An image from Time Stands Still / Megall az Ido Directed by Péter Gothár, 1983; 99m Photo Credit: Magyar Filmunio

“Hungary has one of Europe’s richest cinematic traditions,” says Richard Peña, Film Society program director. “In assembling a series of films that reflect on the key event of Hungarian history in the 20th century, we were able to include major works by some of Hungary’s finest filmmakers.”

The event includes more than two-dozen films and six U.S. premieres, is organized into three different, but integrally related, film series: Remembering ’56; The Currents of History: A Tribute to Miklós Jancsó; and New Cinema From Hungary.

Complementing the film program is The Golden Age of Hungarian Film Posters, a special exhibition of 24 vintage posters from the Ernst Gallery in Budapest, on display at the Walter Reade Theater’s Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery at Lincoln Center from Oct. 27 – Nov. 27. Gallery hours are 1-8 p.m.; this exhibition is free and open to the public.

The Ernst Gallery’s internationally significant collection contains almost 200 one-of-a-kind lithographs hand-painted by towering talents of Hungarian poster art between 1912-1945. While the collection has been displayed in Europe several times, this is the first time selections will be presented in America. Appropriately, among the vintage prints on display are Hungarian posters of some classic Hollywood films including: Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert (1934), James Cagney in G-Men (1935), Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938) and Gary Cooper in Beau Geste (1939).

Tickets for Resistance and Rebirth: Hungarian Cinema, 50 Years After ‘56 are available at the Walter Reade Theater box office and online. Ticket prices are $10 for adults, $7 for students, $6 for FSLC members, and $5 for seniors for weekday matinees before 6 p.m. For more information and online tickets, go to www.filmlinc.com or call (212) 875-5600.

Program Schedule:

Remembering ’56
The Currents of History: A Tribute to Miklós Jancsó
New Cinema From Hungary

Remembering ‘56

Father / Apa
Istvan Szabó; 1966; 95m
Fri Oct 27: 2 p.m.; Mon Oct 30: 7:15 p.m.
Described by Szabó as “the autobiography of a generation,” Father was one of the first films to include actual footage from the ‘56 Uprising —and to depict those events as a key to understanding contemporary Hungarian youth. Heralding the arrival of a revitalized Hungarian cinema, Father cunningly mixes a broad array of cinematic styles, brilliantly and often humorously capturing a moment in which the various myths of the past give way to a more soberly observed present.

Refuge England
Robert Vas; U.K.,1959; 27m
Hungary, 1956: Our Revolution
Mark Kidel; U.K., 2006; 60m
Sat Oct 28 : 4 p.m.; Mon Oct 30: 1 p.m.
A fictional account of a Hungarian refugee’s first day in London, Refuge England captures the loneliness and wonder, as well as fears and hopes, of a man as he attempts to take in the sights and sounds of his new home. Mark Kidel’s Hungary 1956: Our Revolution explores the 1956 Uprising from a variety of viewpoints: from those who took part in the actual street demonstrations, but also from the perspective of the Soviet soldiers sent in to put them down. Politicians, students, factory workers, and Radio Free Europe staffers offer their memories and impressions, as well as their thoughts on what they did—or should have done—fifty years ago.

Recsk
Géza Böszörményi & Livia Gyarmathy; 1989; 230m
Sun Oct 29: 1 p.m.; Wed Nov 1: 7:30 p.m., U.S. Premiere
In 1950, just two years after the ascension of the Hungarian communists to power, a prison camp was set up to intern political dissidents. Torture, beatings, psychological and physical humiliation were routine events. Then, in 1953, the camp was abruptly closed; those who survived were sent back to their former lives, and the very existence of the camp at Recsk became one of the regime’s darkest secrets. Thirty years later, the filmmakers interviewed as many “veterans” of Recsk as they could find—not only prisoners, but also guards and even the officials responsible for sending people there. The result is this extraordinary work, a richly, terrifyingly detailed portrait of a prison camp, which received the 1989 European Film Award for Best Documentary.

Time Stands Still / Megall az Id
Péter Gothár; 1983; 99m
Sat Nov 4: 6:15 p.m.; Tue Nov 7: 2 p.m.
Winner of the 1983 New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Foreign-Language Film, Time Stands Still begins with the crushing of the ‘56 Uprising, as one of the freedom fighters leaves his family to escape to America. Seven years later, revolution is in the air, only this time it tastes like Coco-Cola and sounds like Elvis Presley. Working with the great cinematographer Lajos Koltai, Gothár serves up an amazing array of visual effects that capture a world at once falling apart and desperately seeking reconciliation.

Whooping Cough / Szamárköhögés
Péter Gárdos; 1987; 91m
Wed Nov 8: 4:20 p.m. & 8:45 p.m.
Winner of the top prize at the Chicago Flm Festival as well as a host of other international awards, Péter Gárdos’s Whooping Cough takes a decidedly less reverent tone to its depiction of the events of ‘56, offering a wry, black-humored look as what happens to one family when suddenly from one day to the next its world is turned upside down.

Diary for My Mother and Father / Napló apamnak és anyamnak
Márta Mészáros; 1990; 120m
Wed Nov 8: 2 p.m. & 6:20 p.m.
The third part of Mészáros’s loose postwar trilogy, Diary for My Mother and Father begins with the lead character, Juli, returning home from Moscow weeks after the Uprising has been put down. Mészáros brilliantly captures that feeling of an enormous political void left in the wake of ‘56 for a then-emerging generation that still felt a strong commitment to a vision of a better, more just world but had now lost faith in the instrument, the Communist Party, in which they and especially their parents had placed so much faith and given so much of their lives.

That Day Was Ours / Az a Nap a Mienk
Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács; 2002; 123m
Fri Nov 10: 2 p.m.; Sun Nov 12: 1:30 p.m.
Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács (When Joseph Returns) approaches the record of October 23, 1956—the day of the outbreak of the’56 Uprising—from a decidedly specific point-of-view: the experiences of the students at the Academy of Film and Theater.Weaving together a series of interviews, That Day was Ours traces the evolution of events from various groups of students deciding that their Academy also had to be represented at the mounting protests to the famous march of many thousands to the statue of Hungarian patriot Sándor Petoffi. With so much detail, and so any different experiences from which to draw, That Day was Ours makes the events of October 23 come alive in extraordinary and deeply moving way.

Daniel Takes a Train / Szerences Daniel
Pál Sándor; 1984; 93m
Sun Nov 12: 4:15 p.m.; Nov 15: 2:30 p.m.
Sándor’s masterpiece, screeened at the 1983 Cannes Festival, focuses on three short days in the lives of two teenagers, Daniel and Gyuri, who in the final weeks of 1956 decide to escape to the West. Daniel hopes to meet up with his girlfriend Mariann, who fled with her family some weeks earlier; for ex-soldier Gyuri, the trip could be a chance to settle the score with his father, a former communist official now working as a mechanic. In wonderfully realized scenes of overcrowded trains and border hotels, Sándor creates a rich panorama of ‘56 refugees, with their contradictions, naïve dreams and hopes, as well as their continuing fights and rivalries that mirror the political situation for those they’ve left behind.

Twenty Hours / Húsz óra
Zoltán Fábri; 1965; 120m
Wed Nov 15: 4:15 p.m. & 9 p.m.
After the shock of ‘56, cultural policies began to ease up somewhat in the Sixties; while censorship remained, filmmakers began to broach a number of previously forbidden subjects, including the Uprising. Veteran director Zoltán Fábri was one of the first to take up the challenge with Twenty Hours. Assigned to write an article about contemporary village life, a reporter suddenly finds himself at the scene of a murder investigation. He manages to uncover a sordid, tragic story of four friends, all of whom were enthusiastic partisans of the founding of socialist Hungary, but whose political paths began to diverge when the reality of the situation set in. Fábri employs a complex flashback narrative, moving between past and present to suggest perhaps not so much a contrast as a continuity of the issues addressed in the film.

A Tribute to Miklós Jancsó

The Red and the White / Csillagosok, Katonak
Miklós Jancsó; Hungary/USSR, 1967; 90m
Fri Oct 27: 4 p.m.; Mon Oct 30: 9:15 p.m.
At the end of WWI, thousands of Hungarian soldiers are prisoners behind Russian lines; the new Bolshevik authorities offer them freedom if they will join the “Reds” in their struggle against the “White” forces still loyal to the Tsar. Some join up out of socialist solidarity, others for the chance to loot the newly “liberated” estates. The Red and the White is the first work in which one experiences the full effect of what became Jancsó’s trademark visual style: extraordinarily long takes complemented by intricate camera movements and dense, multi-layered action—the perfect incarnation of a world in which instability is the rule and treachery the norm. The Red and the White is a haunting, disturbing portrait of a world choked by war.

Electra, My Love / Szerelmem, Elektra
Miklós Jancsó; 1974; 76m
Sat Oct 28: 6:15 p.m.; Mon Oct 30: 2:45 p.m.
The films of Miklós Jancsó’s, with their fascinating choreography of characters and camera movement, always had a clear affinity to dance, but nowhere is this tendency more visible than in his version of Euripides’s drama. Composed of only twelve shots, the film is a constant visual and aural feast, with a constant flow of horse riders galloping across the horizon, peasant girls in traditional costumes or stark naked, or rows of young men cracking whips in synchronized precision filling each frame.

The Round-Up / Szegénylegények
Miklós Jancsó; 1965; 90m
Thurs Nov 2: 6:30 p.m.; Sun Nov 5: 3:45 p.m.
The film that established Jancsó’s international reputation, The Round-Up is set a few years after the collapse of Lajos Kossuth’s 1848 uprising against the Austrian Hapsburg monarchy. Hungarian policemen loyal to the crown take a large group of peasants prisoner; among those they’re holding the police are certain that there are rebels and Kossuth loyalists to be found—but they have no way of determining who they are. Thus begins a haunting, almost ritualistic process whereby the authorities try to set up traps and ruses to have the rebels reveal themselves—or just to be betrayed by the others. The Round-Up offers a harrowing vision of a world completely unmoored; characters enter shots as friends and leave as enemies, the threat of betrayal the only thing of which one can be sure.

Winter Wind / Sirokkó
Miklós Jancsó; 1969; 80m
Sun Nov 5: 2 p.m.
A co-production with France, composed of only 13 shots, Winter Wind explores a hidden corner of history as a means of casting a light on an entire era. In the mid-1930s, soon after the assassination of the Yugoslav King Alexander in Marseille, a group of Croatian anarchists involved in that plot cross the dense forests at the northern border of Yugoslavia in an effort to seek refuge in Hungary—which has secretly been providing them aid. Their leader, Marko (Jacques Charrier), has become something of a legend of the resistance; his violent, frequently unpredictable behavior, however, has now made him a liability to the movement, and the Hungarians signal that they’d rather not have him on their side of the border.

Red Psalm / Még Kér a Nép
Miklós Jancsó; 1972; 87m
Sun Nov 5: 8 p.m.; Thurs Nov 9: 1 p.m.
On a vast, flat plain in the Hungarian hinterlands a mass of peasant farmers have risen in revolt against the local landowners. The political authorities, troops of soldiers, and even the clergy come out to try to convince the peasants to return to their homes, but they’ll have none of it; their rebellion, expressed through communal dancing and singing, can no longer be so easily put down. The visual splendor of each frame is at times overwhelming, as the combination of movement, sound, and color becomes the expression of pure emotion. Containing only 26 shots over the course of its 87 minutes, Red Psalm is perhaps the most formally elegant of Jancsó’s works.

God Walks Backwards / Isten Hátrafelé Megy
Miklós Jancsó; 1990; 95m
Thurs Nov 9: 3 p.m.; Sun Nov 12: 8:15 p.m.
In the late ‘80s/ early ‘90s, Jancsó made a series of films that explored the use of television imagery as means of making his legendary shots even more visually complex. Perhaps the most remarkable of these films was God Walks Backwards, an eerie prophecy of the impending collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of Gorbachev made several months before the actual coup itself. Waiting for a film they’re working on to start up again, two members of the production wander around a seemingly deserted mansion, watching news reports of the unfolding events in Moscow and the assassination of Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest / Nekem Lámpást adott Kezembe az Úr, Pesten
Miklós Jancsó; 1999; 103m
Mon Nov 13: 6:15 p.m.; Tue Nov 14: 1:30 p.m.
After an absence of seven years from feature film production, Miklós Jancsó returned to the forefront of Hungarian cinema with this madcap, totally unexpected ramshackle comedy featuring two of Hungary’s most popular performers, Zoltán Mucsi and Péter Scherer. Kapa (Mucsi) and Pepe (Scherer) are two grave diggers from Budapest. Or perhaps they’re actually nouveau-riche lawyers. Or possibly terrorists. Whatever they are, they seem to be shadowed by two very distinguished older gentlemen (Mikós Jancsó and his longtime screenwriter, Gyula Hernádi), who seem unable to decide what should happen next.

New Cinema from Hungary

Moscow Square / Moszkva Ter
Ferenc Török; 2001; 88m
Fri Oct 27: 6 p.m.; Tue Oct 31: 3:15 p.m.
The release of Ferenc Török’s debut announced the arrival of a new sensibility in Hungarian cinema, one that corresponded to a generation that had entirely grown up in the post-communist era. It’s April, 1989; Petya, Kiegler, Ságodi, and their friends spend their evenings hanging around the clock tower in Moscow Square, while all around them the old regime is on the verge of collapse. Few films have more effectively captured that sense of life on the eve a momentous political and social transformation—that unsettling combination of giddy optimism for the future and creeping fear of the unknown.

Johanna
Kornél Mundruczó; 2005; 86m
Fri Oct 27:8:15 p.m.; Sat Oct 28: 8:15 p.m.; Sat Nov 4: 8:30 p.m.; Tue Nov 7: 4 p.m.
One of the most hotly debated films at the 2005 Cannes International Film Festival, Johanna begins as the victims of a massive traffic accident are brought into a hospital emergency room. Among the casualties is a young drug addict, Johanna, who sneaks into the pharmacy and overdoses. Saved by the efforts of a young doctor, Johanna fully recovers but has no memory of her past life; instead, she stays to help others by working as a nurse. Yet Johanna’s rather distinctive ways of providing aid and comfort to her patients.

White Palms / Fehér Tenyér
Szabolcs Hajdú; 2006; 103m
Sun Oct 29: 5:30 p.m.; Tue Oct 31: 1 p.m.; Wed Nov 1: 5:30 p.m., U.S. Premiere
Winner of several awards at this year’s Hungarian Film Week, White Palms is based on director Hajdu’s own youthful experiences as an aspiring gymnast. Miklós Dongó arrives in Canada to begin work as a coach and trainer for young gymnasts. His career cut short by injury, Miklós is flooded with memories of his own childhood as he starts to work with the talented but confrontational Kyle. Miklós sees much of himself in the young man—yet his efforts to perfect Kyle’s skills run up against his own competitive feelings and disappointment in his own career. Avoiding the typical “sports narrative,” White Palms instead immerses the viewer in the very special world of gymnastics, a kind of secret society with its own rules and conventions, where athletes train endless hours to perform routines that barely last minutes.

Dealer
Benedek Fliegauf; 2005; 135m
Sun Oct 29: 7:45 p.m.; Mon Oct 30: 4:30 p.m., U.S. Premiere
Dealer tells the uncompromising story of a day in the life of a drug dealer. His clients include the leader of a religious sect, a friend who needs a final fix, a former lover who claims to have had his child, a student, and a black marketeer. Using long, sinuous camera movements to narrate his story, Fliegauf brings us into a kind of sensual contact with his protagonist and his daily routine.

Fresh Air / Friss Levegö
Ágnes Kocsis; 2006; 109m
Thurs Nov 2: 8:30 p.m.; Sun Nov 5: 5:45 p.m., U.S. Premiere
Selected for the Critics Week at the Cannes International Film Festival, Fresh Air is a neo-realist work in the tradition of Bicycle Thieves or the kitchen sink cinema of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. Viola, a subway toilet supervisor, and her daughter Angéla, who dreams of becoming a fashion designer, live in a small Budapest apartment, sharing little in common other than their favorite television show. Distinguished by a witty, uncanny emphasis on (sometimes) absurd work routines and rituals, Kocsis’s film shows exceptional, unerring empathy for her characters.

Kontroll
Nimród Antal; 2004; 105m
Fri Nov 10: 4:30 p.m. & 9 p.m.
A slapstick tale of redemption set in the Budapest subway system, Kontroll centers around the brooding, charismatic Bulcsú and his return to grace. Once a promising young professional above ground, Bulcsú now spends his days and nights wandering the tunnels as the reluctant leader of a ragtag group of ticket inspectors. Lower, even, than the traffic police, they dally forth daily to fight sad and hilarious uphill battles against hostile straphangers, abusive punks, pimps, pickpockets and drunken tarts. Screened at the Critics’ Week in Cannes and as part of FSOLC’s New Directors/New Films series, Kontroll is a poignant tale of one lost soul’s journey toward love and salvation.

After the Day Before / Másnap
Attila Janisch; 2004; 119m
Fri Nov 10: 6:35 p.m.; Sat Nov 11: 8:15 p.m.; Mon Nov 13: 2 p.m.
A stranger arrives in the countryside, wandering from house to house speaking to stonefaced residents; only gradually does he learn a young girl has recently been murdered. Using the most economical of visual means—slow zooms, landscape tracking shots, point-of-view and close-up shots—Janisch is able to create a mood of overpowering foreboding and dread comparable to Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité.

Vagabond
György Szomjas; 2003; 102m
Sat Nov 11: 6:15 p.m.; Mon Nov 13: 4:15 p.m., U.S. Premiere
One of Hungary’s finest filmmakers, György Szomjas developed in earlier works such as Bald Dog Rock or Mr. Universe a scrappy, vibrant style that perfectly blends fiction and documentary that is on brilliant display in Vagabond. Discovering the existence of an “underground” music scene, he fashions a story that is a means of documenting the scene and some of its most remarkable personalities, resulting in a fascinating journey into a side of contemporary Hungarian culture rarely seen by outsiders or by Hungarians themselves.

Dallas Pashamende
Robert-Adrian Pejo; Hungary/Romania/Austria, 2005; 93m
Sun Nov 12: 6:15 p.m.; Mon Nov 13: 8:30 p.m.; Tue Nov 14: 3:45 p.m.
“Dallas” is the name that inhabitants have given to a ramshackle shanty town located next door to a garbage dump, the home to a thick goulash of Hungarians, Romanians, and specially Romany (formerly known as Gypsies), all of whom actually get along reasonably well. Into the mix one day arrives Radu. Now a schoolteacher, Radu has returned to carry out a promise to his father—to bury him in Dallas. But trying to come back into the fold—even when you’re dead—proves trickier than Radu might have imagined, and soon he realizes that his stay in Dallas might take longer than expected. A rare look at the Roma people that’s not merely sociological, Robert-Adrian Pejo’s Dallas Pashamende gives a vibrant, full-blooded portrait of complex, many-layered community that happily avoids stereotypes or simple moralizing.

©Movie Views; October 14, 2006