The art of Lajos Koltai
Lajos Koltai’s cinematographic career, which began at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, and his directorial career, which started in the 2000s, are closely intertwined with the processes of Hungarian film history. For an artist whose work spans half a century, who has contributed to more than eighty films and collaborated with twenty-five Hungarian directors, this is hardly surprising. What is far more remarkable is that Koltai’s art is connected to virtually every stylistic trend of the eras in question (and the films he made abroad are similarly diverse). In this outline of his oeuvre, I aim to sketch the arc of his career primarily through the stylistic affiliations of his most significant films, and in this way to present the essential features of Lajos Koltai’s cinematographic and directorial style.
If we want to highlight the major tendencies of Hungarian film history beginning in the 1970s, we encounter the following important movements:
1. the experimental films of the Balázs Béla Studio;
2. the emergence of new forms of documentary filmmaking within the same workshop;
3. the migration of all this into the mainstream as a style of feature films, and as the works of the Budapest School;
4. the world of grotesque satire, largely drawing from the satirical documentaries of the Balázs Béla Studio;
5. the modernist auteur style – labelled aestheticism at the time – which positioned itself in opposition to the documentary trend;
6. the mid-cult new academicism of the 1980s, including the group of so-called 1950s-films;
7. the 1990s cinematic reflections on the political transition;
8. and, after 2000, the emergence of prestige films based on literary works and biographies.
The elements framing this process are, in fact, introductory and concluding in nature. The brief connection with experimentalism, which produced only a few films, can be regarded as a prelude closely tied to Koltai’s college work and functioning as its continuation, while his later assumption of directorial roles represents a move away from cinematography. After his first film as a director, Sorstalanság [Fatelessness] in 2005, Koltai would serve as cinematographer on only two more films for his closest creative partner, István Szabó: Rokonok (Relatives, 2006) and Zárójelentés (Final Report, 2020). In his own films he no longer acts as his own cinematographer.
Equally decisive, however, is Koltai’s involvement in both of the major – and stylistically opposing – tendencies of the 1970s: aestheticism and documentary realism. A similar statement can be made of the new academism that shaped the mainstream of the 1980s. During this period he developed his longest-lasting collaboration with István Szabó, resulting in seventeen films altogether, including international productions. Koltai was also the cinematographer of the first two – and arguably the best – entries in the cycle of films set in the 1950s: András Kovács’s A ménesgazda (The Stud Farm Manager, 1978) and Pál Gábor’s Angi Vera (1979).
In the 1990s his connection to the main currents of Hungarian film history weakened, as from the late 1980s he increasingly worked on international productions – twenty were completed before his own directing project, Este (Evening, 2007). Yet his name is still associated with one of the emblematic films reflecting on the regime change: István Szabó’s Édes Emma, drága Böbe (Dear Emma, Sweet Böbe, 1992).
The two films Koltai directed in Hungary – Sorstalanság followed much later by Semmelweis (2023) – are standalone works that can mainly be linked, from an institutional perspective, to the representative prestige-film tendencies characteristic of their respective periods. Both belong to the genre of the historical film, the former being a Holocaust drama and the latter a biographical film.
Let us now examine the above-mentioned stylistic tendencies one by one and consider Lajos Koltai's role within each of them.
1. Although the later development of the oeuvre is not marked by experimentalism – on the contrary, it becomes explicitly professional in character and tends toward mid-cult art films, or, in the case of international productions, toward genre filmmaking – it is worth highlighting the experimental nature of the first works and their connection to the Balázs Béla Studio. All this demonstrates the diversity of the oeuvre, sometimes through the cinematography of unexpectedly unconventional films, such as Gábor Bódy’s very first independent project, shot at the BBS before he even entered film school: A harmadik (The Third, 1971).
This black-and-white film, built largely on improvisation and observing students rehearsing Faust on the humanities faculty terrace while interviewing some of them, displays the traits of amateur filmmaking through seemingly accidental camera movements and distant, “watchful” setups. At the same time, in the interior interview situations – and most of all in the intimate moments of the girl who becomes the central figure – one can already clearly recognize the style that would later become the cinematographer’s hallmark: painting with light, and the image illuminated to tonal threshold.
Koltai’s first feature film, Agitátorok (The Agitators, 1969, dir. Dezső Magyar), boasts similar strengths, though it already has a more structured narrative and visual world. The film, which presents the activities of the intellectual group of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, succeeds in conveying the momentum of revolution (and one can “hear” 1968 resonating within it). Besides the rapid-fire dialogue and the nearly continuous movement, this is largely due to the images: the dynamic camera motions and tight compositions. At the same time, counterpoints play an important role in the film – the calm, peaceful setups, such as when we glimpse a scene from a didactic theatre performance. The opposing groups are also given distinct atmospheres: the counter-revolutionary Whites indeed appear in lighter-toned images, while the revolutionaries’ recruitment speeches and actions unfold in more dramatic lighting, often at night or in darkness.
A particularly innovative directorial solution is the incorporation of archival documentary footage, which expands and contemporizes the meaning, and with which the newly shot material must harmonize. This succeeds especially in the sequences portraying the functioning of the intellectual group, which take on the character of reportage or documentary film.
The Agitators was the Balázs Béla Studio’s first feature-length production – and also its first banned film – thus a crucial moment in the studio’s history, with Lajos Koltai as one of its collaborators. The film also served as Koltai’s diploma project, the culmination of nine exam films (some of which he co-directed), the most memorable of which is the medium-length Három lányok (Three Girls, 1968), also made with Dezső Magyar.
2. The films shot at the BBS – in preparation for the film-historical tendencies of the period – set off in two directions: on the one hand toward new modernist forms, and on the other toward developing innovative possibilities for documentary practice. Koltai took part in both. Since he was involved in more works within documentary filmmaking, let us begin by listing these, and then continue with the feature films made in the mainstream, in which the documentary style can still be detected.
Given what we know about the oeuvre, it may be surprising how many documentaries Koltai photographed at the beginning of his career, partly at the Report and Documentary Film Studio (these are the more traditional pieces), and partly at the Balázs Béla Studio (the more experimental ones). At the former workshop were made: Illetlen fotók (Improper Photos, 1970, dir. Géza Böszörményi), Lányok (Girls, 1970, dir. György Szomjas), A lőrinci fonóban (In the Lőrinc Spinning Room, 1971, dir. Márta Mészáros), Tisztelt cím! (Dear Address, 1971, dir. Lívia Gyarmathy), Füredi Annabál (The Anna Ball of Füred, 1972, dir. György Szomjas), and Sárospatak (1972, dir. Ferenc Kardos). At the latter workshop were shot: Nászutak (Honeymoons, 1970, dir. György Szomjas), Archaikus torzó (Archaic Torso, 1971, dir. Péter Dobai), Tengerszint feletti magasság (Altitude Above Sea Level, 1972, dir. Ferenc Téglásy), Valami mást (Something Else, 1972, dir. Pál Erdőss), Gyakorlatok (Exercises, 1973, dir. György Szomjas), Regruták (Recruits, 1974, dir. Pál Erdőss), Az egyedi eset természetrajza (The Natural History of a Special Case, 1975, dir. Györgyi Szalai), and Tárgyilagosan (Objectively, 1977, dir. Pál Erdőss). Together with the already mentioned Agitátorok (The Agitators) and A harmadik (The Third), as well as the Prés (Press, 1971, dir. Gyula Maár), Koltai shot eleven films at the BBS, and he continued working there even after feature films were already associated with his name.
Without delving deeply into these short documentaries, it is still worth highlighting that while they introduce their cinematographer to the world of contemporary Hungarian society and strengthen the sense of reality that will remain recognizable in his later films, they also make stylistically clear what interests Koltai most in his surroundings: the face, which will become the most important and defining motif of his art. The face: the image of reality and sociality reflected on faces, interpreted less in sociological than in psychological terms. The human soul – and the soul of reality. Of course, one finds descriptive, atmosphere-rich shots of the environment (for instance, in the depiction of the spinning room in Lőrinc), but the dominance of the face, of the close-up, is striking, especially in a documentary context. And not only in interviews – where the tight framing is already surprising, as in Honeymoons or especially in Archaic Torso (in which we seem to penetrate into the deepest, most secret recesses of a strange soul) – but also in setups capturing situations and events, such as in Dear Address or Improper Photos (in the latter, the camera mercilessly scans the faces of the audience watching a pathetic strip show in extreme close-ups).
The other noteworthy circumstance is film-historical: just as these short films serve as the precursors of the mainstream documentary trend, Koltai’s working relationships with the directors involved also tend to continue (György Szomjas is the one surprising exception, even though he shot four short documentaries with him). The same occurs with Márta Mészáros (Szabad lélegzet [Riddance, 1973]; Örökbefogadás [Adoption, 1975]; Olyan, mint otthon [Just Like Home, 1978]), Lívia Gyarmathy (Álljon meg a menet [Hold Your Horses, 1973]), Géza Böszörményi (Autó [Car, 1975]), Pál Erdőss (Adj király katonát! [Princess, 1982]) and Ferenc Kardos (Mennyei seregek [Heavenly Hosts, 1983]); and to this group belong, through Györgyi Szalai, the significant films made with István Dárday (Jutalomutazás [The Prize Trap, 1974]; Filmregény [Film Novel, 1977]; Harcmodor [Mode of Combat, 1979]), while Péter Dobai becomes the co-screenwriter of István Szabó’s trilogy in the 1980s. What stands out most in this network of connections is that, apart from Mennyei seregek [Heavenly Hosts], filmed with Kardos much later after a ten-year break and stylized into a mystical form, all the feature films can be linked to the methods tested in the short documentaries.
3. The documentary approach leaves its mark on feature films partly by allowing conventional realism to enhance a film’s sense of authenticity through solutions borrowed from documentary filmmaking. A major representative of this tendency is Márta Mészáros: the first phase of her oeuvre, beginning in 1968 and bringing her international fame, consists of films in this style, and three of the eight-film series were shot by Koltai. Riddance and Adoption are particularly important – also from the perspective of cinematography. Owing likely to Koltai, the lyrical tone and the drive to depict psychological processes permeate the style of these two black-and-white films with greater force. As is generally the case with the female protagonists of Mészáros’s films, the heroines here are also rebels, yet their rebellion takes shape as an inner struggle and becomes external only in the denouement through a radical act: in Riddance with the acceptance of one’s real social situation and the break that follows from it, and in Adoption through the act named in the title and the separation that likewise accompanies it. Koltai follows the inner path of rebellion on the protagonists’ bodies (the opening sequence of Riddance, with its close-ups scanning the showering female body, is telling) and on their faces (as the disciplined features of Kati Berek, the protagonist of Adoption, subtly tremble).
The other main contemporary consequence of the documentary approach is the birth of a new film genre, which is neither documentary nor feature film, but documentary feature film, and for this reason it is given a name of its own by foreign critics: Budapest School. István Dárday, the creator, the most persistent exponent, theoretician and organiser of this movement, makes his films together with his partner György Szalai. Koltai was a collaborator on their early, and thus stylistically groundbreaking, works, and was the cinematographer of The Prize Trap, Film Novel with Ferenc Pap, and Fighting Manners. Here, too, the first two opuses are significant. In The Prize Trap the feature film formulation is even more pronounced, and the film has explicit satirical solutions (satire would become another important branch of Koltai's work in the 1970s), while the improvised dialogues of the civilian characters demand a different kind of filming and image-making practice. Koltai shoots with 'two eyes', i.e. he not only looks into the camera, but also keeps his other eye open to see the events he has to adjust to in a moment, whether the camera is on a tripod or in a car or (most often) in his hand. But the cinematography, which uses natural light outside and only the most necessary, natural lighting inside, is not without its dramatic elements, such as the red highlights in the The Prize Trap, which are the hallmark of the pioneering movement. The Film Novel, on the other hand, is shot in black and white, but this choice is not necessarily in the service of realism either, since the often gloomy, dimly lit settings and interiors have a strong atmospheric effect, and the story, which tells of everyday horse racing events, is essentially played out in the faces of the "three sisters". In order to achieve a feature film style, and to capture all the scenes shot in one shot, a second cinematographer is used in this film, as has become the practice in the Budapest School films. In this way, too, the grand epic of the film novel uses a highly complex method of representation, and the encyclopaedic presentation of the period includes not only the story and the characters' social situation, but also the atmosphere and the inner world, thanks primarily to the images.
Koltai's commitment to the documentary form is also indicated by the fact that, following the three previous BBS films of Pál Erdőss, who continued the tradition of the Budapest School, arriving as its second wave and increasingly approaching the form of feature film, the director's first film, which established his style, Princess (Péter Gothár, 1979 and 1981) and Trust and Mephisto (István Szabó, also 1979 and 1981).
4. The group of satirical films is more loosely connected to the documentary trend. The most direct influence comes from the satirical and grotesque short documentaries produced mainly at the Balázs Béla Stúdió, among which Koltai worked as cinematographer on György Szomjas’s films; to this group also belongs Gyula Böszörményi’s Indecent Photos. Yet because of their satirical tone, these feature-length productions are already more stylized works, marked by the “Czech-style” grotesque small-realism that is most often evoked by the narrative world (a rural or small-town environment). Koltai’s cinematography is fundamentally dramatic in tone (especially in his own directorial works), but his oeuvre also includes comedies shot abroad. The tone of Hungarian satire, however, is in any case closer to tragicomedy than to comedy, and through their stylization these works acquire an authorial character, while the comedic quality appears only as a subgenre or generic pattern within them.
At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, satire gained new momentum, and its two most original voices were the creative duo Lívia Gyarmathy and Géza Böszörményi. Interestingly, Koltai photographed both of their second films – that is, works that were not style-defining and can be considered less successful – Hold Your Horses and Car (and we may also include Böszörményi’s 1975 one-hour German–Hungarian co-production television film Az utolsó tánctanár (The Last Dance Teacher)). In these works, a different set of the cinematographer’s strengths comes to the fore: instead of close-ups, it is the wider shots and group compositions – where the relationship between environment and human being (Hold Your Horses) or the more spectacular action sequences (Car) – that generate the satirical meaning.
Because of its style blending satire with the grotesque, an outstanding work is Ferenc András’s first feature film, Veri az ördög a feleségét (Rain and Shine, 1977). In its scenes depicting the 20 August village fair, the film evokes the world of the documentary-fiction works (especially the similarly themed opening of The Prize Trap). Yet the film’s true visual invention is the grotesque distortion, most of all in the festive lunch that forms the centre of the story. In this meticulously constructed scene, alongside the interactions of multiple characters, the grotesque takes on literal visual meaning in the distorted extreme close-ups: eating becomes gorging. Goulash-communism triumphs. Another high point is the grotesque exaggeration of boastful petit-bourgeois mentality: the ceremonial presentation of the family crypt before the dull party-official guest, which is abruptly ended by a sudden storm – as if nature itself were rebelling against, or laughing at, what it witnesses…
For a cinematographer who feels most at home in urban settings, in tight interiors, in closed compositions, and in “probing” camera movements, satirical films offer the possibility of a more open, relaxed, plein-air mode of expression rooted in the countryside and nature – a possibility Koltai exploits with visible delight. To use a painterly analogy not at all foreign to him: the aestheticizing films resemble oil paintings, while the documentary-style works and the satires are more akin to watercolours. The same can be said of the more lyrical Amerikai cigaretta (American Cigarette, János Dömölky, 1977), shot in the same year as Rain and Shine, and especially of Szépek és bolondok (On the Sideline, 1976), made one year earlier.
Yet in Péter Szász’s film the spiritualized poetic quality grows so strong in contrast to the satire and the grotesque (even though the story – about the greatness of the little man, embodied by a middle-aged labourer who, on weekends, becomes the much-derided referee of third-division football matches – is indeed grotesque and satirical), that the film moves the viewer rather than provokes laughter. From the cinematographer’s perspective, moreover, it belongs at least as much among the aestheticizing films as among the satires.
5. Koltai aligns himself with the aestheticism that intensified – and often radicalized – the modernist styles of the 1960s through his collaborations with Gyula Maár: he became the cinematographer of the director’s first four films. Their partnership again began at the Balázs Béla Studio, where Prés (The Press, 1971) was completed as the workshop’s second feature-length production (thus Koltai played a major role in the BBS’s “coming of age”). After Jancsó’s parables, the director sought new ways to portray the nature of power and manipulation, discovering them partly in a lyricism permeating abstraction, and partly in a closed world that acted as an inverse of Jancsó’s open spaces. In these artistic aims, Koltai became his key partner: in his black-and-white images the representatives of power are rendered with harder contours, while softening lights delineate characters who detach from violence, turn inward, reflect – and thus prove unsuitable for their trainers. The monastery-like boarding institution, particularly its corridors, proves especially apt for capturing characters’ inner worlds through their movement, but the same can be said of Teréz – played by Mari Törőcsik – and her tense pacing up and down the cell-like rooms. The movement of the actor and of the camera, and their combinations; light and darkness, and their intermingling to the point of extremes; the human face on its own, and the human figure framed, enclosed, or highlighted by its surroundings – nearly everything that characterizes Koltai’s visual artistry is already present in this film.
The next Maár film, the likewise black-and-white Végül (In the End, 1973), continues this style, though in a slightly less elevated and essentially realist environment. Out of this more descriptive visual approach emerges the inner drama of a devout communist whose worldview has become anachronistic, as well as his generational conflict with his son. The film therefore stands closer to the world of the documentary-style works beginning with Riddance. Maár’s next films, Déryné, hol van? (Mrs. Déry, Where Are You?, 1975) and Teketória (Entanglement, 1976), however, employ radical stylization. It is no coincidence that this is when the concept of the “honey-brown half-light” emerges as a signature element of Lajos Koltai’s authorship. In Mrs. Déry, Where Are You? the methods already seen in The Press reappear, now in color: the play of predominantly dark, warm tones; long takes composed for interiors; complex camera movements; adjustments connecting and separating spaces, whether in the intriguingly segmented theatre building or in the interconnecting rooms of Déry’s rural home. This too is a story of rebellion – just as the middle-aged female protagonist of Entanglement experiences her crisis with self-irony in the film’s present-time narrative. Yet Maár, in a manner quite unique in this period, does not give the rebellion a social, historical or political context, but a psychological and existential one. In Mrs. Déry’s theatre, one feels as though moving inside the protagonist’s reddish, soft soul – or heart – just as Ingmar Bergman imagined the inner world of the soul in Cries and Whispers, and as Sven Nykvist photographed it for him. It is no coincidence that when Mrs. Déry secretly watches her young rival rehearsing, the stage is bathed in cold blue light. She leaves this world for the sake of her husband, traveling with him to his bleak, colorless home, then leaves him again in the dawn-shot scene symbolizing escape, returns to the stage, and finally disappears into the mist of eternal legends together with all the film’s characters. The peculiar tension of both films stems from the fact that their grand, emotion-rich dramas are depicted with suppressed passion, melancholy and self-irony. Serving this are the quiet, monotonous, almost monologue-like dialogues, the restrained acting, and above all Koltai’s sensitive, shadow-bound, boundary-exposed images – of female souls crossing the limits of their own selves.
Other aesthetic films include The Epidemic (1975) by Gábor Pál Gábor, which also places more emphasis on the inner struggle of the medical protagonist between the lords and the peasants than on the spectacular depiction of the cholera conflict and the measures taken to deal with it. And here, too, can be included the aforementioned On the Sideline, which also uses the dramaturgical function of colour shades, such as the depiction of the protagonist working as a bread delivery man in the warm light of the ovens, or the intimate afternoon with his country girlfriend, as he tells of his everyday war exploits while its getting dark in the room. All this contrasts with the hazy, damp, cold and faded grey-blue of the desolate football pitches.
When speaking of the aestheticizing tendency that emerged in the first half of the 1970s, it is worth noting an important circumstance regarding Koltai’s artistry. The modernist style of these films is determined primarily by non-linear narrative structures, by a consciousness-film quality, and by the associative rapid-montage that creates it. The two films that inaugurate this trend – Károly Makk’s Szerelem (Love, 1970) and Zoltán Huszárik’s Szindbád (Sindbad, 1971) – exemplify this. Although both films possess outstanding visual worlds – the former shot by János Tóth, the latter by Sándor Sára – the structure, the mode of narration appears to stand just a step ahead among their form-shaping elements. In another characteristic work of the trend, Pál Sándor’s Régi idők focija (Football of the Good Old Days, 1973), the burlesque genre-play seems to be the fundamental stylistic component, even though the cinematography (by Elemér Ragályi) is likewise captivating. In the aestheticizing films shot with the collaboration of Lajos Koltai as cinematographer, however, this perhaps artificial hierarchy appears to be overturned – with the images emerging as the true victors.
These works do not belong strictly to the aestheticism of the 1970s, since they were made at the end of the decade and in the early 1980s, yet this is where Péter Gothár’s first two films must be mentioned: Ajándék ez a nap (This Day Is a Gift, 1979) and Megáll az idő (Time Stands Still, 1981). The former may also be grouped among grotesque satires, while the latter’s evocation of the past recalls the world of 1950s films, but the visual style of both films is a self-standing, unique tour de force in its own right, even as each bears traces of Koltai’s “aestheticization” – albeit in more radical form. The most striking element is the incorporation of the “single bare bulb” (and the single neon tube) into the film image. Placing the light source within the frame had not been foreign to Koltai’s methodology before, yet here it becomes decisive. Another familiar solution is the contrast of warm and cold colors (a significant feature in Confidence as well), except that here it often appears within a single frame, dividing the composition into what amounts to two images. The grotesque close-ups of This Day Is a Gift intensify the similar shots in Rain and Shine, while the chalk-dust-filled school scenes of Time Stands Still recall the fog-shrouded final image of Mrs. Déry, Where Are You?. But the themes and moods are very different: the absurdity of everyday life under Kádár in This Day Is a Gift, and, as its prelude, the nostalgically stylized yet ultimately disillusioning 1960s – culminating in the disappointment of ’68 – in Time Stands Still. A new, unparalleled quality is born. It is no coincidence that Time Stands Still would become one of the films that opened the doors of a new world for Koltai – and in his American work, a truly new world did indeed unfold before him.
And finally, two late after-echoes of aestheticism: Ferenc Kósa’s Guernica (Guernica, 1982) and the already mentioned Heavenly Hosts directed by Ferenc Kardos. Koltai shot only one feature film with each of them.
In connection with aestheticism, it is worth drawing attention to one of the cinematographer’s strikingly frequent recurring motifs, one that offers an excellent opportunity for stylization: the presence of the theatre, the stage space within the narrative world of the films. It already appears in the shabby community center of Indecent Photos, then in its venerable patina as the theatre housing Mrs. Déry, and the stage becomes a stylized metaphor in the self-reflexive final image of Entanglement. The protagonist is an actor in Mephisto and Csodálatos Júlia (Being Julia, directed by István Szabó, 2004); an illusionist performing on stage in Hanussen (István Szabó, 1988) and Mario és a varázsló (Mario and the Magician, Klaus-Maria Brandauer, 1994); singers, musicians and a conductor prepare for an opera production in Találkozás Vénusszal (Meeting Venus, István Szabó, 1991); and the composer’s stage works are evoked in Offenbach titkai (The Secrets of Offenbach, István Szabó, 1996). And this does not even include the many scenes in other films that incorporate various kinds of stages, from Angi Vera to Redl ezredes (Colonel Redl, István Szabó, 1985).
All this is more than coincidence.
6. Even before the decline of aestheticism, and in parallel with his international work, Koltai took on a defining role in the dominant trend of the 1980s and in one of its thematic film groups: the new academism and the cycle of films about the 1950s. His most important creative partner in all this is István Szabó, with whom – apart from a single film – his path never diverges from this point onward. It is important to note that the two of them essentially shift together from the aestheticizing auteur film to the midcult art film of medium scale, since Szabó’s works of the 1970s also belong to the previously discussed trend (Szerelmesfilm [Lovefilm, 1970]; Tűzoltó utca 25. [25 Fireman’s Street, 1973]; Budapesti mesék [Budapest Tales, 1976]). The stylistic shift in his oeuvre is marked by Confidence, the first film made with Koltai. In this essentially two-character wartime melodrama, the director asks for – and receives from his cinematographer – the grayish-blue bleakness of the persecution era to complement the “honey-brown half-light”, and the other significant element is the close-up, which from this point forward becomes central to Szabó’s art. Two defining visual solutions – no coincidence that from here on they become inseparable. All of this, of course, required the change in scale brought about by the subsequent international co-production that realized the fully developed midcult film, the ability to meet its demands, and the enormous success that followed: the Academy Award for Mephisto (Mephisto) (and the nominations for the preceding and following two films). The trilogy beginning with Mephisto, and later the likewise tripartite A Napfény íze (Sunshine, 1999), which traces a three-generation family saga, introduces a new element: a series of spectacular, tableau-like set-ups involving crowds, which effectively establish (indeed, function literally as establishing shots) the period and its locations. However, it is worth noting that these solutions – which can indeed be considered more conventional – are frequently followed by close-ups introduced through cuts that are, strictly speaking, irregular. Thus, alongside the historical tableaux, the more intimate premier plan shots persist. In this visual approach one can clearly observe the defining characteristic of midcult films: the blending of auteur style and perspective with more traditional, genre-like formal conventions. Koltai and Szabó’s collaboration continues with a series of varied works, some realized abroad, each of which would merit an independent study. There is no space here to discuss them all, but I will recall their joint oeuvre once more in a brief chapter
Before moving on, let me at least refer to the two works that launched the thematic wave of films about the 1950s – A ménesgazda (The Stud Farm Manager) and Angi Vera – not least because the latter, prior to Time Stands Still and Mephisto, would become the film that brought Koltai international fame. Yet both works are remarkable in their own right, for beyond their subject matter they also introduce the style that has since become characteristic of the now historically distant Rákosi era through their “painterly rendering” of the period. Painterly are the horses standing in the dawn mist at the state stud farm, followed by their bloody clash, which demonstrates the incompetence of the cadre appointed to run the place. And here too, the rare warm moments in the beloved’s small room stand in stark visual contrast to the harshness of the outside world, revealed with particular visual force in the film’s “detour” to Recsk, an autonomous episode within the story. Something similar may be said of the foggy November exteriors of Angi Vera, neither autumn nor winter, and the cold green-walled interiors of the residential cadre school, in contrast with the intimate, nest-like red glow of the bar just beyond the fence. And Koltai also photographed another “doubly” painterly film about the period, Hajnali háztetők (Rooftops at Dawn, Dömölky János, 1986), whose protagonists are painters.
7. I consider it important to highlight Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe separately within the oeuvre, because it is not only a valuable and significant film that responds quickly and deliberately “in sketch form” to the changing social situation (its subtitle is Sketches, Nudes), but something more: a remarkable artistic gesture on the part of both the director and the cinematographer. By this time, Szabó and Koltai were internationally recognised artists, capable of making high-budget films with A-list Hollywood stars. Characteristically, immediately before this film they completed Meeting Venus, which met all these parameters, and after two television films Szabó went on to shoot the likewise high-budget, multinational co-production Sunshine, while Koltai was at that time regularly shooting American genre films. At the end of the millennium he would take on another large-scale European super-production, The Legend of 1900 (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1999), which received numerous awards, including the David di Donatello Award for Best Cinematography. Another major Tornatore success followed Malena (2000), which again earned him the David di Donatello Award and even an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.
Despite all this, Szabó and Koltai both considered it essential to make, at home, a deliberately simple, low-budget film responding to the new political situation – a film that nevertheless remained faithful to the central thesis of their earlier and later work: to show the human being under the pressure of social challenges. The story’s genuinely topical, publicistic tone is supported by Koltai’s unadornedly simple images, from which only the “aestheticising” nightmare sequence deviates (the vision of the protagonist falling naked), while once again the excellent actors’ close-ups shine most brightly.
8. Lajos Koltai, as a director, also returns home: he commits himself to Hungarian film and Hungarian stories, while his international recognition is reflected in the fact that, after Fateless, he was given the opportunity to direct a Hollywood film, an adaptation of American writer Susan Minot’s novel Evening. Yet afterwards he again shot a film in Hungary, an autobiographical drama about a Hungarian hero, Ignác Semmelweis, revered as the saviour of mothers. In his own directing work Koltai follows the style of the latest and longest period of his career as a cinematographer – spanning four decades – that of the midcult art film, in which, as is characteristic of this type of filmmaking, the author’s style and perspective remain clearly recognisable.
In the classicising adaptation of Imre Kertész’s world-famous novel (the project had been decided upon even before the Nobel Prize), one especially outstanding visual moment for me is in the appel sequence, when the sight of the exhausted, staggering bodies transitions into stylisation, as the movement artist Andrea Ladányi, hidden among the crowd, amplifies and elevates the scandalous reality into an artistic action; or the shot in which someone lifts the protagonist, long thought dead, onto his shoulder, and from the upside-down viewpoint of Gyuri Köves hanging headfirst we see a world that has indeed been turned on its head.
The success of these films – including the exceptionally high audience numbers of the most recent work, Semmelweis – confirms for Lajos Koltai that it was worthwhile to return, fortified with international experience, and to devote his new works to filming Hungarian heroes in Hungary, for nothing can replace the love and appreciation of the domestic audience. The soul of the image comes alive here; the images of the soul express the most at home.
[2024]