Through the cooperation of the Palace of Arts and the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute (MaNDA), this new series will present the finest works of legendary Hungarian film directors. The first half of the year sees digital screenings of a selection of ten films from the life’s oeuvre of Zoltán Fábri. Although the three-time Kossuth Prize-winner Zoltán Fábri occupied pride of place in the display case of Socialist cultural policy, his work as a film director (1952-1983) was de...fined by the banning of his screenplays, so that he conveyed his humanist message about the world, dictatorship and human relationships in a series of literary adaptations that reached an audience of millions. Although he was essentially not an innovator in terms of the language of film, few directors would have as many powerful sequences in a hypothetical reel of the great symbolic moments in modern Hungarian film – from the dramatic merry-go-round scene in Körhinta (1955) to the vacant building site in A Pál utcai fiúk (1968), and from the expressive stadium in Hannibál tanár úr (1956) to Zoltán Latinovits’s major absurdly packing boxes in Isten hozta, őrnagy úr (1969). “Hannibál tanár úr takes place in the period of the Hungarian Awakening movement of the 1920s and 1930s, at the same time revealing the motivations and methods behind the show trials of the Rákosi era: the unstable and shifting moods of the fundamentally gullible masses, so typical of the years around 1956, which – from 1950 onwards – saw these intolerable things occurring; the show trials and death sentences, followed by the rehabilitation.” (Zoltán Fábri) “Long live Töhötöm, down with Nyúl!” cries the entire arena. The film depicts the extreme moods of the mob as seen through the state of mind of the teacher Béla Nyúl, at first holding his views consistently but then progressively intimidated and “converted”. One of the sources of its dramatic power is the way in which its visual style changes as reflected in this subjective mirror: from empathy to dark hatred, from unsavoury jokes to satire, from classical visions to oblique modernist camera angles and expressive long shots; everything in the powerful montages is pregnant with a surplus of meaning. The shocking fate and descent into intellectual hell of the humiliated little man Béla Nyúl, set amid the spread of fascism in the irrational world of the 1930s, broadens – in the outstanding performance of Ernő Szabó – into a tragically grotesque, parabolic study of the nature of every instance of barbaric oppression and manipulation of the masses. This exceptional example of classic Hungarian film was premièred on 18 October 1956, with the funeral of the rehabilitated politician László Rajk as a supporting feature. In this context, it would have had a different meaning if not swept away by revolution. In August 1957, having won the top prize at Karlovy Vary, the film would be widely distributed with the tagline: “A cry against fascism in all eras.” Presented by: Palace of Arts
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