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). The novels of József Balázs, Hungarians and Bálint Fábián Meets God, caused a great stir in the 1970s. When writing a screenplay for these two only thematically linked works, Zoltán Fábri created a two-part film serializing the history of a family: he made the András Fábián of Hungarians the son of Bálint Fábián, although in the novels the two characters are only connected by name. While Hungarians deals with Hungarian day-labourers working in Germany during the Second World War, farming the land of German peasants conscripted into the army, the more lyrically toned Bálint Fábián Meets God is set at the end of the First World War, during the time of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the reprisals that followed. It was unfortunate that Dialóg Stúdió did not keep to the chronological order of the two parts and ordered the apparently more successful Hungarians to be adapted for the cinema first. The film displays its own distinctive power in depicting how, in 1943, a group of penniless serfs who cannot see beyond their own little village in Szabolcs County, in the hope of enrichment and exemption from the draft, work relentlessly on the German land with their eyes closed to the proximity of the nearby prisoner-of-war camp, stumbling on corpses at every turn while the sound of shooting can be heard in the backround… “A number of specific elements in the film continue to lend the story some resonance to this day: on the one hand, József Balázs’s view of the modern peasantry comes across in his approach, devoid of illusions, to a social class said to be the glue that holds the Hungarian nation together. On the other, the world is not as black and white as we have come to expect in many Hungarian films: the German farmer (Sándor Szabó) is neither a Nazi nor a member of the resistance, the steward (Zoltán Gera) is neither a slave-driver nor a friendly Swabian, and an element of the fate of both characters affects the Hungarian peasants as well.” (József Marx) Nevertheless, Gábor Koncz remains in the audience’s memory not for the short-tempered but insufficiently striking main character he plays in this film, but rather for the part of Péter Szaffrán in the film Fekete gyémántok (Black Diamonds) released one year earlier, or even for the title role in The Danube Pilot (1974). Although Hungarians was nominated for an Oscar, and won various prizes both abroad and at home for Gábor Koncz and Éva Pap, critics handed it a trashing, branding it “tasteless crying over the Hungarian people.” Presented by: Palace of Arts
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