Gábor Xantus was born in 1954 in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca). He completed his secondary education there in 1973, after which he studied journalism at the University of Bucharest, specialising in television and film arts (1991). He obtained the degree of Doctor of Visual Arts in 2008, magna cum laude, at the University of Art and Design of Cluj-Napoca. His doctoral dissertation addressed his most cherished genre, documentary film and the documentary portrait. He is a member of the International Documentary Association (IDA), the Association of Romanian Television Professionals (APTR), the Union of Romanian Filmmakers (UCIN), and the The Explorers Society.
From the outset, his career may be described as almost fateful. Indeed, his professional trajectory emblematically ‘maps’ the institution-building struggles of Hungarian-language television in Romania. He experiences his chosen profession as a vocation – he never wished to do anything else.
He was only seventeen when he first held a camera in his hands. As a small child, he noticed a ‘mysterious’ tin box in his father’s study room. He found no peace until he had touched the celluloid-scented film cuttings and shot remnants, until he had examined the tiny photograms. The background to this story is that in the early 1950s the Alexandru Sahia Film Studio commissioned his father, Dr János Xantus Jr., to write the screenplay for the first Romanian colour nature film, A Retyezát-hegység (lit. The Retezat Mountains). The successful work went on to win the Silver Prize at the Rome Documentary Film Festival.
This ‘magic box’ undoubtedly played a role in Gábor Xantus later becoming an outstanding cinematic personality of his generation and an unmistakable creator within the genre of documentary film. Within his family environment he absorbed a knowledge and love of nature, as well as the intimacy of visual representation. Thanks to the self-confidence he thus acquired, in the early 1970s – when collaborators were being sought for the Hungarian-language broadcasts of Romanian television – he applied even before completing his school-leaving examinations. From that point on, the moral integrity, social sensitivity and aesthetic quality of his films were shaped by his relationship to the existential questions of the Hungarian minority in Romania.
Among his forebears we find Xantus Keresztes, of Székely ‘lófő’ [primipilus] family origins, a Tatar-slayer and royal judge of Alcsík (†1694); among his naturalist ancestors, János Xantus of Csíktaploca (Toplița Ciuc) (1825–1894), world traveller, geographer and ethnographer, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; the geographer and geologist János Xantus Sr.; and his own father, Dr János Xantus Jr., a distinguished figure of the natural sciences and of scientific popularisation. Following in the footsteps of the world-travelling Xantus, he himself set out together with his closest collaborator, his filmmaker son Áron. Their journeys with the camera took them not only through California and the legendary Wild West, but also as far as Borneo, where they made several documentary films among head-hunting communities (Explorare necesse est series). He soon became aware that his ‘innate sense of adventure’ was owed to the genes of his ancestors. The opportunity to live this out, however, only truly opened up after 1990.
An important station in his professional career was the Magyar Ház editorial office of the Magyar Televízió, at a time when this cross-border ‘extended professional family’ functioned as a media institution embracing television and film professionals from beyond Hungary’s borders.
Recalling the beginnings, Xantus writes as follows:
“…When above our own landscapes, too, the low-hanging clouds that had piled up over many decades began to disperse, and from time to time the sun would already shine, the image-writing garabonciás [mythical figure in Hungarian folk religion] magicians slowly gathering beyond the borders of the Motherland dried their cloaks around a great, shared campfire. At that time, we did not build wagon forts; the warmth of the fire belonged to everyone, just as hope, trust and the preparations for a great peregrination brought about by a new ‘situation’ belonged to everyone. We believed that our electronic smoke signals rising from beyond the borders would be visible from hilltop to hilltop far away, and that the beacon fires lit here and nourished ever since would not be extinguished for a long time yet.” (Magyar ház [Hungarian House], MTV)
At the founding of Duna Televízió and in the years that followed, the founding president of the television channel of Hungarians worldwide, the Kossuth Prize–winning cinematographer and director Sándor Sára, professionally supported his daring ideas, ideas he had not previously even dared to contemplate. It was during this period that he also conceived his series of globetrotting documentary films with Hungarian connections. Looking back on this phase, he wrote on 12 July 2016: “There are fateful encounters in life. I owe a great deal to Sándor Sára, who believed in what I wished to do and believed that I was capable of doing it. He stood by me throughout.”
Although in the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship he had every reason to long for departure, the local patriotism inherited from his forebears proved stronger than the compulsion to leave that affected so many before 1989. Speaking recently to the author of these lines about the dilemma of ‘leaving or staying’, he reflected as follows:
“I managed to resolve this question relatively simply. I thought, quite radically, that departure – whether justified flight, capitulation, or perhaps a carefully philosophised slipping away, call it what you will – is nothing other than abandoning one’s homeland in times of difficulty. Naturally, everyone experienced and interpreted this differently, in nuanced and personalised ways, at the time – perhaps for understandable and understandable reasons, under the assumption that ‘after all, we only live once’. Among my compatriots there were many for whom the intensifying, unbearable ‘survival’ compromises were incompatible with their moral order.
If they were at home today, we would certainly be stronger now…
Together with my family, I chose to remain, with all its beauty and not a little opprobrium. I knew of myself that my rootedness would always be stronger than my longing to depart. I did not establish an escape hinterland or an ‘emergency exit’ either; I did not have, and never had, a permanent apartment on the Grand Boulevard. I was aware of the circumstances; I knew that in that social and political environment, amid the contradictory tensions between dictatorship and minority existence, I could only do my work if I rationally assessed the balance of forces and, accordingly, tried to act and create something at home – and waited, because I always believed that one day it would come to an end.”
“In 1989, during the days of the Romanian revolution, I myself took action to ensure that it would indeed come to an end.
In any case, I believe that people like me are often regarded as self-directed. I never needed the compasses of others. I always found my own Pole Star; I often listened to my instincts and kept my course accordingly.”
His family upbringing – and perhaps a fragment of a Moldavian ballad as well – likewise proved to be ‘fate-shaping’. In a volume dedicated to him, Zoltán Kallós drew his attention to the following lines:
“Do not hasten to foreign lands
while you can make a living in your homeland.
Do not go far away to dwell
as long as you can live in your homeland.”
Later – while filming in Csángó Land – in Lujzikalagor (Luizi-Călugăra) he himself was able to record the ‘admonition’ in its original form. For him, it came to equal that of Saint Stephen. He later interpreted it as follows: “the longer the road I set out upon led me, the stronger the call of my homeland became, and the dearer the return home.”
Another characteristic, Xantus-like strand of his ‘time travels’ is connected to the history of the film profession itself. The forty-five-minute Filmjáték Mozifalván (Film Play in Cinema Village) leads back to the source region of Transylvanian silent film production. Documentary segments from this work were accorded a distinguished role on the centenary of the birth of motion pictures (see Korunk, 2002/1, 45–58). This also stands as testimony to the fact that the person of Gábor Xantus creates continuity between the distant past, the recent past, the twenty-first-century present and the future-shaping vocation of Transylvanian film art.
Television is an art to the extent – he explained in the Cluj-based journal Filmtett in 2001, addressing a younger colleague – that it approaches the classical genres, language, aesthetic tendencies and formal world of cinema. He added that even as a television creator, it is above all in the language of film that he is truly able to express himself.
From the very beginning, critics regarded him as a born cinematic talent, a determined creator “whose discoveries recorded on film contain scientific information, humour and philosophy alike. His subtly modern shots could be envied even by foreign colleagues who certainly do not lack access to the exorbitantly expensive tools of cutting-edge film technology” (Simon Buia: Régi nyári történet, A Hét, 1981/38). Yet because the recent background of his career vibrates with Romanian political life and its absurdities, one can also sense how all this influenced the theme selection and film-poetic inspiration of a cinematographer-director attentive to the finest tremors of the soul. Humorous scenes, for example, are consciously incorporated into his films. These are never staged, however: they come to the fore during filming. The bizarre and the grotesque are so deeply embedded in our social environment – as he has explained on numerous occasions – that if they were filtered out, we would fail to perceive (indeed, we would falsify) the essential features of reality, which reveal their message only through interpretation. Creative freedom, in any case, allows for certain elements to be restrained and others intensified. He presents the tragic fate of Bözödújfalu (Bezidu Nou), flooded by the Küsmöd (Cușmed) stream (the ‘Székely Jerusalem’), as an eternal memento in such a way that even for those not yet born at the time of the events, the inhumanity of the Ceaușescu era becomes palpable. He achieves this by enriching lyrical images conceived in ‘disciplined beauty’ with visual framings that condense and radiate dramatic messages (cf. Zoltán Hegyi: Egy az Isten, Magyar Nemzet Online, 31 January 2003).
It is most probably in this ‘disciplined beauty’ that the secret of Xantus’s film études lies.
Close-up – (1971–1989)
“I did not make a single film,
not even in the television of the years of dictatorship,
that I could not stand by today.”
(12 July 2016)
At the most receptive period of his life, he found himself close to the profession. His father owned a small-gauge film camera, with which he made his first reports for the Hungarian-language broadcasts of Romanian television – well before his school-leaving examinations. At the time of his debut, he counted as the youngest collaborator of Romanian Public Television. More importantly, his career start almost coincided with the beginnings of Hungarian-language television in Romania (1969), and later followed its – even in retrospect difficult-to-trace – history.
Pál Bodor, head of the nationality programmes of Romanian Television, already wished to employ him in 1971, but owing to his ‘bourgeois–clerical’ personnel file, the higher authorities permitted this only in 1975, and then merely on a provisional basis. Subsequently, even as an employee, he was kept until 1989 in the lowest pay grade – identical to that of a cleaner.
Bodor wrote about this in the late 1970s in one of his (archived) letters addressed to Anna Halász, film critic of the cultural weekly A Hét:
“Kiki! They keep failing Gabi Xantus at the IATC entrance exam, below the line – I won’t go into why, but it is not his fault. He has passed with distinction countless times. He has been working for us day and night since 1971, more than 300 of his pieces have gone on air, he films excellently. (…) I too have tried in vain to take him on – somehow they always outmanoeuvre me. So, his status is disturbingly uncertain (…) Would you write about him? If you like, we can show you his best films.”
At that time, public service television was regarded as a political apex institution within the propaganda apparatus of the Romanian Communist Party, operating under the direct control and supervision of the Press Department of the Central Committee of the RCP. The path to editorial positions in radio – and above all in television – led through strict cadre screening and confidence checks…
Nor did the year 1975 itself offer any particularly good omen, for by then the so-called second cultural revolution (1974) had already been proclaimed, amid the maelstrom of minority rear-guard battles. It is true that in 1975 the demonstration of intellectual resilience still possessed a life-prolonging value – especially when compared with the developments of the Ceaușescu-era emergency period (1985–1989): when Romanian Television was permitted to broadcast only two evening hours per day, half of which were taken up by news programmes; when the staff of both the Hungarian and the German editorial offices were dismissed, and the radio and film archives were transported to Jilava Prison.
Thanks to the professional recognition he gained early on, and to his international awards, Gábor Xantus also benefited from a measure of good fortune: through the intercession of well-wishers, he was ‘saved on paper’ by being transferred to the Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) correspondent’s post of Bucharest Radio, while he was still able to continue working as a film-maker – at a time when the use of a film camera or a field recorder entailed strict and continuous official (that is, state security) surveillance. Romanian Television commissioned from him nature films (on the Danube Delta, caves, glacial lakes, as well as works of natural science and popular education, among others) that could be sold for hard currency at international film markets. At these markets and festivals, however, he himself was never permitted to represent his own works; trusted delegates were always sent in his stead. From a professional point of view, it was nevertheless a far from negligible ‘side circumstance’ that colour film stock was provided for shooting – a rarity at the time.
The trials of his early career, however, proved by no means disadvantageous in professional terms. This was partly because programme production for the Hungarian-language broadcasts took place within a narrowly circumscribed editorial framework, which required the novice collaborator to test his talent, ingenuity and stamina across virtually every television genre. Partly, too, because filming was still carried out on celluloid, demanding a far more responsible attitude from both cinematographer and director alike: mistakes were not permitted. Celluloid could be obtained only with hard currency, and at that time even ‘waste’ resulting from inexperience was classified as sabotage. Teamwork also mattered greatly. It was no coincidence that the true dimensions of Gábor Xantus’s talent began to manifest themselves in the years 1982–1983, when the creative energy of the editorial staff itself reached a culmination. We were already beyond the so-called second cultural revolution (1974), amid the turmoil of minority rear-guard struggles, yet the demonstration of intellectual resilience still possessed a life-prolonging significance, particularly with regard to national minorities.
Meanwhile, his work also attracted the attention of the ‘major’ editorial departments of Romanian Television (he worked extensively, for example, for the Film Editorial Office, which brought together the institution’s professional elite).
The Ceaușescu-era emergency period (1985–1989) struck the institutional system of culture in Romania more harshly than ever before. RTV’s broadcasting time was reduced to two hours per day, regional radio and television studios were shut down overnight, and editorial staff were retired or reassigned to other positions.
Recalling the years of hard dictatorship, Xantus reflects as follows:
“The Romanian intellectual life, the community of intellectuals – and emphatically the Hungarian community – remained throughout in the crosshairs of the party-state and its all-encompassing apparatus. Surveillance, wiretapping and tailing were daily realities of editorial life; their fabric was deeply permeated by the constant activities of ideological petty tyrants and the secret services.
The editors-in-chief’s offices were regularly visited by interior ministry supervisors. At such times, the secretaries would make coffee and tea; no one was allowed to enter the editor-in-chief’s room. Members of the ‘elite’ detachment of the thought police specialising in intellectuals – the ‘snake-eyed lambs’ – were everywhere.
In Transylvania, in the spiritual centres of Hungarian life, all this was present far more emphatically than, for example, in the capital, Bucharest. Television functioned as the most strictly controlled press institution. When in 1985 the dictatorship reduced public service television broadcasting to two hours per day, the political police, the Securitate, officially and openly installed itself on the ninth floor of the tower building of the central Bucharest studio, where the Hungarian and German editorial offices had previously operated. Why precisely the former editor-in-chief’s office was considered most suitable for this purpose could readily be surmised, since it was undoubtedly one of the institution’s ‘key’ offices.
These were times burdened by constant suspicion, a palpable sense of danger and existential insecurity. A schizophrenic, paranoid atmosphere increasingly took hold, while the ‘apparatus’ ever more deeply enmeshed every layer of society. Everyone suspected everyone else, according to diabolically devised, tailor-made, perverse psychological scenarios. And not everyone was prepared to assume the burden of survival.”
News of the Bucharest ‘regime-changing’ events of 21 December 1989 reached Xantus in the ground-floor Room No. 4 of the guarded, ‘hibernating’ Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) studio on Donát Road, beside his editing table evacuated from Bucharest; it was there that he received word from relatives that the first shots had also been fired in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca). He immediately took his Bolex-brand film camera from its cabinet, loaded it with a 120-metre cassette, and set out for the city centre. He filmed for barely fifteen minutes – he had to conserve the stock – then headed towards the Astoria Hotel, and later to the Someș Bridge, where the security forces were already facing down thousands of protesting workers marching from the industrial districts towards the city centre. He had scarcely been able to set up his camera when, unexpectedly, a soldier wearing an assault helmet approached him from behind and struck the camera cassette with the butt of his rifle; the dislodged reel began to roll away, and the ebonite film cassette – preserved today as a relic – shattered into pieces.
He returned to the studio with the previously filmed – salvaged – reel, where, in the early evening hours, colleagues who had been dismissed years earlier began to drift back slowly and cautiously: the very few who felt that the moment had come to reclaim the Donát Road building for Transylvanian radio and television culture. The hastily appointed director, the poet Horea Bădescu, immediately asked the sole Hungarian colleague, Gábor Xantus, to prepare the first free Hungarian-language materials, to edit the programmes, and subsequently to take on the position of deputy director. He declined the latter. Later, in January 1990, it was he who proposed and invited his colleague Sándor Csép to fill this post (see Toronytól toronyig [lit. From Tower to Tower] – Csép Sándor-portré, 28’, director–cinematographer Gábor Xantus). Until then – namely from the afternoon of 21 December 1989 until the dictator’s capture – those who spent the very first hours and days of the Romanian revolution in this building had to endure nights far from safe and days bordering on a state of siege. Under cover of darkness, the guards had vanished. Had they been recalled? Or had they fled, obeying their survival instinct? In their place, soldiers armed with live ammunition were deployed. By whom? And under what orders? Would they not disarm them as well? At the time, a baseless command, a diversionary instruction, would have sufficed. To these questions there has never been an acceptable answer. The volunteer “studio occupiers”, among them Xantus, were hastily instructed by assault-helmeted soldiers – who had meanwhile taken up combat positions – in the use of machine guns and in first aid. The reclaimed building still had to be defended (see Dekonstrukció, avagy hol volt a romániai magyar értelmiség a forradalom óráiban? [lit. Deconstruction, or Where Were the Hungarian Intellectuals in Romania During the Hours of the Revolution?], 52’, documentary film; director–cinematographer Gábor Xantus).
The relaunch of both radio and television broadcasting has its own story. Certain snapshots of these moments cannot be absent from Gábor Xantus’s December 1989 close-up either.
Restarting the radio, which had been shut down for almost four years, was the first step. In the initial hours of the Romanian revolution, the still reigning repressive power treated the institution as a strategic object. The dictator was on the run, yet still at liberty. His supporters desperately attempted to prove their loyalty and to save their own skin. They were likely the as yet unidentified ‘terrorists’, the mysterious snipers, well-poisoners and diversionists for whom the media – radio and television – represented the headquarters of the popular uprising, communication centres and channels whose ‘neutralisation’ presented itself as a matter of life and death for the agonising system.
The first free Hungarian-language radio broadcast transmitted from Cluj was prepared by Gábor Xantus. It was a hastily made, clandestine recording of some ten minutes, taped under cover of night – a mobilising message written and read by the renowned Transylvanian writer Gyula Szabó in his flat near the studio. Today, the sound recording stands as a document of its time. A few days later followed a series of attempts to revive Transylvanian public service television.
From the most dramatic television episodes, I quote the following:
- “Together with two technicians, we drove up to the transmitter tower at Felek Forest to have the relay station tuned to the studio. I stayed at the wheel, but as soon as my colleagues got out of the car, a burst of machine-gun fire was unleashed at them from the forest – they survived by sheer miracle. They could clearly have been shot dead, but they probably only wanted to frighten them. Finally, a few days after Christmas, broadcasting became technically possible.” For this, however, the only video camera available in Transylvania had to be brought from Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș).
- “Since travel conditions were unsafe, the then county president of the National Salvation Front in Cluj [the actor Dorel Vișan – P. Cs.] arranged for me to go to Târgu Mureș for the camera in an amphibious, armoured vehicle. That was how we launched the first broadcast of free Cluj television. Ten days later we returned it to its owner, because by then foreign assistance had arrived and other video cameras had become available.” (Ferenc Csomafáy: Kamerával a vállán [lit. With a Camera on His Shoulder], Romániai Magyar Szó, 12 March 2004.)
Today, the Transylvanian-centred, Cluj-based public service radio and television constitute Romania’s most significant regional studio. Later, by presidential decree, Xantus was awarded the title of ‘revolutionary who rendered exceptional services in the fighting’, a distinction whose legal privileges he has never availed himself of.
Thus, this period acquires a significance extending beyond itself in Xantus’s career – a time “when he surveyed sky, earth and water” (Ibolya Cs. Nagy).
Another lesson also suggests itself here, which, interpreting the experiences of his post-1990 career as well, he formulated in an email sent to me as follows:
“There were times in my life when I had to be strong. In the primeval forest just as much as on drifting ice floes, or – horribile dictu – in our small, provincial, inward-looking, sometimes scheming world here at home. There were times when some hoped that they would finally wrest the camera from my hands. (Once, a large Bornean orangutan also tried to do so – but purely out of curiosity. He did not succeed either. And he was at home, in the heart of the jungle, physically four times stronger than us humans. And let me add: he is ‘only’ a great ape – and far purer of soul…) At such times – with considerable exaggeration – Galileo’s famous saying (and, of course, the Inquisition, and its modern incarnations) comes to mind: ‘Eppur si muove!’ Let me use a fitting paraphrase here: ‘Eppur si movie’ – that is: and yet it moves, that is: and yet the film still rolls.”
Main phases of the oeuvre
Both recalling the past and alert to the present, Gábor Xantus practises documentary filmmaking as a vocation of value preservation; he regards experimental filmmaking as the feast days of creation.
In the world of tawdry stars, he directs viewers’ attention towards genuine values.
More than four hundred authorial works are associated with his name. He served as cinematographer on four feature-length art films; he is the scriptwriter and director–cinematographer of 131 historical and scientific documentary films and of more than thirty film études. He produced forty-two Romanian-language film portraits of public figures, artists and ‘extraordinary’ individuals (2006–2009). He participated in twenty-nine international co-productions (with creators from North America, Australia, Sweden, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and elsewhere). Together with his son, Áron Xantus, he led twelve documentary expeditions to America, Australia, Central and East Africa, Borneo, the Indonesian, Polynesian and Malay archipelagos, the regions of Komodo, Sunda, Sumbawa and Flores, the volcanoes of the Hawaiian Islands, Papua New Guinea, South America and Antarctica.
As a descendant and spiritual heir of renowned geographers, he chose a distinctive way of travelling the world: experiences gained beyond the horizons familiar to us were recorded and shared with his audience with a camera on his shoulder. He filmed in numerous locations across the globe where no Hungarian filmmaker had worked before. These expeditionary documentary films were made together with his closest collaborator, his son. A defining feature of these works is that their protagonists are Hungarian world travellers, researchers, explorers, collectors and later institution founders who set out from Transylvania and returned there – many of them forgotten great predecessors. (Magyar volt-e Old Shatterhand? [lit. Was Old Shatterhand Hungarian?], 52’; Terra australis, 38’; Életem, Afrika – dokumentumportré dr. Sáska Lászlóról [lit. My Life, Africa – Documentary Portrait of Dr László Sáska], 60’; Magyar sírhant a pálmafák alatt – Fenichel Sámuel Új-Guineában [lit. A Hungarian Grave beneath Palm Trees – Sámuel Fenichel in New Guinea], 52’; Bíró Lajos utazásai Pápuaföldön, Új-Guineában [lit. The Travels of Lajos Bíró in Papua, New Guinea], 52’; A kacagó koponyák földjén – fejvadászok Borneo őserdeiben [lit. In the Land of Laughing Skulls – Headhunters in the Jungles of Borneo], 52’; Magyar Afrika-kutatók nyomdokain – Magyar József portréja [lit. In the Footsteps of Hungarian Explorers of Africa – Portrait of József Magyar], 52’; A pokol tornácában – hátizsákkal a Yellowstone, Hawaii, Indonézia tűzhányóin [lit. On the Threshold of Hell – With a Backpack to the Volcanoes of Yellowstone, Hawaii and Indonesia], 4 × 28’).
They filmed twice in the wake of the Belgica expedition’s Antarctic journey (1897–1899) in order for him to realise a work conceived according to his own vision (A felfedező [lit. The Explorer], 75’, feature-length film).
The increasingly complete oeuvre of Gábor Xantus suggests a strong sense of unity. He remains faithful to himself and to the objectives formulated in his ars poetica: he consistently practises documentary filmmaking as a vocation of value preservation, while regarding experimental filmmaking as the festive days of creation. Which genre has or had priority in a given period, which carried or could carry a greater density of values, and when the lack of harmony between the two became apparent, was always determined by the (historical) circumstances at hand. His way of thinking and seeing nonetheless reached a state of balance when, on the basis of his experiences in the wider world, he was able to articulate the law of his own organic construction: “From this closed world, one must occasionally break out, so that upon returning one may continue one’s work at home with an entirely different perspective and philosophy of life.”
It is as if the symbolic message of Károly Kós were echoed back across nearly a century:
“I walk the stony path among the mountains, and for long years the icy wind has blown around me and the Sun has scorched me. But I have grown accustomed to the mountain, the stony path, the icy wind, the great forests. And my eyes too have grown accustomed to distant things.”
He is able to renew himself by building further upon his own earlier achievements in every genre, while continuously enriching his documentary and film-poetic toolkit.
Creative periods
II/1 1971–1985: the joy of genre discovery and fulfilment
II/2 1985–1989: nature films – withdrawal from the visual firmament of dictatorship
II/3 1990–1995: the hermeneutics of recommencement, the search for a perspective with a wider horizon
II/4 1995–2015: the cardinal points of the Xantus world-view (the inner dimensions of ‘home’ and the ‘wider world’)
Sequences of the oeuvre analysis
Preparation for filming
1. The screenwriter’s documentation
“The scripts must be written well in advance […] and with great care broken down into images, settings, dialogues, music and sound effects. Locations must be studied in depth, every technical solution prepared, and the technicians’ entrances and exits calculated with second-by-second precision.” (Simon Buia)
“The Belgica expedition can perhaps be compared, in the history of human exploration, to the scale and risk of the Moon landing. The journey lasted two years. On 28 February 1898, the sailing ship became trapped in ice, and despite the crew’s desperate attempts they were unable to escape the captivity of the snowfields. […] Our present Antarctic film expedition (the first took place in 2012, the second in 2014 – P. Cs.) set itself the goal of following the Belgica’s route as precisely as possible, landing everywhere that our explorer ‘predecessors’ had once set foot. This largely succeeded. At the outset of our journey, we scheduled eight days of filming in the Tierra del Fuego region, where the Belgica’s biologist and photographer, Emil Racoviță, before embarking, studied the flora and fauna of the area and the indigenous Ona Indian tribes, since exterminated to the last person (!).” (Gábor Xantus, A Belgica-expedíció nyomában (lit. In the Wake of the Belgica Expedition))
For his film Emelt fővel (lit. With Head Held High), Xantus began collecting material relating to Áron Márton in 1990; for more than two decades he persistently pursued the discovery of details suggesting completeness, until the surveillance files on the bishop finally emerged from the archives of the Securitate: the first consisting of 174 volumes and nearly 56,000 pages, the second of 62 volumes and approximately 24,000 pages. The documentary value of the film is further enhanced by the fact that during the process of gathering material, Xantus’s camera recorded testimonies from witnesses who have since passed away: Mrs Áron Kurkó (née Anna Márton), the bishop’s sister, speaks of Áron Márton’s search for vocation; Mrs Pál Csillag recalls the story of the legendary white horse of the Csíksomlyó pilgrimage; István Lakatos, a fellow prisoner, evokes the prison years as a witness to the relations between cellmates and guards; and Ferenc Sztojka, a former transport entrepreneur, leaves to posterity his memories of travelling by car with the bishop. “These are all scenes recorded with fine sensitivity at the right moment, which today already belong to history. And it is likewise of documentary value – because it is original, live-filmed – how Áron Márton’s former secretary, later director of the episcopal office, Dénes Csíki, in 1990 pries up the parquet flooring with his own hands to pull out from underneath the wires of the listening devices.” (Márta Bodó: Rendületlenül [lit. Unwavering]. Márton Áron filmes idézése [lit. A Cinematic Evocation of Áron Márton], Szabadság, 29 December 2012.)
It is no coincidence that all analysts of the film – Márton László and Csaba Zoltán Novák of Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș), Krisztina Irma Tarjányi of Bonn, and Gabriella Varga – began their assessments with the strengths of the screenplay:
– a meticulously elaborated plan
– versatility, attention to detail, and fidelity to reality
– nuanced characterisation of both principal and secondary figures
– a substantial, authentic, and meaningful message
– condensed dramatic force
– a richly flavoured, well-crafted language
According to the critic Kristóf Joó (Tamás Jakabffy), the 58-minute documentary film “is productively integrated into the referential framework preparing the beatification of Áron Márton”.
2. Selection of locations
“Before our eyes float by Itkár, Marosillye, Gyergyószárhegy, Déva, Hunyad Castle, Gyulafehérvár, the ‘treasure city’ of Kolozsvár, Tövis, Szentimre, Temesvár, Szászváros, the Transylvanian Iron Gate, Bethlenszentmiklós, Lippa, Jenő Castle, Medgyes, Várad, Enyed, as well as contemporary buildings, engravings, and surviving drawings. Xantus turns up everywhere that the genius loci may come to his aid and still reveal something of past events, of the former presence of the great prince.” (Mihály Sebestyén: A fejedelem igaz szolgálata [lit. The True Service of the Prince]. 400 éve született Bethlen Gábor [lit. 400 Years since the Birth of Gábor Bethlen]. Documentary film, Utunk, 1981/3.)
“The churches, the cemetery, and ‘beyond the water’ the synagogue have vanished. Xantus’s camera lingers on a solitary open hearth, a bed, a few vessels – the accusing witnesses of a destroyed village.” (Zoltán Hegyi: Egy az Isten [lit. There is only one God].)
The documentary presenting the life’s work of Áron Márton is intended to illustrate one of the most critical historical periods for Transylvanian Hungarians – their struggles, and at the same time their finest moral victories – as a belated act of reparation for the fact that for decades it had not even been permissible to utter the name of Transylvania’s legendary bishop.
“At individual locations, details flash up that testify simultaneously to the sensitivity of the cameraman and the remembering priest. […] We walk through the cemetery of Farkaslaka (Lupeni) with Gábor Jakab, who looks around with a troubled gaze – a sombre expression that is surprising, since, as a deeply believing man, we know it is not mortality that troubles him […]. He speaks of a diminishing future, which he believes is endangered not by others but by ourselves; in the film, quoting Áron Márton’s words, Gábor Jakab expresses this as follows: between the two world wars it was not Romanian soldiers who truly conquered Transylvania, but Hungarian mothers who lost it.” (Márta Bodó: Erdélyi papi sors filmen [lit. The Fate of Transylvanian Priests on Film]. Filmportré Jakab Gáborról [lit. A Film Portrait of Gábor Jakab]. Keresztény Szó, 2014/5.)
3. The role of filming equipment
Gábor Xantus began with an 8 mm camera and a 6 × 6 box camera, followed by the ‘sixteen’ and the ‘thirty-five’. When, however, they were following the Belgica expedition in the southern ice world, they were able to film with what were then the most advanced cameras and equipment available, “which withstood the strain and the cold, and functioned even in gale-force winds driving salty wave crests, in the immense swell of the Drake Passage and the damp, freezing snowstorms of the Southern Ocean”.
4. The cinematographer’s eye – ‘seeing and making seen’
– the ‘dynamics’ of still images: “he animates still photographs through dissolves and fades into blur” (Mihály Sebestyén)
– light-sensitive plasticity: “as mirrors of inner landscapes, deep-seated serenity of the soul and drifting clouds, [the images] revealed the flashes of light and shadow of Fodor’s pure humanity, at times fluttering into a smile, at others crowding into wrinkles. We listened to him – as the philosopher would say – and conversed with ourselves.” (János Szász: Sokszemközt Fodor Sándorral [lit. In Open Conversation with Sándor Fodor]. A Hét, 8 October 1982.)
– snow-covered landscape with pines: the image of a sending-off yet sustaining homeland in the Áron Márton film (Márta Bodó)
– accompanying sequences filmed from the interior of an old car: the even row of trees lining the road, fading into a threatening greyness, foreshadows the approaching events (Márta Bodó)
– prison windows in Máramarossziget (Sighetu Marmației) bordered by barbed wire: evoking the years following arrest, unjust accusations, and the inhuman conditions inside (Márta Bodó)
“With regard to the documentary’s general aesthetic aspect, we find Xantus’s cinematographic technique worthy of unqualified praise, as well as the careful – by no means anxiously rigid – practice of editing.” (Kristóf Joó)
5. The habitus of the experimental director
It was most likely Mihály Sebestyén who first drew attention to the ‘Xantusian formal language’, which individualises his work and sets it apart from that of other major personalities. “Through dissolves and fades into blur, Gábor Xantus animates still images, plunging beneath the surface of the painting: he stirs up and brings to the surface emotions and sensations that had already lain immanently within the image; he achieves effects that can otherwise only be paired with music, yet he still does not transgress the specific languages of film and painting; what visibly preoccupies him is the relationship between model and realisation, the autonomous life of images, their symbolic system, the philosophical content expressed through painterly means, and a personal view of the world.” (Mihály Sebestyén: Nevermore, Utunk, 15 October 1982.)
“Excellent close-ups, interiors and exterior shots (Fellegvár [Citadel]), nuanced image composition, witty editing and dissolves enriched the dialogue into a genuine cinematic experience.” (János Szász)
In the Márton Áron film, Xantus combines lyricism with documentary charge in well-judged proportions – observes the film critic of Keresztény Szó; the journal’s editor-in-chief, Márta Bodó, highlights how, through the inclusion of rare original image and sound recordings, contemporary newspaper pages, photographs and newsreel excerpts, as well as Márton Áron’s own words expressing deep faith without pathos, he succeeds in creating the atmosphere of the period.
“Gábor Xantus’s exceptional talent as cinematographer and director is attested by the way he was able to connect alternating video footage and still images (since there was little contemporary moving-image material of the bishop) in such a manner that the viewer of the documentary perceives this as natural, untroubled by the alternation of still and moving images.” (Sándor Fodor: A témához méltón [lit. In a Way Worthy of Its Subject], A Hét)
Film-experience sequences
Rekviem Nádországért (lit. Requiem for Reedland)
(Nature film about the Danube Delta)
If the father was a co-creator of the first Romanian colour nature film, the son could hardly do less; having inherited the epithet ornans of the ‘perpetual nature filmmaker’. In Xantus’s work, nature is by no means system-independent. When the young filmmaker boards a boat to film in the Danube Delta, he refrains from analysing the political and social relations of Romania’s minorities, yet still paints a faithful picture of the Ceaușescu regime – solely through the sequences presenting the world of the Delta. “The waters of the once certainly blue Danube are a muddy grey, mottled with foamy patches of filth. The reed islands that once floated have taken root because of the reduced water level; and would the viewer unversed in ornithology believe that this tiny difference causes the death of thousands of pelicans… […] No one cares either for them, these poor avian fates, or for the half-built factory monstrosities planted here by the former regime – their rusting remnants; on the water’s edge stands the metal monster, in the water its mirror image! The short film, which does not politicise and pays attention to nothing but nature, is in fact a harsh, severe indictment.” (Ibolya Cs. Nagy: Határon túli műhelyek [lit. Workshops Beyond the Border], Magyarország, 22 July 1994.)
Zsoltárok fehérben, zöldben (lit. Psalms in White and Green)
(Film étude about Edit Finta)
The procedures of an artist experimenting with film genres elicited an early response. “Years ago I saw an extraordinarily exciting film of his about the works of the painter Edit Finta (then still living in Cluj); the director placed the artist’s paintings in a ruined castle [Bánffy Castle, Bonchida] and its luxuriant ruin garden, conjuring a veritable ‘image happening’ onto the screen with the camera wandering among them. […] And yesterday […] he presented four further former Transylvanian artists – the goldsmith Antónia Pongrácz (Letéptem egy hangaszálat (lit. I Plucked a Strand of Heather), 27’, authorial film essay), the painter János Dési Incze, and two sculptors, Sándor Benczédi (Benczédi, a sárkovács (lit. Benczédi, the Mud Smith), authorial film portrait, 26’) and Jenő Szervátiusz (Szervátiusz, 26’, authorial film essay) – again in a form uncustomary for this genre. The camera roaming the abandoned studio, the recollections spoken during tidying by the actor husband, the creator shaping material to a Karády song, the huge naked tree giants and the faces and figures carved ‘from’ them changing to unsettling music – all added a surplus that made the film at once a genuine ‘film’, while perfectly fulfilling what it promised: to erect a memorial to four outstanding visual artists.” (Gábor Martos: Kép, szobor, film.)
Alkonytájban – átutazóban (lit. At Dusk – On the way)
(Messages of the painter Pál Nagy)
“The closing sequences remain memorable for everyone who saw this barely quarter-hour-long short film: paintings impersonally suspended from trees sway and turn, the silence is threateningly heavy, only hinted at by the wind standing guard in the abandoned garden, the museum of nature; not a single brushstroke can be discerned, twilight absorbs everything, dulls their edges – yet no one ever dissolves their restlessness and loneliness, just as no one ever does that of the creator whose career was abruptly cut short…” (Mihály Sebestyén: Nevermore)
Rhapsodia demographica series
(Film requiem for the decline of the Transylvanian Hungarian population)
Following Sándor Csép’s snapshots made about the one-child practice in Kalotaszeg, from the mid-1990s onwards Xantus extended his demographic-themed cinematic investigations from Székely Land to the Partium. He captures the process by which large numbers of young people flowed out of Transylvania, when there was no time left for having children in the accelerated world’s overturned value system. According to Xantus’s intention, his work “addresses the viewer who could do something about that which this film is about”. He continues to this day to document on film the process of dramatic population decline, probing with his camera the interrelations and deeper layers of the sociographic, cultural, ethnic and, not least, biological problems afflicting our nation.
Yet with equal responsibility and care he also turned towards the pressing existential issues of Transylvanian Hungarians as they presented themselves across a wide spectrum over recent decades. (See also: Kilátás a Varjúvárból – Kós Károly intelmei a szülőföldről (lit. View from Raven Castle – Károly Kós’s Admonitions on the Homeland), 52’; Tékák a kálvárián (lit. Libraries on the Calvary); Bibliotheca Batthyaneum; Ideje van a szólásnak – harcban az államosított, elkobzott erdélyi ingatlanhagyaték és a történelmi könyvtárkincs visszaszerzéséért (lit. Time to Speak – In Struggle for the Restitution of Nationalised and Confiscated Transylvanian Properties and Historical Library Treasures), 3 × 52 minutes.)
6. His place within the canon
Gábor Xantus is one of the best-known cinematographer-directors of Transylvanian Hungarian motion picture culture. It is no coincidence that he was the first ‘extra-territorial1 creator to earn the title of academician as a television and film artist. Until then, only filmmakers, directors, cinematographers and photographic artists from Hungary proper had been members of the Magyar Művészeti Akadémia (Hungarian Academy of Arts). He excels equally in the creation of nature films and documentary and essay films of scientific, historical and sociological focus, as well as in recording the portrait gallery of Transylvanian writers, scholars and artists.
Drawing on decades of professional experience and on his commitment to Transylvanian Hungarian television and filmmaking, in 2001 he submitted a letter of founding intent to Dr Sándor Tonk, the late rector of Sapientia – Erdélyi Magyar Tudományegyetem (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania), proposing the organisation and launch of a university-level training for film and television professionals in Hungarian. He played a decisive role in laying the foundations and building up the faculty associated with his name, which has been operating ever since, and he also taught at the university in its first semester following its launch (2003). From 2003, he has been a lecturer at the Babes–Bolyai Tudományegyetem (Babeș–Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca), and today he is Professor at the Faculty of Theatre and Television, Department of Film, Photography and Media, where he teaches documentary filmmaking.
He decided relatively late to step behind the lectern alongside his creative work.
He reflected on this as follows:
“Although for several generations my forebears were teachers and educators, I do not really consider myself to have a pedagogical disposition. I only took on teaching when I felt I had sufficient professional grounding behind me, when I had already put something on the table, when I felt that the road travelled in the profession – the so-called oeuvre – entitled me to stand credibly before my students.
I am truly happy when I can create.
I believe that here and now our primary task is to document, to record in our films and to attempt to interpret everything in which we live today. Whether this takes place at home, in my narrower patria of Transylvania, within our minority existence, in the Carpathian Basin, or in the wider world.
From the perspective of a film-professional career this is a less rewarding path, as it does not follow fashions or trends, does not seek out sensational themes, and does not always adopt the accelerated pace and rhythm of our contemporary world.
Yet I hope that these films will remain retrievable later on as well – as a kind of modern-day petroglyphs carved into film frames, at which posterity may one day marvel.
And I also believe that the camera I shall one day hand over will be in good hands with my filmmaker son, Áron.”
(Excerpt from Gábor Xantus’s letter of 12 July 2016.)
[2016]