Béla Szobolits, a Balázs Béla Prize–winning film director, committed himself primarily to documentary filmmaking. His sensitivity to the world developed early in childhood. This was due in part to the emblematic location of his early years – the Kemelyi Forest, twenty-five kilometres from Miskolc along the Hernád River – and to his attending primary school in Hernádkak, where he crossed the river by boat with his younger sister. Until the age of eleven, as he put it, he was an ‘forester’s son’: his father, a professional forester, instilled in him an attitude closely attuned to nature from an early age. Observing the lives of women working in the twenty-hectare tree nursery in summer and of woodcutters in winter provided a strong foundation for the later development of his documentary sensibility.
Over nearly five decades of filmmaking, the Czech New Wave was Szobolits’s first formative ‘film school’. From Miloš Forman, in particular, he learned that reality can be revealed even in the most everyday, banal events – indeed, that when depicted with the utmost realism, such moments can become incisive satire.
From a cinematic perspective, Szobolits Béla later recalled the years between 1960 and 1964, spent in secondary school, as decisive, when he was first exposed to film, including screenings at the Kossuth Cinema in Miskolc. After completing his school-leaving exams, he worked in Miskolc as a theatre set designer and photographer. Later, in the capital, he was employed as a metallurgical technician and lorry driver. Between 1966 and 1968, he became involved in amateur filmmaking at the Kőbánya Amateur Film Club, where he made short fiction films under the guidance of director György Palásthy. He completed his university studies in philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University. From 1973 to 1975, he worked at MAFILM as an assistant director on feature films alongside László Bánk, known as ‘the Captain’. Since 1975, he has worked as an independent film director. At the MAFILM Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio, he directed satirical newsreels and documentary films.
In connection with the construction of the Orenburg oil pipeline, he filmed in the Soviet Union in 1977. From the 1980s onwards, as censorship gradually eased, he was able to use fate-tracking as a defining method of his artistic vision in his films.
The breakthrough came after his work as a feature film assistant at MAFILM on Parasztcsillagász (lit. Peasant Astronomer, 1977), which won the Newsreel category at the 1977 Miskolc Film Festival. He produced numerous satirical newsreel reports. Among these and his other works are Gesztusok (lit. Gestures, 1975), Marhapasszus (lit. Cattle Pass, 1976), Tevékeny öregek (lit. Active Elderly, 1978), and Bánffi hajszesz (lit. Bánffi Hair Tonic, 1979).
In the 1980s, Hungarian cinema was not only part of public discourse but also actively shaped it, playing an important role in the formation and strengthening of social-critical consciousness – hence the notion of ‘regime-changing films’. This perspective is evident at times in Szobolits’s newsreel reports, but most emphatically in his film Macskaköröm (lit. Cat’s Claw, 1981), which, after four years of litigation with the leadership of the National Association of Hungarian Cat Owners and Breeders, received the Grand Prize at the Miskolc Film Festival in 1983 and the Film Critics’ Award in 1984. While still working at the Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio, Szobolits completed Kizárt a párt (lit. Expelled from the Party, 1988) at the Társulás Studio, offering insight into the world of reform communists through the ordeal of the expulsion from the party of Mihály Bihari, Zoltán Bíró, Zoltán Király and László Lengyel. This film established his place among documentary filmmakers: he became a chronicler of the regime change. In Aki nekiszaladt a demokráciának (lit. The Man Who Ran Headlong into Democracy, 1989), he examined the responsibility of the media, emboldened by sudden freedom of speech, in connection with the suicide of the chairman of the council of Tiszakécske.
He portrayed the events and protagonists of the regime change strictly from below, with his camera always positioned on the side of the losers. He was deeply shaken by the way Hungarian society split with extreme rapidity after 1989, and by the manner in which privatisation unfolded through the instruments of wild capitalism. These changes were difficult to capture, yet his film A munkásosztály a kapitalizmusba megy (lit. The Working Class Goes to Capitalism, 1997), which depicts privatisation, destruction, and the dismissal of workers at the Szekszárd Meat Processing Company, succeeded in doing so. Gyógyszer(gy)árak titkai (lit. The Secrets of Drug Prices and Factories, 1998) and Szolgálunk és vétünk (lit. We Serve and We Sin, 1996) also tackle the strictest taboo, with the latter exposing police abuses that permitted forced interrogations.
He also made a film about the ambivalent hero of the 1956 revolution, Pál Maléter, entitled Maléter I–III. (1993), as well as a film on the ‘media war’, Tájkép csata közben (lit. Landscape During Battle, 1992), produced in synchrony with unfolding events. His films made after 1989 function almost as medical reports on social conditions, media freedom, and freedom of speech.
Szobolits maintains that a strong sense of community within a film crew is fundamental, and that the right collaborators are crucial. Among cinematographers, he most frequently worked with István Kiss, József Fifilina, András Z. Surányi, Gábor Balog, Tibor Varjasi, and the later academician János Gulyás. He maintained close working relationships with sound engineers Gyula Traub, Péter Szűcs, Ernő Wechter, and Vince Kapcsos, as well as editors Mihály Morell, Tiborné Hollósi (Emőke Vencel), István Enzsöl, and Lilian Uchlaczki. His regular music editor was Ágnes Szigeti, and he collaborated with composer László Melis. Among production managers, Norbert Solymosi, László Nádasi and Miklós Szederkényi played key roles. On several films, he worked with dramaturges László Mönich and Mara Gere. His studio heads were László Bokor and Tamás Fehéri. As transporting the crew, cameras and equipment is also essential on long shooting days, the director particularly valued the assistance of drivers Pál Polyák (‘Uncle Pufi’) and Imre Gráczer, whose help went far beyond mere transportation.
After MOVI closed, he made his films at Golden Conch Kft. (producer: Annamária Körmendi).
With A munkásosztály a kapitalizmusba megy (lit. The Working Class Goes to Capitalism, 1997) and A szegénységről három tételben (lit. On Poverty in Three Movements, 1997), Szobolits Béla definitively committed himself, even at the level of their genesis, to reality-exploring documentary filmmaking.
His film Háromkirályok (lit. Three Wise Men, 1990), which won the Best Feature Film under 60 Minutes category at the 1992 Bombay International Film Festival, represents an excursion into the short-feature film genre. The work is a paraphrase of the biblical Three Wise Men, set in a contemporary Hungarian context.
According to Szobolits Béla, the documentary film director resembles a conductor: under his direction, the film is organised into a coherent whole, and the selection of the subject is likewise the director’s responsibility. He is an artist who does not submit to new fashions, and he considers fate-tracking and situational documentaries just as authentic as the documentary–fiction films of the Budapest School. In this spirit, he made the feature-length Makacs álmok (lit. Stubborn Dreams, 1988), which won the Grand Prize at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan in 1991.
His 1990 film Nálunk minden halott egyforma (lit. Here Every Deceased Is the Same) about the privatisation of the Funeral Services Company, demonstrates with brutal honesty that there are people in our society who, due to poverty, cannot even be granted a dignified burial – a fact to which the authorities remain indifferent.
For a long time, his film about the heroes of Hungarian culture, the Püski couple, A Püski házaspár (lit. The Püski Couple, 1996), also remained ‘in the box’, as Aunt Ilus’s ‘what’s on my heart is on my tongue’ manner did not spare the first freely elected prime minister. An unforgettable sequence shows Sándor Püski, with tears in his eyes, recalling his friend István Sinka by reciting one of his poems.
The humanity, restraint, credibility, will to act, and, not least, humour that radiate from Béla Szobolits’s films can benefit the community at large.
Music plays a significant role in Szobolits Béla’s life as a director, and his musical activity is likewise substantial. As a trumpeter, he is the founder of the Brass On Brass Dixieland Band. During his secondary school years in Miskolc, he completed conservatory studies in trumpet. The name Brass On Brass (‘brass upon brass’) was coined by Gyula Márton, screenwriter of Csinibaba. Szobolits began organising the ensemble in the summer of 1998, three years after his former workplace, the Hungarian Motion Picture and Video Film Factory, had ceased operations and was subsequently demolished. The ensemble has been based at the Rózsa Ferenc Cultural Centre in Budapest’s 18th district, and later at the Kondor Béla Community Centre, which has run a dixieland club since its inception.
An article by Károly Csala, published in the 5 March 1999 issue of Népszabadság under the title Egy konok dokumentumkészítő (lit. A Stubborn Documentary Filmmaker), offers a concise summary of Szobolits Béla’s worldview as a film director.
“I have been watching Béla Szobolits, the documentary filmmaker, for quite some time now. Always just a little. I watch him distrustfully. I always think: who knows what he will do next… And the years go by, and Béla Szobolits stubbornly refuses to disappoint. It seems he truly is the kind of person his films suggest he is.
And those films are hard and obstinate, like the facts they uncover. There are many kinds of documentaries, but Szobolits Béla’s films reveal the facts. He ventures into wild, dangerous, topical social terrains with the naturalness of someone who seems unaware of where he is – yet he knows very well that beneath the carefully raked sand of law, politics and morality lie interest-mines waiting to explode. He is neither naïve nor pseudo-naïve. He embarrasses his distrustful viewer by making them realise that between naïve and pseudo-naïve curiosity there exists something unrelated to untouched ignorance or slick cunning: the curiosity of a courageous person. Whether he wishes it or not, Béla Szobolits is courageous. Perhaps not in ‘life’. But what, after all, is his real life? His films. And in them, he is indeed courageous – obstinately, regardless of concealed interests, and with an unflinching gaze fixed on the truth of the facts to be revealed.
For this reason, his films currently broadcast on Duna TV are essential viewing. (They are shown in full for the first time without forced cuts.) One should watch Szolgálunk és vétünk (lit. We Serve and We Sin), filmed two or three years ago, about the victims and perpetrators of police coercive interrogations. (This has already aired by the time these lines are read, but given Duna TV’s commendable programming practice, it will almost certainly be repeated soon.) And one should watch on Monday the analysis A munkásosztály a kapitalizmusba megy (lit. The Working Class Goes to Capitalism), made on the occasion of the scandal series surrounding the Szekszárd meat industry.
End-of-millennium diagnoses of social injuries that heal far beyond eight days. Although the series into which they are slotted modestly calls itself Ezredvégi krónika (lit. End-of-Millennium Chronicle).”
[2019]