If we place Attila Mispál's oeuvre in the context of film history, we can associate the concept of “transition” with his work; the continuous transition that leads his creator along the “paths of light” of the moving image. His oeuvre is a transition in terms of institutional and socio-political conditions, as well as in terms of the period of film history; his films are a transition in terms of the most diverse film genres; finally, a kind of transition is also evident in the approach and style of his films, and this is most evident in his auteurist works. In what follows, I will look at these aspects of 'transience' in the hope that they will lead to a better understanding and appreciation of the oeuvre.
In the case of Attila Mispál, his filmmaking activities and film studies began after the fall of communism, but both are strongly embedded in the previous era. His first film project was accepted by the Béla Balázs Studio, where Mispál soon became a member and even took part in the management of the workshop. BBS, founded in 1959 and producing films from 1961, already had a long tradition in film history, offering opportunities to young filmmakers and, from the turn of the 60s and 70s, opening its doors to people without a degree. In this respect, Mispál's initial position is also one of transition, as he shoots his first experimental film, Dance, at the studio between 1990 and 1992, before being accepted at the Academy of Theatre and Film, where he continues to receive support from the BBS (the studio produced a 35 mm print of one of his films, Angst, for his final exams) and leaves the studio in 1997, after graduating. But the situation of the BBS itself can be described as “transitional”: its exceptional monopoly during the Kádár era is abolished, and with the change of regime, new studios, including Inforg and Duna Műhely, are free to form, which also welcome young filmmakers and help them to start their careers. However, Mispál, along with many of his generation, such as Júlia Szederkényi, Csaba Bollók and Ágnes Kocsis, chose BBS, and thus began his career in a “classic” way: with short films in the studio's tradition of bold experiments in form, followed by a first feature-length film in a similar spirit, as with the members of the emerging generation of the previous three decades, with only the most representative names, from István Szabó to Gábor Bódy and János Xantus.
His departmental teachers at the college, despite their apparent randomness independent of the creator's choice, also represent a transition. Gyula Gazdag brings with him the tradition of the Béla Balázs Studio, which played an important role in his career and was a member of its board (at the turn of the sixties and seventies), a fact that must have been particularly important for Mispál, who was also active at the BBS. In the early nineties, with the impetus of the change of regime, Greichag, in response to a “public outcry” from his students, left his cathedral in Los Angeles to become rector of the college. His sudden departure from the country after only a few years (and his return to the prestigious UCLA faculty) surprised and ill-affected many, especially members of his department. He also involved Paul Zolnay Greichag in his teaching, but the director's death in 1995 meant that this collaboration could not flourish. At the unanimous request of the students, they were finally taken over by János Herskó, who in 1970 had similarly unexpectedly defected from the country, in a manner then considered illegal, leaving his current class (who were taken over by Zoltán Fábri). A curious 'tradition' can be recognised in this moment, but it is at most an anecdotal, symbolic turn in the story of Mispál. The more fascinating question is how the two professors, who were committed to documentarism, left their mark on their students' worldview and methodology. Mispál's work will play an important role in the life of the filmmaker, who started out as an experimental filmmaker and short filmmaker, and oriented himself towards feature films, as documentaries and their diverse sub-genres, such as portraits, concert films, the documentation of theatre performances or artistic events, will play an important role in his oeuvre.
Finally, the beginning of Mispál's career also coincides with a period of transition in film history. 1989 marked the end of the forty-year period of the state socialist era and the end of the Kádár era, which lasted for a man-year. But a new era in film history has not yet begun, at least in formal terms and in the mainstream; it will come at the turn of the millennium, thanks to the generation of 'young Hungarian film' that followed the Mispalades by only a few years. A new class, like the new wave Máriássy class, will be born, that of Sándor Simó, including such now seminal creators as Szabolcs Hajdu, György Pálfi and Ferenc Török; They are joined by filmmakers who graduated in a different class or later, or who do not have a film degree (Kornél Mundruczó, Ágnes Kocsis, Benedek Fliegauf); and a new generation of creators is emerging in popular culture alongside this wave of auteur filmmakers (Krisztina Goda, Gábor Herendi, Péter Bergendy, Nimród Antal). Behind the class and generation of Mispálek, there is no such generational driving force. There is no wave to ride, no producer support behind them (Simó, as head of studio, is giving his students their first film, Fliegauf's career starts at András Muhi's Inforg), and Eurofilm Studio, led by Péter Miskolczi, which provides the director with a workshop, is gradually losing its opportunities as the financing system is being restructured, so his new feature film projects are not being supported. This is despite the fact that in the 1990s, the Mispálék generation also produced remarkable short and later feature-length films, original ideas and innovative styles. Among them are Júlia Szederkényi and Csaba Bollók, already mentioned in the context of BBS, Péter Mészáros, who studied in Georgia, Tamás Tóth, who graduated in Moscow, Tibor Klöpfler and István Szaladják, who also worked as cinematographers, and Mispál's college classmates András Fésős, Marcell Iványi and Júlia Sára. A distinctive generation of early careerists, the nineties, but also many individual, lonely, more or less isolated lives. Autonomy, artistic autonomy and independence are virtues, but being outside the mainstream, lacking the impetus of the new wave, is also a burden, as the very small filmography of these works unfortunately proves. Mispalé only in a certain sense: in the sense of a career as a feature film director starting out as an auteur. But it has not left its mark on the versatile, 'applied' filmmaker, who already has a considerable filmography, is constantly at work and tries to preserve and keep alive his auteurist approach and style, if not in experimental short or feature-length films, then in other, equally varied forms. From this point of view, Mispál's work is very different from that of most of his contemporaries of the 1990s: his first work enriches the transitional period in the history of cinema of the decade, while his work continues to depart from this path, thinking on a smaller scale and in smaller forms, but which has already produced a body of work of considerable quantity and quality.
If we focus our attention not on the individual films of the author, but on the whole arc of his oeuvre, we can also observe a particular “transience” in the types of films. I am not necessarily referring to their diversity and variety (short films and feature-length films, the various forms of documentary), but to the very specific presence of the two great formal traditions of documentary and fiction. This is not a reference to the tradition of Hungarian film history, namely fiction documentaries, and the Budapest School as a trend. Mispál does not make this type of work. It is striking how little his documentaries deal with sociological themes, in fact he has no such work at all. He is not interested in everyday “reality”, in this respect he differs from the approach of his two masters, but in the “celestial model”, if you like, of reality, its “fiction”.
A strikingly high proportion of his documentaries are about art or artists: about actors (Lajos Kovács, Juli Básti, Ödön Dusa, György Cserhalmi, Margit Karna, Attila Magyar, Gábor Máté, Péter Blaskó, Ilona Béres, Éva Vári, András Győrffy, Anna Ráckevei), musicians (Tamás Cseh, Ilona Budai, Aladár Pege, Christian Paccoud, Sándor Balassa, the Commission Ensemble), writers (Géza Bereményi, László Lator, Ferenc András Kovács, Erzsébet Tóth, Ferenc Temesi, János Pilinszky, Győző Határ), directors (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Valére Novarina), artists (György Jovánovics), architects (László Sáros). Among these, portraits of the protagonists of The Paths of Light stand out: Marathon (2001), which follows Lajos Kovács in the dramatic situation of a long-distance race, with an almost feature-film dramaturgy and tension, and Prague Journey (2006), which also places György Cserhalmi in a situation. In addition to portraits of artists, Mispál's work also includes many documentaries on art, theatre performances, exhibitions and other events. In this group of films, too, the most memorable undertaking is the exhibition Once Upon a Time There Was an Exhibition I-II (2009), which unfolds from an unexpected situation and contains not only descriptions but also an investigation of the exhibition entitled Little Hungarian Pornography at the MODEM in Debrecen, but also a discussion of the fraught relationship between art and politics in the context of an unexpectedly (?) erupted debate. In other words, the actual subject of the exhibition. The two-part, two-and-a-half-hour film, while maintaining its original objective of presenting the exhibiting artists and their works, documents the disagreement surrounding the opening, and weaves it into the pre-recorded reports as a kind of diving path. In this way, we see two films, a report and a situation piece, the latter in the spirit of the director's first class teacher, Gyula Gazdag, who similarly shot material on contemporary mid-cadres that was at best foreboding, but ultimately revealing beyond all expectations, on the occasion of a report on György Schirilla in his epochal work Your Long Run We Can Always Count On (1969). Once upon a time, there was an exhibition, which makes us feel that it is not only the film's situational method that remains valid and topical...
It can be seen, therefore, that Mispál is happy to break out of the genre of documentary, reportage or popular science fiction film, if circumstances allow. In his best work, this is what happens. And when the director makes a more auteur-like etude, he spectacularly sticks to the inspiration of his collaborators, as in the case of Symphonies (2013), which was made to the lyrics of a poem by Sándor Weöres. So these are not documentaries in the sociological sense of the term, but rather educational works, or, to use a genre label that is no longer used much, but all the more characteristic of Mispál, short art films. This also has a significant tradition in the history of Hungarian film, but is perhaps little known: István Szőts made such films during his emigration to Vienna; Zoltán Huszárik's Amerigo Tot (1969) also belongs to this category; János Tóth, the film's cinematographer, made several films of a similar nature (Testamentum (Testament) with István Ventilla in 1965, Szintézis (Synthesis) with Ágoston Kollányi in 1968, and Poézis (Poesis) directed by himself in 1972); and István Gaál's late works, above all Gyökerek (Ancestors) (2000), on the art of Béla Bartók, can be included here. These films, which are often difficult to define in terms of genre or genre (etudes, experimental films, portrait films, educational films), also document something of “reality”, but these “realities” are the impressions of the world created by art and artists, the presentation and processing of which itself cries out, or at least can cry out, for an artistic form. Of course, a more traditional portrait or reportage film about an artist can also be made, but the presentation of the works acts as a creative compulsion, as an inspiration: how to convey the products of co-artistic production through my own medium, the moving image. One extreme, truly documentary, is the documentary, portrait and educational film, in which the artists and their works are presented in a fair and objective way. The other is a method that emphatically and innovatively mobilises the formal means of expression of its own medium, at the same time interpreting and reflecting on the artworks presented and initiating a dialogue with them, such as the art short films of Huszárik and János Tóth: in these, for example, there is no trace of a traditional interview, and even narration is missing. And of course there are many “middle-way”, “transitional” solutions, like those of Szőts or Gaál - and Mispál's art documentaries are among them. The client, the serial principle (such as the Playbill portraits of actors), the documentation of theatre performances, the coverage of certain cultural events, all of these are mostly limited. However, if a little more freedom is given to creative creativity, Attila Mispál's documentaries immediately take on a more authorial character, such as the Pilinszky series (including traditional documentary elements), which includes “planted” and situational reports, visits to original locations, and the pieces in the Csillagháló (Star Network) (2015-2022), which are structured around a specific theme.
This is the basis of the transition between works that are interested in the world of art, which are less objective and objective, and therefore more poetically inspired, and works of fiction, but with fiction the imagination is much freer than in the case of films that are more closely linked to “reality”, which can be called documentaries in the broadest sense. In other words, Mispál's early short films made at BBS and college, as well as his first feature-length film, are explicitly poetic, mythicising, 'world-making' works with a strong co-artistic attachment. For short films with an experimental tone, this is hardly a surprising undertaking. The basic setting of Hajszál és csengettyű (Hair and Bells) (1994), a Christmas meeting between a homeless man and a wealthy family, foreshadows one of the plot threads of the feature-length film Paths of Light (2005), and thus bears witness to a consciously constructed authorial idea. The stylization of real-life situation, the transience, if you like, between everyday life and the world of the imagination, is already clearly discernible in this early examination film, but in a less powerful form. The basic situation could even be considered sociological: the world of the rich and the poor, which is particularly heightened at Christmas time. For a fleeting moment, a hair-trigger bond is formed between the homeless man and a beautiful woman who is apparently well-off, only to have the dream end at the ring of another homeless man's bell (he is using it to beg), and the sobering and angry realisation that there is no passage, no transition. A particular formal virtue of this short film, shot in black and white, is the creative use of the video camera and the video image, which will play a major role in Angst.
The two most significant works of his early films, Angst and altAmira (the director's graduation film), which are related in terms of the scale of stylization, also form a transition within this group of films: they do not continue the path of the radical avant-garde film language experimenters, led by Gábor Bódy and Miklós Erdély, nor do they join the conceptual filmmakers (János Sugár, Miklós Peternák, Péter Forgács) who typically worked with video techniques. At the same time, these works cannot be considered traditional narrative short feature films, but are much more radical in their visual conceptualisation and narrative style. What is also special about them, and this can be interpreted as a kind of transition, is that they connect distant worlds with the help of poetic form: the story of Angst takes place in the everyday space of the metro traffic control office or at the station, while the title motif of AltAmira refers to the famous cave, a kind of point of origin of our human existence, while the story takes place in the mythicised but recognisably contemporary world of graffiti artists. A documentary location on the one hand, a motif for a popular science fiction film on the other, from which radically stylized poetic worlds and philosophical visions are constructed.
Angst (the German word Angst means fear, dread), based on a short story by Zsolt Pacskovszky, creates a metaphorical situation of anxiety. Sitting in a traffic control booth in front of security monitors all day long, the chatty Engel one day steps out of his invisible role and reads from J. M. C. Le Clézio's 1967 novel Terra Amata to an unsuspecting travelling public over a loudspeaker. The spoken excerpt of the little boy playing with coloured beetles and thus imagining himself to be God comes to life, or is it the operation of the metro that evokes the reading experience in Engel? Indeed, the crowd of the subway moves mechanically up and down the escalator like bugs, and this appears to be an insect-like procession, especially in the security camera footage. Invoking Kafka, the beetle's existence expresses a grotesque and tragic state of alienation and mechanisation, which Engel, as an outsider, views critically, as if he were a little boy playing with bugs. However, Mispalses continues the philosophical train of thought, making the protagonist himself a participant in the bug existence, who is thus also a prisoner of the world he controls, and at this point we can also recognise Foucault's thesis, which was little known in Hungary at the time. Angst's intellectual power and originality is rivalled, or rather reinforced, by its formal innovation, namely the use of images from industrial cameras. The black-and-white images of cinematographer András Nagy create an original, surreal and grotesque visual world from the degraded technique of this low-quality, purely observational device. This is of course enhanced by the realistic masks of the extras, a goggle-like device, the choreography of their twitching movements, and the quick cuts that enhance the dynamics of the movement, the psychedelic electro-music and the distorted 'voice of the sky' of the announcer, or, on the visual plane, Engel's hands and control panel, densely drawn with geometric and calligraphic shapes, 'continued' in graphic images of the insect world. But the most important moment, which also elevates the philosophical idea, or, on the contrary, brings it close to the viewer, is the stylization of the everyday space used daily by everyone (at least by the city dwellers), as in the medium of the metro, loudspeaker and industrial screens, an abstract, surrealistic, grotesque, absurd world is created, opening up a poetic, metaphysical perspective, or rather a counter-metaphysics, the anxious, oppressive, hopeless narrowness of our existence. And this, namely the vision constructed out of the everyday, is the realisation of this philosophical idea on a par with Kafka's art, where the displacement of a single element, in this case, the artistic 'reaching into' the everyday environment of the subway, opens up a view of the infinite vulnerability of our existence.
AltAmira is also based on a script by Zsolt Pacskovszky, with the collaboration of András Nagy, cinematographer, in which the everyday mundane world also comes into contact with a special, mythical world, and the possibility of visual stylisation plays an important role here, with the style of graffiti (which is evoked by the spelling of the title) following the industrial camera image. As in the case of the subway, the graffiti artists are a well found 'transitional' motif: their works are all over the city, they are part of our everyday visual experience, but their activity is also a secret, they work at night, because most of the protected wall surfaces are forbidden, which entails punishment and retribution. The status of graffiti artists is already complex and contradictory: artists or vandals, artists of our time or pests? It is this liminality that gives rise to the secretive, alchemical nature of their community, the emblematic pictograms with which they communicate with each other and 'sign' their works. Mispal also places a love and jealousy story with a traditional dramaturgy in this particular context, and enhances the stylization that results from it with additional motifs, such as deafness. The signage, however, rhymes nicely with the graffiti “signage”, the world of AltAmira is unified and consistent in all its elements, and this is what touches the viewer: the characters are in fact following the traditional circles of love-love-jealousy-hate-reconciliation-friendship, but the familiar story theme is made special by the visually highly expressive image of an exotic world.
The Paths of Light is a continuation of the style and approach of the college exam films, naturally in line with the expectations of the feature-length form, i.e. a more traditional narrative work, with a genre pattern and strong acting presence. But it is also not without transition: the subject matter clearly captures this kind of dynamic. We see the story of the meeting of two fates that have been fundamentally, even extremely, altered: that of a fashion model who has lost her beauty due to a severe burn and that of a pentathlete who has lost her sight, who meet each other in this altered, new state and perhaps continue their story together. For one of them cannot see what is dramatically distorted in the other... They are bizarrely matched, and even a 'found' child comes with a new life. One cannot help but notice a certain irony in this heightened melodramatic conclusion, even though the road to it is a serious one. In both stories, an important role is played by a fateful, redemptive figure, whether demonic destroyer or supportive helper. The story is therefore also pervaded by mysticism, by the meeting of special worlds, by models living extravagant lives on the one hand and by the work of the craftsmen who possess an almost secret knowledge on the other. The mysticism is also emphasised by the way in which the story is told, which makes chance a dramaturgical organising principle, and which is therefore at best more traditional than in short films, but by no means conventional. The model's story is presented in a chronological narrative, often with rapid, associative flashbacks, while the thread of the pentad that starts in the second half of the film meets the plot of the previous story at several points. We see the same scene from different points of view, or the prequel or sequel to one or other of them. A further interesting feature of the flashback narrative is the change of timeline, linked to a montage of scenes, as a movement continues in the past or in the future. The narrative structure is thus radically formal, the strong story, the specific plot, the visual language that expresses it, the consistently constructed motifs (above all the fire), the demanding and varied use of music, make the story easy to follow and experience, and the narrative does not feel overloaded, forced or mannered. If told in a linear way, the story might seem linear, but thanks to the particular fragmented narrative style, the metaphysical, spiritual, magical, if you like, component that goes beyond the concrete, which is Mispal's main concern, is amplified.
The Paths of Light won seven awards at the 2005 Hungarian Film Festival, including Best First Feature and the Student Jury Grand Prize, but until now it has not been followed by a second feature film. But this is not the only feature film the director has made, as he also made a TV movie in 2007 called Dance of the Bees. In the modernised story of Mihály Kohlhass, perhaps it goes without saying now, there is also a sense of transience: this is Mispál's most realistic film, and can even be interpreted as a contemporary social critique, while the increasingly absurd situations in life distance us from the everyday world, even to the point of a psychiatrically authentic depiction of the Kohlhass syndrome. And this is in the spirit of Kleist: who is the patient...? In this way, the title also refers to the duality of the absurd and the real: ecological pollution is killing bees, and in a way, it foretells the end of the world.
Parallels, unexpected encounters and, above all, transitions in the forms used and the worlds depicted. This is perhaps the best way to capture Attila Mispál's oeuvre to date.
[2022]