról was the first film to reveal what Gyöngyössy would later articulate, in connection with Két elhatározás, about their co-directorial collaboration: “My magical, spiritual way of seeing was ideally complemented by Barna’s sensitivity to the grotesque and his documentary-minded approach [5].” Filming took place predominantly on original locations (Dörgicse, Vereb, Tinnye, Pilisszentlélek, Vászoly, Gödöllő), largely outdoors, and the dynamic camera of cinematographer György Illés follows, in long takes, the simple-minded Gazsi – an animal rescuer who protests against rabbit hunters and claims to communicate with animals. The basic situation, the central conflict, and the anti-hero himself are all grotesque, since the narrative unfolds from Gazsi’s point of view: he simultaneously and comically overestimates both the situation and his own role in it, an illusion later abetted by the hunters themselves and their henchmen. Yet there is something elevating and noble in Gazsi’s mission, for ultimately he fights on behalf of innocent animals, vulnerable and exposed to human power, against exploitative and oppressive authorities.
After the political transition, Kabay demonstrated that he was also open to a form of humour free from the grotesque. Together with Katalin Petényi and Bence Gyöngyössy, he wished to make entertaining films capable of making audiences laugh. “Earlier, I made films that had a strong emotional impact, and viewers often left the auditorium with tears in their eyes. But films of that kind will never reach the audience numbers achieved by the few highly successful Hungarian comedy features [6],” Kabay stated. This ambition led to remakes of classic Hungarian films from the 1930s and 1940s. Of these remakes, Kabay directed two – with Petényi as co-director – Hippolyt (1999) and Meseautó (The Dream Car, 2000). In the cases of Egy szoknya, egy nadrág (One Skirt, One Pants, 2005) and Egy bolond százat csinál (One Fool Makes a Hundred, 2006), Kabay served as producer, while Bence Gyöngyössy occupied the director’s chair. The first three films all ranked among the twenty most-watched Hungarian films produced after the regime change, with Meseautó proving the most successful, attracting 308,787 viewers [7]. These light-hearted works, which articulate a veiled form of social critique, updated the original films with respect and sensitivity. At the same time, the creators’ central thematic concerns re-emerge in certain motifs: in Hippolyt, for instance, the life of the nouveau riche Mátyás Schneider is uncomfortably regulated and constrained by the titular butler summoned by his wife, rendering him, in effect, an “exile” within his own home.
More decisive than either the grotesque or the comic vein in Barna Kabay’s oeuvre is documentarism, which gave rise to the most significant films of his career and to those most crucial in terms of historical and social commitment. Of particular impact is the four-part documentary Memento, filmed by Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay in Beloiannisz near Dunaújváros. Here, Greeks who were forced to flee their homeland after the civil war that followed the Second World War speak about the trauma of separation from their native land and country, and about the war’s brutal cruelty in tearing families apart and destroying lives.
The creative partnership’s first joint feature film, credited as a co-directed work, was the fiction-documentary Két elhatározás, in whose making Petényi also took an active part. This work occupies a particularly important place within the oeuvre not only as the beginning of their co-directorial collaboration and because of the many awards and distinctions it received, but also on account of the German connection and the bitter experience of “voluntary exile” in Germany. Like the films of the Budapest school more generally (such as Jutalomutazás (The Prize Trap, 1975) by István Dárday, or Gyuri Cséplő (1978) by Pál Schiffer), Két elhatározás tells a true story through scenes that are partly observed and partly staged. Its protagonist is Aunt Verus, who lives in the Nógrád village of Rimóc, and whose fate models the recent tragedy of the Hungarian peasantry as a whole: like so many other women, she lost her loved ones in wars and under dictatorships. Her only surviving son defected to the United Kingdom after the suppression of the 1956 Revolution and War of Independence, and Verus therefore resolves, first, to visit him in the West, and second, to cultivate one last time the abandoned vineyard. The film addresses a wide range of themes: alongside the collective memory of the recent past and its unspoken traumas, it offers a compelling portrait of the strength and perseverance radiating from Verus, through which she survived the storms of history. At the same time, it brings into view the problem of the disappearance of traditional peasant culture: Verus is one of the last representatives of a vanishing old world. This thematic concern reappears in Kabay’s and his collaborators’ later documentaries as well, such as Pusztai emberek (lit. People of the Plains, 1981), which deals with the disappearance of the ‘tanya’ world, and Bakonyi juhászasszony (lit. The Shepherdess from the Bakony, 2013). The latter likewise portrays a tenacious elderly woman, hardened and worn by Hungarian history, similar to Aunt Verus: Vilma, who lives in Szentgál. The disappearance of traditional peasant culture is also one of the central themes of Gyöngyössy’s and Kabay’s feature film Töredék az életről (1980): in the wake of her rural mother’s death and funeral, Éva – a factory director who rose from a village background – takes stock of her life and identity.
Although Két elhatározás, supported by the German public-service television channel ZDF, received several international awards – among them the Golden Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Audience Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the prestigious Adolf Grimme Award at the competition for German television films in the Federal Republic of Germany – the hardships endured during production and its aftermath ultimately forced Kabay, Gyöngyössy and Petényi to leave the country [8]. During filming, the crew faced severe harassment: the World Federation of Hungarians denounced them on the charge that they were preparing a commemorative programme about 1956; the shoot was banned on two occasions; the protagonists were intimidated; and the filmmakers’ passports were confiscated. In parallel, the Állambiztonsági Szolgálat (State Security Service) kept them under surveillance for years, partly because of Gyöngyössy’s person and partly because of their contacts with Rome and the Vatican. Intensifying personal attacks in the press and an increasingly untenable professional situation left them with no real alternative. As Kabay later put it, they opted for “voluntary emigration”. Offers from ZDF and the Munich-based Tellux Film were accepted, and in 1980 they relocated to the Federal Republic of Germany, their departure being channelled through the light-music organisation Interkoncert.
A Struggle for Historical Truth at Home and in “Exile”
“We never wished to sever ourselves from Hungary […]. Nor from Eastern Europe. We consciously undertook the role of engaging in a constructive dialogue between East and West, between different religions, different ideologies, believers and non-believers, perpetrators and victims [9],” Kabay recalled when reflecting on their “voluntary exile”. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the triumvirate encountered a film industry that was far freer and more professional than the one they had left behind; at the same time, however, political censorship was replaced here by economic control, and by distributors’ audience-driven priorities, which posed their own difficulties. Kabay and his collaborators nevertheless adapted to this new production and distribution environment. It was for this reason that, in the 1980s, they founded the Starnbergi Magyar Alkotóműhely (Starnberg Hungarian Creative Workshop) near Munich, where they continued their joint work.
Kabay and his collaborators remained faithful to their homeland and to their central themes, as evidenced by their co-productions. It was in this context that, on commission from Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the already mentioned Pusztai emberek was made, as well as the Oscar-nominated Jób lázadása, and Yerma, adapted from the 1935 drama by Federico García Lorca and likewise submitted for Academy Award consideration. Kabay had already filmed the world of Jews in northern Hungary during his college years, in 1968; later, the subject was rekindled for him and his collaborators by Petényi’s 1982 book on the painter Imre Ámos, who died in a concentration camp. Jób lázadása was produced not only with the support of ZDF but also at the short-lived Társulás Stúdió (Partnership Studio, 1981–1985), founded primarily to support fiction-documentary films and associated, among others, with Gyöngyössy and Kabay. The Kádár-era dictatorship, however, viewed the project with suspicion: although the Holocaust formally belonged to the category of the “tolerated”, it was nevertheless regarded as a sensitive subject. The Filmfőigazgatóság (Directorate-General of Film) banned the screenplay; this prohibition was lifted only through the intervention of the Minister of Culture, Imre Pozsgay, and following renewed attacks it was Sándor Scheiber who publicly spoke out in defence of Jób lázadása.
Kabay and his collaborators’ work remains a rarity to this day, as relatively few Hungarian films have addressed the deportation of rural Jewish communities (for example 1945, directed by Ferenc Török in 2017). At the same time, its achievement of an Academy Award nomination is no accident: while rooted in a specifically Hungarian subject, the film acquires universal meaning through its engagement with antisemitism and biblical symbolism. The traditional Jewish protagonist, portrayed with great sensitivity by Ferenc Zenthe, recognises the contradiction between the biblical parable of Job and the reality of 1943–1944. Whereas the biblical Job is tested by God and ultimately rewarded, he himself is offered no recompense for passively enduring terror, oppression, and antisemitism. It is for this reason that he rebels against his fate and adopts a Christian boy, Lackó, through whom he can still salvage something of himself and of his wife, portrayed no less impressively by Hédi Temessy, since all their biological children have perished. Beyond its biblical paraphrase, one of the film’s most distinctive features is its child’s perspective, through which the horrors of the Holocaust appear even more cruel, unjust, and senseless. Lackó is innocent and naïve; he understands nothing of hatred towards Jews, and thus cannot comprehend why those whom he has come to regard as his parents suddenly vanish from his life, abandoning him as well in the wilderness, into the “unknown” (a destination known to the viewer, though not to the boy). Why? This is the question to which the human soul, untainted by ideology, is incapable of finding an answer.
During their German “exile”, Barna Kabay and his collaborators produced a considerable number of documentaries and feature films in which a central theme is the condition of becoming homeless, catalysed by oppressive regimes. Boat People (1987) focuses on Vietnamese refugees, Exodus (1995) on Cuban refugees, while in Cirkusz a holdon (lit. Circus on the Moon, 1988) the Sri Lankan civil war is presented through the metaphor of circus life as a form of perpetual flight and wandering. Even closer to us, as inhabitants of East-Central Europe, are the two documentaries directed jointly by Gyöngyössy, Kabay and Petényi: Holtak szabadsága (The Freedom of the Death, 1992), dealing with the persecution of Lithuanians, and Ötven év hallgatás (50 Years of Silence, 1992), which presents the tragedy of the Volga Germans. Both documentaries focus simultaneously on a tragic past and on the unhappy present that has resulted from it. The fate of the Lithuanians and the Volga Germans closely resembles that of the Greeks who fled to Hungary in Memento: all of these peoples were tormented by tyrannical powers, torn away from their homelands, and even their eventual return failed to bring unclouded happiness. Instead, it entailed a further rupture and the painful realisation that, over the course of decades, the former homeland had come to feel almost foreign. During the war, Lithuania was occupied first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets; the latter deported some 150,000 people on charges of collaboration and in response to intense partisan activity lasting until 1953. Holtak szabadsága portrays the struggle of Kociunaite Pridanova Gene and her brother, Kociunas Vincas, to locate and repatriate the remains of their deported parents. At the same time, the film introduces the dilemma the younger members of the family face: whether they should return with their parents to Lithuania – a place that, for them, is no longer a homeland but almost a myth. It is here that both the Lithuanian tragedy of fate and the crime of the oppressors become evident: through deportations, not merely one but several generations were condemned to permanent homelessness.
In Ötven év hallgatás and in the docu-fiction based on the same tragedy of fate, Száműzöttek (Homeless, 1991), the fate of the Volga Germans appears even more tragic and insoluble, for they quite literally have nowhere to return to. The Germans settled along the Volga in the eighteenth century by Catherine the Great were granted their own autonomous republic within the Soviet Union in 1923 (the Volga German ASSR). This autonomy, however, was abolished by Joseph Stalin in 1941, following the German invasion during the Second World War. Despite the fact that many Volga Germans fought against the Nazis, the paranoid dictator branded them potential collaborators and war criminals. More than one million people were deported from the region; many perished in the aftermath of these expulsions, and when survivors were finally permitted to return decades later, they were met with hatred fuelled by propaganda (as illustrated, for instance, by the case of the German schoolteacher who was labelled a fascist in a threatening message). In this sense, Ötven év hallgatás functions as a companion piece to Add tudtul fiaidnak, since both films confront the same problem: after terror, genocide, and the confiscation of property carried out in the name of collective guilt, those who return home are forced to face the fact that their homes have fallen into other hands and that they are no longer welcome in their own homeland. Although younger generations attempt to seek their fortunes in Germany, even this proves no solution. Despite the shared language, they are regarded as foreigners there as well, for over the centuries the true homeland of the Volga Germans had become the region along the Volga itself.
Both Holtak szabadsága and Ötven év hallgatás eased the life-long pain of their traumatised interviewees, as in both cases the speakers – Vincas in the former, and the Volga German man who breaks down at the ruined church in the latter – pour out their souls and speak openly about the crimes of the dictatorship that silenced them for decades. Thematically similar, though offering a far more positive resolution, is Petényi and Kabay’s 2017 documentary „Bíboros” – Az állambiztonsági szervek célkeresztjében (lit. “The Cardinal” – In the Crosshairs of the State Security Services), which approaches the historical trauma of exile through the fragmentation of a single Hungarian family, the Bíró family. György Bíró, a bourgeois democrat persecuted on fabricated charges during the Rákosi regime, defected to England after 1956. Despite all his efforts, he was unable to bring with him his loved ones, who were monitored and harassed for decades by the Kádár-era state security services, and thus he eventually founded a new family abroad. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, his (former) wife and his daughters in Hungary were able to visit him on several occasions, and after his death they were also able to bring his mortal remains home. Yet despite this ultimately affirmative outcome, „Bíboros” makes clear that the decades stolen by the dictatorship can never be recovered.
What was unfolding in neighbouring Romania under the Ceaușescu dictatorship profoundly affected Barna Kabay and his collaborators; accordingly, on several occasions they turned their attention to the Transylvanian Hungarian community and to those oppressed individuals who found themselves in the crosshairs of the Securitate. These themes are addressed in the documentary Erdély (lit. Transylvania, 1990), in Európa messze van (Europe Is Far Away), in Stigma, and in Szigorúan ellenőrzött életek (Strictly Controlled Lives, 2012), which examines Romanian and Transylvanian Hungarian church history under state socialism, focusing on Archbishop Áron Márton of Alba Iulia and on the Tőkés family. Over the decades, the filmmakers regularly travelled to Transylvania, among other things with the support of two aid organisations, Church in Need and Cap Anamur/Deutsche Not-Ärzte. They also produced footage for these organisations, often illegally or using hidden cameras, and even had their car’s fuel tank modified in order to smuggle the recorded material out of the country. Friends repeatedly warned them against these journeys: a French film crew, for instance, was beaten by Romanian police, and in 1988, during the period of village demolitions, Kabay and his companions were themselves taken in twice for questioning. “During the interrogations that lasted from morning until evening, we ourselves were able to experience the fears of our Transylvanian friends. As a result of these personal experiences, we decided to make a documentary about Ceaușescu’s dictatorship – about the operating mechanisms of the Securitate, about collaboration, loyalty and betrayal [10],” recalled Katalin Petényi.
Szigorúan ellenőrzött életek and Stigma alike lay bare the terror of dictatorship and its later, more sophisticated methods of intimidation and surveillance. Alongside the testimonies of those directly affected and other interviewees, oppressively staged scenes reminiscent of a paranoid thriller, as well as state security reports read aloud by actors (for example Péter Scherer), conjure the suffocating atmosphere of the Romanian communist regime. In Szigorúan ellenőrzött életek, the musty, damp basement of the notorious Jilava prison – where political prisoners were held – is almost literally suffocating, while the close-ups of the execution wall, marked by the impact scars of fatal bullets, are deeply harrowing. The stories of István and László Tőkés, Reformed pastors who resisted the oppressive regime, in a sense complement Kabay and his collaborators’ films about exiles: despite being subjected to surveillance even within their own family and to constant police harassment, the Tőkés family did not break and persevered until the 1989 revolution. In Stigma, Eszter Tőkés recounts that her husband, Tibor Barta – an informant under the code name “Stelian” – tried to persuade her and their family to move with him to Hungary, knowing that after the revolution there would be no future for him in Romania as a former Securitate collaborator. Eszter, however, replied that their mission lay in Transylvania: they had a duty to fight for Transylvanian Hungarian culture.
The same strong sense of mission characterises the church figures who were oppressed and placed under surveillance during the Hungarian communist dictatorship, as portrayed in the Pannonhalma-focused films and series by Katalin Petényi and Barna Kabay. Kabay first became interested in the history of the Pannonhalma Benedictines in 1970, when he met the biblical translator and priest Gellért Békés in Rome. Békés, who had earlier taught Imre Gyöngyössy, later emerged as one of the central figures of the most recent documentaries, Pannonhalmi Szamizdat (lit. Samizdat of Pannonhalma, 2023) and Fénytörés (lit. Refraction, 2023), alongside Asztrik Várszegi, emeritus Archabbot of Pannonhalma and church historian.
Petényi and Kabay’s first work on this subject was the documentary series A közvetítő (lit. The Mediator, 2005), produced in the mid-2000s, which focuses primarily on the present-day life of Benedictine monastic communities – alongside Pannonhalma, those of Tihany and Bakonybél also come to the fore. Asztrik Várszegi already appears as a key figure in this series, yet it is in Hitvallók és ügynökök (Confessors and Traitors, 2009) – released both as a feature-length film and as an eight-part series, and regarded as the major work of the Pannonhalma cycle – that the recent history of the Hungarian Catholic Church is brought into sharp focus through the Archabbot’s interpretation. As in Szigorúan ellenőrzött életek, Petényi and Kabay here again combine classical interviews with staged scenes reminiscent of paranoid thrillers, as well as state security reports read aloud by actors and used as narrative voice-over. The historical trajectory is similar: just as in Romania, in Hungary open terror was gradually replaced by more sophisticated forms of surveillance and by recruitment strategies aimed at morally compromising priests, while the Kádár regime sought to weaken the Catholic Church through the institution of the so-called “peace priests”. At the same time, the film presents a number of deeply moving examples of steadfastness and moral integrity. Among them is Antal Kuklay, a newly ordained young priest who spent six years in prison, and the church historian Gábor Adriányi, who, as a seminarian, openly refused collaboration together with his peers in the late 1950s. As a consequence, they were expelled from the seminary and, with the assistance of Elemér Rédly, completed their studies and were ordained secretly, “in illegality”.
Alongside the fate of Transylvanian Hungarians and communist persecution of the churches, the dramatic life story of József Béres constitutes the third major thematic focus of Kabay and his creative partners after the regime change. On the one hand, the filmmakers regarded Béres’s life trajectory as paradigmatic, a means through which the duplicity and injustice of state socialism could be rendered with particular clarity. “We wanted to present a diagnostic snapshot of the socialist–communist world of the 1960s and 1970s, of the dependency between provincial leaders and their subordinates, of that white spot which very few feature films had portrayed with any authenticity [11],” Kabay described their intentions. On the other hand, they recognised elements of their own persecution in Béres’s ordeal. “In the 1960s and 1970s, together with Katalin Petényi and Imre Gyöngyössy, we were all deeply shaken by the orchestrated smear campaign – in today’s terms, a discrediting campaign – launched against József Béres. Artists, writers, and poets stood up for him, from Tibor Déry to Ferenc Kósa; I could also mention Imre Pozsgay. This affected us profoundly, not least because a very similar campaign was being waged against Imre Gyöngyössy [12],” Kabay recalled. Petényi and Kabay directed the 2015 documentary Béres József életútja (lit. The Life Path of József Béres), which was later expanded with post-regime-change developments in the four-part television series Cseppben az élet (lit. Life in a Drop, 2019) and in the feature film A feltaláló (The Inventor, 2020), partly re-edited from the series and partly composed of newly shot scenes. The fictional series and the feature film were directed by Bence Gyöngyössy; Kabay participated as one of the co-writers and as producer, while Petényi contributed as co-writer and artistic consultant.
A counterpart to the Béres narratives can be found in Halál sekély vízben (Death in Shallow Water, 1994), co-directed by Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay on the basis of a screenplay by Katalin Petényi and Imre Gyöngyössy. This film, too, was inspired by real events – the mysterious murder of János Elbert and his family. One of its protagonists, Tibor, modelled on Elbert, is likewise an inventor, threatened by the political police of a dying dictatorship, the KGB. In the films of Kabay and his creative partners the oppressive regime seeks to sabotage Béres’s research and to appropriate Tibor’s discoveries, and in each of these stories a central problem is the transfer of power from one political system to the next. In Cseppben az élet and A feltaláló, it is Mátyus who rises to power and attempts to destroy Béres – the very man whom Béres had once prevented, during the 1956 revolution, from lynching a Rákosi-era communist. In the final sequence of Halál sekély vízben, Tibor’s wife, Mária, confronts Dobos – a powerful figure believed to be a family friend and in fact a former KGB agent – with evidence of her husband’s murder, whereupon Dobos has her declared insane and taken away by ambulance. In a certain sense, then, Mária herself also becomes an exile on fabricated charges, like so many characters in the films of Kabay, Petényi and Gyöngyössy. “If we do not speak about the nameless, about those who were silenced, about falsified historiography, about the white spots, then no one will speak about them; they will sink into oblivion. Yet this past must be shown to future generations, to young people who know nothing about these things anymore [13],” Kabay summed up – a credo that applies not only to their creative triad, but also to the silenced, exiled and oppressed protagonists who held their ground amid the storms of history.
[2023]
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[1] Ágnes Erdélyi Z.: Kilépés a feledésből. Beszélgetés Kabay Barnával. (lit. Exit from Oblivion. A Conversation with Barna Kabay.) Filmvilág, vol. 63, no. 12, 2020, p. 11. URL: https://epa.oszk.hu/03000/03028/00207/pdf/EPA03028_filmvilag_2020_12_11-14.pdf (Last accessed: 18 January 2024)
[2] Imre Gyöngyössy: Curriculum vitae és ars poetica. (lit. Curriculum Vitae and Ars Poetica) In: Remény és mítosz. Gyöngyössy Imre. (lit. Hope and Myth. Imre Gyöngyössy.) Ed. Katalin Petényi, Budapest, CinemaStar Kft., 2015. 17. p.
[3] Csilla Csűrös: Nagyok Kabay Barnával. (lit. Great Figures with Barna Kabay.) = Kossuth Rádió, 4 October 2023, URL: https://mediaklikk.hu/kossuth-radio/cikk/2023/10/03/nagyok-kabay-barnaval/ (Last accessed: 2 November 2023)
[4] Barna Kabay: Nagy felelősség a valóság láttatása (lit. A Great Responsibility: Making Reality Visible). Film Színház Muzsika, vol. 20, no. 6, 1976, p. 17. URL: https://adt.arcanum.com/hu/view/FilmSzinhazMuzsika_1976_1/?pg=172&layout=s (Last accessed: 18 January 2024)
[5] Katalin Petényi: Emléktöredékek. Gyöngyössy Imre (1930–1994) I. (lit. Fragments of Memory. Imre Gyöngyössy (1930–1994), I). Filmvilág, vol. 63, no. 12, 2020, p. 8. URL: https://epa.oszk.hu/03000/03028/00207/pdf/EPA03028_filmvilag_2020_12_04-10.pdf (Last accessed: 18 January 2024)
[6] Rita Ezüst: „Sikerre számítok”. A Meseautó rendezőjét, Kabay Barnát irodájában kérdeztük a film születésének körülményeiről
(lit. “I Expect Success”. Interview with Barna Kabay, Director of Meseautó). Cinema, no. 12, 2000, p. 53. URL: https://adt.arcanum.com/hu/view/CinemaMagazin_2000-2/?pg=632&layout=s&query=kabay (Last accessed: 18 January 2024)
[7] Máté Takács: A legnézettebb magyar filmek 1990 óta (lit. The Most-Watched Hungarian Films Since 1990). Aeonflux, 15 March 2017. URL: https://aeonflux.blog.hu/2017/03/15/a_legnezettebb_magyar_filmek_1990_ota (Last accessed: 3 November 2023)
[8] Ágnes Erdélyi Z.: Op. cit., pp. 11–15.
[9] Klára Tóth: A dialógus rendezői (lit. The Directors of Dialogue). Magyar Hírlap, vol. 30, no. 167, 1997, p. 13. URL: https://adt.arcanum.com/hu/view/MagyarHirlap_1997_07_B/?pg=75&layout=s&query=A+dial%C3%B3gus+rendez%C5%91i (Last accessed: 18 January 2024)
[10] Gabriella Lőcsei: Elaknásított terület (lit. A Minefield). Magyar Nemzet, vol. 75, no. 328, 2012, p. 34. URL: https://adt.arcanum.com/hu/view/MagyarNemzet_2012_12/?query=%22Elakn%C3%A1s%C3%ADtott+ter%C3%BClet%22&pg=33&layout=s (Last accessed: 18 January 2024)
[11] Dániel Bodnár: Gyöngyössy Bence és Kabay Barna a Béres Józsefről szóló, A feltaláló című filmről (lit. Bence Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay on the Film The Inventor about József Béres). Magyar Kurír, 23 February 2023. URL: https://www.magyarkurir.hu/hirek/gyongyossy-bence-es-kabay-barna-beres-jozsefrol-szolo-i-feltalalo-i-cimu-filmrol (Last accessed: 3 November 2023)
Printed version:
Dániel Bodnár: Ha segíteni tudsz, kötelességed cselekedni. Gyöngyössy Bence és Kabay Barna Béres Józsefről (lit. If You Can Help, It Is Your Duty to Act. Bence Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay on József Béres). Új Ember, vol. 76, no. 8 (3731), 23 February 2020, pp. 1, 9. PDF-URL: https://ujember.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Hetilap200223_teljes.pdf (Last accessed: 18 January 2024)
[12] Ibid.
[13] Csilla Csűrös: Op. cit.