Ferenc Pap came to Budapest from Törtel, an environment where he learned the courage and strength of the struggle, the sense of reality and endless perseverance of those who work with land and animals, and a willingness to see the extraordinary.
He realised early on that a cameraman needed a strong nerve, because he had to make decisions almost every minute, he couldn’t make a single mistake – not even half a fade – because it had consequences on the screen.
In 1969 he started at the Színművészeti Főiskola (Academy of Dramatic Arts). The young team – István Dárday, László Vitézy, György Fehér, János Edelényi, János Illés, Sándor Kardos, Gábor Várkonyi, Attila Bartha and Ferenc Pap – did not know then that they would be the last Herskó class, because their idolised teacher would go on to defect before the school year.
It was a bit confusing for the class, but perhaps it gave them a sense of committed togetherness.
Ferenc Pap proved early on to be a deep and instinctive talent, who sees not only with his eyes but also with his heart. As a cinematographer, he is not only interested in creating a spectacle, but also in the smallest details, using raw material and light with awareness, striving to authentically reveal the underlying world of social and political life, of man and the soul.
Ferenc Pap has made nearly 50 feature films and several documentaries.
The technical conditions for making moving images have improved enormously since his college days. He has been actively involved in this innovation.
Alongside Sándor Sára, he was a cameraman in three films in the early seventies – and it was then, alongside college, that he really learned the trade. Sára taught him the tricks of the trade, and he learned a lot in Árvácska (Little Orphan), including what a cameraman can and cannot do. Here he learned that he can make suggestions for make-up for the sake of the picture, but that a wound or make-up that ages the actor is the director’s responsibility.
In the Budapest school there was a main direction, embodied by e.g. Adj király katonát! (King, Give me a Soldier!), Családi tűzfészek (Family Firehouse). The big films promoted in the main line were made on 35 mm prints. In addition to these there were the marginal films, and a third group, neither mainstream nor marginal, was the duo formed by Lívia Gyarmathy and Géza Böszörményi, who drew from the Czech school. They began to work together, producing a number of works of cinematic historical importance. Ferenc Pap also made his first feature film with Lívia Gyarmathy, entitled Minden szerdán (Every Wednesday), in 1977. Lívia Gyarmathy is a true director who knows exactly what she wants to see on the screen. The film stars the recently deceased Jirí Menzel. The film tells the story of a boy who has been in a reform school for burglary and meets his former denouncer, who feels responsible for his fate and sends him to school and then helps him get an apartment. Their next collaboration was Koportos, a Hungarian-German co-production in 1979, followed by Egy kicsit én, egy kicsit te (A Little Bit of Me, A Little Bit of You) in 1984. Laura (1986) was the work of Géza Böszörményi, who put his life-changing experiences in the forced labour camp in Recsk into a film. The titular character Laura, who visits the site of the Recsk camp on an aid mission, decides to change her life. The 1987 film Vakvilágban (In a World of the Blind), directed by Lívia Gyarmathy, was also a challenge for Ferenc Pap because it depicted a working class, a world of innkeepers that had disappeared, and it was therefore a real cinematographic challenge to portray it on the screen. He used parallel montage and the message was important to him because it was about the little man.
About the fact that the rules of the game change during the game, and the little man always ends up getting the short end of the stick.
The documentaries include Kilencedik emelet (Ninth Floor, 1977, Lívia Gyarmathy), Együttélés (Living Together, 1983, Lívia Gyarmathy), Faludy György, a költő (György Faludy, the Poet, 1987, Lívia Gyarmathy – Géza Böszörményi) and the most profound political documentary of the era, Recsk, or the story of a secret forced labour camp, which was secretly filmed for years in four parts by Géza Böszörményi and Lívia Gyarmathy, and which was awarded the European Prize in Paris in 1989.
A characteristic of the Budapest school was that it was shot with amateur actors and only the situation was given. The actors did not speak a written text, i.e. there was no script, but the cast was chosen to fit the theme of the film. This is why these films are called documentary feature films. However, the new formal language required a new technique. The amateur actors did not always turn at the right time in the scene and sometimes looked in the wrong direction, which was a potential for error. At the beginning, the amateur actors spoke a fairly accurately written dialogue, but when they were casting, it was clear that they brought their gestures, their inflections, their paraphrases from their own lives. In the case of the 35 mm film, it was not possible to use dubbing for amateur actors, as this would have lost the character. The cameras used at that time were still very heavy, over 70 kg, carried by two people, which made it difficult to change over for documentary films, because by the time you turned over with such a heavy camera, the scene had sometimes already been shot. But Ferenc Pap took advantage of this perceived handicap, and a new style emerged in the form of Adj király katonát! (King, Give me a Soldier!) and Filmregény (Film novel). With handheld 16 mm cameras, it was easier to move around, with two cameras needed with amateur actors to capture every page, every movement, every pitch, which was a great help in editing. Of course, this also raised another problem: how to get good lighting on two cameras? Obviously you can’t do it very well, so the room was flooded with light, creating a kind of homogeneous lighting effect. Of course, this was more of a contingency. As for movement, the two cameras had to be on one side of the axis. The two cameramen improvised and, with no monitors, worked on their own images, watching each other.
Next to that there was the restriction of raw material, you can’t exceed a certain number of meters. In the case of 35 mm film, you could use 18,000 metres, so a maximum of six overshoots was allowed. Then came the new option, 16 mm film, where you could reach eight times the overshot. It was easier to handle, just because of its size and weight, and the big advantage was that the 16 mm camera could record original sound. So when they were shooting with amateur actors and actresses, such as Dárday and Vitézy, the camera was a great help, as there was no need for dubbing. The material shot on 16 mm film was then enlarged so that it could be shown both on the cinema screen and on television.
The working method of Ferenc Pap
Ferenc Pap is one of the stable builders of documentary filmmaking, present among the creators of the Béla Balázs Studio and a founding partner of Társulás Filmstudio, and a permanent collaborator of its successor studios.
The cameraman was not wrong about the technique. Not even half a blend. Besides, it is a characteristic of documentaries that reactions are unpredictable. So the camera, which could be picked up at the time (and was not so heavy that it needed a wrestler), was not supposed to miss the scene. Besides, you had to find the ratio between the big shots and the close-ups. Ferenc Pap tried to prepare for these in advance, to get a feel for the emotional reactions: when to bring the camera closer to the speaker’s face, determining how long to focus on the speaker and when to move away. The use of vario was no longer a welcome technique for him and his contemporaries. Ferenc Pap is legendary for his skill with the hand-held camera. He made sure that he is never visible when moving or shooting, that he is not obstructed by scenery or objects, and his eyes wander around the frame from time to time to see what is inside the picture. The handheld camera, however, demanded more: it was important to keep it horizontal. To do this, Ferenc Pap developed a holding arm: he made a swan-neck arm with a handle that was horizontal with the arm already bent, which made it much easier to keep it level.
In addition to several documentaries, he was the main cinematographer of the Nevelésügyi Sorozat (Education Series), which explored Hungarian reality through sometimes poignant psychological depths, and was present behind the second camera alongside Lajos Koltai for the opening piece of the stylistic movement later called the Budapest school by foreign critics – Jutalomutazás (The Reward Journey). He is the visual designer of Békeidő (Peacetime), Vörösföld (Red Earth), Családi tűzfészek (Family Firehouse), Harcmodor (Fighting Manners), and Filmregény (Film Novel), and he is the first to bring documentary fiction to foreign success with Adj király katonát! (King, Give me a Soldier!), which won Pál Erdőss the Cannes Gold Camera.
We have already mentioned how cinematographer and director found each other to work together in the case of Lívia Gyarmathy and Géza Böszörményi.
Ferenc Pap was the second assistant and second assistant director of photography on the film Jutalomutazás (The Reward Journey), working with Lajos Koltay and Gábor Szabó. This was the first film that was almost in the style of the Budapest school films. The three cinematographers had already learned this method. The director-cinematographer pairs were formed in such a way that, for example, Pál Erdőss, who had been an assistant in Vörösföld (Red Earth), found an opportunity in the Társulás Filmstudio and, as a first-time cinematographer, was looking for an experienced cinematographer, so he applied the method to Adj király katonát! (King, Give me a Soldier!) in the person of Ferenc Pap, Gábor Szabó and Lajos Koltay.
They worked together with Pal Erdőss almost until Erdőss’ death. Their work together was based on mutual trust, as at that time there was no monitor to follow the recording, and the muster was often returned only a few days later.
In a way, Béla Tarr’s TV film Macbeth (1983) was a challenge, as the 53 minutes had to be shot from a single set. Back then there was no handycam, only a 40 kg portable table-top camera, carried by a weightlifter after the cameraman. They worked with a three-tube camera, and Pap counted the steps backwards down the stairs in the castle, then to the murder, then to the battle scene after the monologue of the main character, György Cserhalmi, because it was all one cut. They rehearsed for three weeks in the castle at night, in the cave, on the balcony above, in the tunnel, at the well and finally the cavalry battle scene in one. It was shot flawlessly four times, and cinematographer Buda Gulyás had to learn the moves in case he had to take over the shoot.
He and Béla Tarr were inseparable until the film Őszi almanach (Autumn Almanac).
The 1985 film Visszaszámlálás (Countdown) by Pál Erdőss, starring Károly Eperjes and the director’s discovery, the “most professional amateur” Erika Ozsda, was a challenge because of the black and white prints. Pap always had a great admiration for black-and-white film photography, because the lights and lighting have to be used in a completely different way. However, for Ferenc Pap, nothing is impossible, as one of his fellow directors and career colleagues, István Dárday, says of him. “He is a colleague who, even in crisis situations, is characterised by a presence of mind that helps him to unfold, who, for example, when he has to hold the camera in his hand, even at the tenth hour, makes a picture without flinching, and who, even when exhausted, retains his wry, free humour, in which the subtle tremors of the soul and the power of the force are well in tune with each other. He can adapt, he can change.”
When he received a script and an invitation, his first question was: what will move in the film? Yet he took on a Turkish film where the answer to that question was nothing. In addition to his career in Hungary, he was also sought after by Turkish directors: Örimázs Film, a three-country, French-Turkish-Hungarian co-production, made a Turkish film called Güle-güle (In the hope of seeing you again, I remain with respect), where the director invited him to shoot. He was also the cinematographer for two other Turkish feature films. Ferenc Pap was fascinated by Turkish acting and work ethic. He shot a series of American travelogues from Australia to Alaska, which made his name known in the world of co-productions and international film production, which began to play an increasingly important role in the 1980s. With a home-grown mentality, he set about filming in America, as he had learned to do in his time in Törtel.
“You know why Hungarian cameramen are beloved? It’s not just because you can get them for a quarter of the price of Americans. But if there’s a problem, the Americans call an emergency number, the Hungarian cameraman takes two planks, a hammer and a wire and solves the problem himself. There is a huge difference”
He shot the film Emigráns (Emigrant) in San Diego with the Szalai-Dárday team, and his work ethic was evident on this shoot as well.
An old dream of Ferenc Pap could come true with the Zsigmond Móricz adaptations: he could make a costume film. He also worked on the “revolutionisation” of the television image in the debate between cinema and television, which had the potential to be a highly popular television image. Together with László Vitézy, they made several television films from Móricz’s short stories, which sought to bring a genre back to the screen while preserving the artistic messages of the old TV dramas.
For Ferenc Pap, the biggest challenge in this difficult work was not only transposing the dramaturgy into images, but also the organic integration of the large-scale scenes, which were also effective on television, and whose composition on a small screen required special artistic vision and ingenuity.
The meticulous vision of the scenes, the acting and the faces, the integration of the landscape into the story is an essential condition for the complete work, which in cinema is a simple matter of composition – unlike on the screen, where the effect of the tiny frame is a vital matter of achieving the effect of the huge.
In addition, it was an internal requirement of the cinematography of these films that they should be able to stand their ground on the screen – also in terms of visual impact. Thus, Ferenc Pap’s works have the particular merit of creating a visual world that works both as a TV and cinema film (Hortobágy legendája (Legend of Hortobágy, 2007), Égi madár (Sky Bird, 2011), Pillangó (Butterfly, 2012), A galamb papné (The Dove Priestess, 2013), A fekete bojtár (The Black Shepherd Boy, 2015), Házasságtörés (Adultery, 2019).
Although he has been directing documentaries since 2012, he considers himself a cinematographer. In his directing, the most important thing is authenticity, that the person who speaks and whom he lets speak is believable and has an impact. He is the cinematographer and director of the films A Tanyák népe (The People of the Farms), Belépési nyilatkozat (Declaration of Entry), Tisza, a magyarok folyója (Tisza, River of the Hungarians) and Munkásőrség (The Workers’ Guard).
In his documentary film A Tanyák népe (The People of the Farms), true to the world of his childhood, he took his camera back to the disadvantaged landscapes of the countryside, struggling with crises, to show through his intense images, the characterful faces that emerge here and the dazzling grand totals of the landscapes: the country is not only made of cities, the success of the country is unrealisable if the countryside does not become an equal force to the opportunities of those living in the stone hills.