The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history. The series Independent Women: The Pioneering Cinema of Márta Mészáros starts on MUBI on March 22, 2021 in many countries. Mészáros will receive the European Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th European Film Awards for her outstanding body of work.
In an interview with Philip Roth, Czech writer Milan Kundera said about the concept of forgetting:
“This is the great private problem of man: death as the loss of self. But what is this self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus, what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life…. But forgetting is also the great problem of politics. When a big power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness, it uses the method of organized forgetting.”
The films of Márta Mészáros epitomize these sentiments. Internationally renowned for her four Diary films—Diary for My Children (1984), Diary for My Loves (1987), Diary for My Mother and Father (1990), and Little Vilna: The Last Diary (2000), the first three of which are included in MUBI’s new series, “Independent Women: The Pioneering Cinema of Márta Mészáros”—the Hungarian filmmaker, like Kundera, came of age in the Eastern Bloc after World War II. Hungary had been part of the Axis powers; toward the end of the war, it was occupied by the Soviet Union, the small Central European country pulled behind the Iron Curtain for the next several decades. Mészáros is thus all too familiar with the consignment to oblivion of a national consciousness profaned by decades of political unrest.
Born in Budapest in 1931, Mészáros spent much of her early childhood in Kyrgyzstan after her communist-artist parents were more or less exiled to the Soviet Union in 1936. Her mother was a painter, and her father, László Mészáros (in Hungarian, surnames typically precede forenames, but here I’ll use the Western standard), was an acclaimed sculptor. His work has been described as expressionistic and modern yet rooted in primitive realism. His most famous piece, the bronze sculpture Prodigal Son (1930), is commanding in its rendering of a peasant boy and keenly perceptive in how the figure exudes intangible sensitivity. Prodigal Son can be seen in Diary for My Children during hazy flashbacks where the protagonist’s sculptor father appears in his workshop—the Diary films are largely autobiographical, based on Mészáros’s formative years and including similarities to the fates of her own parents. Her artistic practice echoes her father’s, exhibiting a similar commitment to social (versus socialist) realism and self expression.
László Mészáros was arrested in 1938 and died in 1945, executed during Stalin’s purges for his continued espousing of pre-Stalinist communist principles; Márta’s mother passed away six years later (some sources cite typhoid as the cause of death, while others claim she died in childbirth). Left an orphan, Mészáros was unofficially adopted by a Hungarian Communist functionary living in the Soviet Union. For Mészáros, being abandoned or forgotten by one’s parents mirrors the experience of being abandoned or forgotten by the state. She is not just the daughter of her parents, but also a child of Hungary. Her work confronts how she and her country people had been forsaken, subjected as they were to bleak livelihoods and punishments ranging from imprisonment to execution, depending on the regime. In general, the theme of abandonment—conveyed often in Mészáros’s films via the relationship between parent and child—is an apt metaphor for the ways in which the Hungarians were at the mercy of their rulers. The Eastern Bloc-method of forced collectivism had yielded a lonesome and desultory citizenry.
Mészáros returned to Hungary and then back to the Soviet Union in 1946 to study at what was then called the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, or the VGIK, in Moscow, the nation’s top film school. The likes of Alexander Dovzhenko, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin taught there, while the alumni include such luminaries as Kira Muratova, Sergie Parajanov, Larisa Shepitko, Aleksandr Sukurov, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Her experiences at the school form the basis for much of Diary for My Loves, which follows the Mészáros stand-in, Juli, as she enters into adulthood and begins contemplating a career. After she’s rejected by a Hungarian film school, Juli pursues her dream in the Soviet Union, where she meets people who affirm and challenge her beliefs. Toward the end of the film, Juli goes back to Hungary and presents her diploma film, a short documentary about the hard lives of peasant workers in the country. A screening committee watches with apprehension, then advises Juli to rework the film so it reflects a more positive outlook; the director is tasked with seeing beyond and even creating a new reality. “I think our opinions differ,” Juli says, “both about reality and the film.”
After graduating in 1956, Mészáros made short documentaries in both Hungary and Romania for the Budapest Newsreel Studio (perhaps with her first husband, fellow filmmaker László Karda); leading up to her feature debut in 1968, she produced various documentaries and films for educational television. In his book Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex, film studies professor John Cunningham notes that this era was an inopportune time for burgeoning Hungarian filmmakers. “What talent, old or new, was around at the time, it could not have flourished in such circumstances,” he writes. “Who today, has heard of, or seen, Miklós Jancsó’s first film, The Bells Have Gone to Rome?... Others, such as the young documentarist Márta Mészáros, made equally quiet debuts.” In 1960 Mészáros would marry Jancsó, an initiator of the Hungarian New Wave, and raised three children with him. They later separated in 1973. Their son, Nyika Jancsó, worked as her cinematographer on a number of her films.
Above: The Girl
Mészáros’ first feature film (also included in the MUBI series), The Girl (1968) follows a young woman who had been raised in a state orphanage as she seeks out her birth mother. A review in a 1972 issue of Ms. Magazine called it “a very deceptive film—small and quiet, building its power like a Chekhov short story through exquisitely subtle details.” Hungarian pop singer Kati Kovács stars as the young, inquisitive woman, Szõnyi, who goes so far as to post newspaper and radio ads to find her mother. Once she’s contacted by the woman who gave her up over 20 years earlier, the girl goes to stay with her mother and her new family on a rural farm. Szõnyi, having grown up in Budapest, is more urban-minded than her hosts; Mészáros conveys the pronounced divide between the characters through the subtle, documentary-like observations of their hair, clothing and mannerisms. Like many of the director’s female protagonists, Szõnyi is a stony, unemotional figure—Mészáros’s transgressive rejection of sentimentality is undeniable.
Above: Poster for The Girl
The mid-to-late sixties comprised a period of significant economic development in the People’s Republic of Hungary. In 1968 János Kádár, who had succeeded Ernő Gerő as General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party after the events of the 1956 revolution, introduced the New Economic Mechanism, which implemented market-style reforms and allowed for the establishment of private businesses. Mészáros’s films from this era, though connected via broader themes and their documentary-like realism, exist in contrast to her later Diary films, which take place exclusively in the past. As they’re set in the current moment, the films provide snapshots of Hungary in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, reflecting the societal changes that followed Prime Minister Mátyás Rákosi’s reign of terror and the 12-day revolution in 1956. Still, memories of those events lingered in the hearts and minds of the Hungarian people.
Above: Poster for Don't Cry, Pretty Girls!
It’s worth noting that Mészáros has made dozens of films, many of which are impossible to view in the United States. None of the films included in the MUBI series are easily accessible otherwise; none of her films are, really, with the exception of Adoption (1975; it’s streaming on Amazon Prime), about a 43-year-old woman who becomes enmeshed with a teenage foster child. At the end of her illuminating 1993 monograph on the director—crucial to any study of Mészáros, and whose insights are prominent in this piece—Catherine Portuges notes that most of the films mentioned in the text are available with English subtitles through Hungarofilm, while the North American sources are contained largely to 16mm prints from New Yorker Films, Kino International, Festival Films, and Les Productions La Fête. Many summaries and reviews of her films in print and online were written by people who have had the privilege of seeing them at festivals and in limited retrospectives of her work. To that end, I wasn’t able to view Binding Sentiments (1969), included in the series and which, according to Mira Liehm and Antonín J. Liehm’s book The Most Important Art: Soviet and Eastern European Film, involves “a widow Mari Törőcsik… whose husband and the father of her children, a famous economist, dies a tragic death,” a form of existential abandonment and its resulting emotional upheaval again at the center of Mészáros’s narrative. Things are further complicated by her adult son, who resents his mother for the re-evaluation of her relationship with her husband following his death, and his fiance (Kati Kovács, who also starred in The Girl).
Above: Don't Cry, Pretty Girls!
In Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls! (1970), the modern rhythms of Beat music quell youthful ennui. The teenaged Jaroslava Schallerová, who starred in Jaromil Jireš’s surrealist masterpiece Valerie and Her Week of Wonders the same year, plays a young worker spending her free time at beat music concerts with her friends and fiance. She strikes an enigmatic figure against the generally convivial tone of the film, which features footage of real Hungarian Beat bands performing for throngs of hip, albeit frustrated, young people. Schallerová’s inscrutable Juli is seduced by a dashing young cellist, who draws her away from her more humdrum fiance. Mészáros’s direction of actors stands out: the story seems to transpire through Schallerová’s face as Mészáros and cinematographer János Kende often center on it—mysteries of human expression likewise draw viewers in yet keep them at a distance. The impassive demeanor of many of Mészáros’s female protagonists communicate as much, if not more, than their words. A twist at the end typifies Mészáros’s understated pragmatism. She eschews romanticism, either of people or ideals, preferring instead the sobering verisimilitude of real life. Dispiriting as that may be, there’s an element of independence in the characters’ woeful decisions. “I have the obstinacy of a mule,” she’s quoted as saying. “[In the creation of my films, I] pursued my attempt to study the characters of types of women [who possessed] a strong personality, and [who were] capable of forming decisions for themselves.”
Above: Adoption
The major films that immediately follow Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls! are Riddance (1973) and Adoption (1975). The former explicitly addresses the issue of class divide, a prevalent condition of Communism despite its allegedly egalitarian aims. Cunningham writes that the film centers on “a working-class woman who falls for a student… who hails from a professional, middle-class family. Hiding her background, she works in a textile mill and was brought up in an orphanage, she pretends to be a student.” He also notes that the film “challenges the official mythology of the ‘classless society.’” Adoption, about an older woman who desires to have a child on her own, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, marking the first time this prize was awarded to a female director. After entering into a friendship with a teenage orphan, the older woman realizes her desire by adopting a child, rather than having one with her married boyfriend. Concurrently, the young woman whom she befriends is liberated from the orphanage by way of marriage to her own boyfriend. Mészáros’s character's quest for independence at all costs echoes that of her homeland.
Above: Nine Months
In Nine Months (1976), Mészáros again explores romantic and class tensions vis-à-vis the story of a young factory worker, Juli (Lili Monori), who’s pursued by her boss, János (Jan Nowicki, a Polish actor whom Mészáros would later marry and who appears in several of her films). Their intense romance is tempered by the fact that Juli has a child by a married man and her desire for independence; she rejects her lover’s attempts to domesticate her, even when she becomes pregnant with his child. A 1981 New York Times review of the film noted that Mészáros called Juli “the most conscious and most mature of all the female characters in my films.” That Janos was her boss and that she has a child by another man creates resentment among his family, and she ends up having the baby alone. Monori was pregnant while filming, and the final scene documents the actual birth of her child in intimate detail. Here again Mészáros’s propensity for documentary realism complements the narrative and adds gravitas to it—like children, films often come into the world bloody and uncompromising. The Times reviewer, Janet Maslin, didn’t seem particularly keen on the film, though she noted that Nowicki acted his part in Polish while everyone else did theirs in Hungarian. “Later, according to Miss Mészáros,” Maslin writes, “this lack of communication grew to be a metaphor for the film's entire message, and brought out new dimensions in [Monori’s] range.”
Implacable female characters are often at the heart of Mészáros’s films, though the director patently rejects the label of feminist, despite the fact that her work is regularly viewed and analyzed through that lens. Furthermore, her films weren’t exceptionally successful in Hungary. Rather, she earned acclaim on the international stage with her Diary films; it follows that the interpretation of her work as being feminist is largely the projection of Western audiences, critics and academics. In a recent interview with the Exberliner, Mészáros said, “Feminism is not a simple, banal thing. Feminism is a concept and a serious philosophy. In this sense, I am not a feminist.” The interviewer raises an obvious point:
But your film work expresses ideas and situations supporting a very female-centric idea of the world. Women, strong women, have already been your main angle… But that's because I know far more about women than I do about men. Men worry me, and I keep my distance from them because it seems their main drive, the most important motivation for them, is to get power over women. I hate power, any kind of power. But the man is driven by hunger for power.
Portuges aptly notes that “like the smaller East-bloc nations that [were then] in the painful process of moving toward market economies and away from central control that for decades regulated the production of word and image, [East European women] too will undoubtedly insist on the right to explain and theorize their experience in their own ways, rather than accepting formulations posed without them.”
Above: The Two of Them
Nevertheless Mészáros’s career remains singular in its ongoing focus on women’s stories and issues, specifically as they’re impacted by their surrounding socio-political climate. Her female characters are decidedly brazen individuals who advocate for themselves not because they’re women, but because they’re people, with their own wants and needs. As in Adoption, this theme sometimes extends to women's relationships with one another. The Two of Them (1977), also called Women and included in the MUBI series, explores the relationship between a woman who runs a girls’ hostel (French actress Marina Vlady) and a younger woman played by Monori from Nine Months (it’s not uncommon to recognize actors across Mészáros’s films) who seeks to distance herself and her daughter from her alcoholic husband (Nowicki). Medium shots, occasionally punctuated by thoughtfully framed close-ups, dominate Mészáros’s films. In one like The Two of Them, which has two central characters, the utilitarian method serves a practical and designative aim in how they’re allotted on-screen space.
Above: The Inheritance
Between The Two of Them and the first Diary film, Mészáros made several features, all of which starred (and were sometimes even co-written by) Nowicki. A few feature famous French actors: Anna Karina stars in Just Like Home (1978) and Delphine Seyrig appears in the Polish co-production On The Move. The Inheritance (1980), a French-Hungarian collaboration included in the retrospective, stars Isabelle Huppert. In it, according to Cunningham’s book, “an aristocratic woman, Sylvia Pernyi (Lilli Monori) is infertile and pays the impoverished Irén Simon (Huppert) to have a child by her husband Ákos. This neat contractual arrangement collapses when Ákos and Irén fall in love. Irén reveals that she is Jewish and Ákos decides to stick with her despite the difficult times ahead. They have a second child but Sylvia denounces them to the authorities, and they are both taken away by the Arrow Cross.” Cunningham notes that “it was not really until the 1980s that Jews began to feature in Hungarian films in any major way.” Later, in 1996, Mészáros made Edith Stein: The Seventh Chamber, an austere biopic of the German-Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a nun.
Above: Diary for My Children
The first of Mészáros’s famed Diary films, Diary for My Children, came out in 1984. It is nothing short of a masterpiece and a cornerstone of Hungarian cinema—it remains her most successful film. Young Juli Kovács (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi, who appears in all four of the Diary films) returns to Budapest with the elderly friends of her parents after living for several years in the Soviet Union, where she was orphaned. Her father, a sculptor, had been arrested in the Stalinist purges, and her mother died from illness soon after. The film is highly autobiographical, drawing on details from Mészáros’s formative years as a young woman in the newfound Eastern Bloc, Hungary being one of the nations that fell under the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Ethereal flashbacks illuminate Juli’s background and the fate of her parents. Back in Hungary following the end of World War II, she’s taken in by Magda (Polish actress Anna Polony), a high-ranking Communist Party official who knew Juli’s parents. Madga, who never had children of her own, desires a maternal relationship with the young girl, though Juli is adversarial toward the older woman. A mediocre student, she enjoys going to the movies above all else, even swiping Magda’s cinema pass to do so. She attempts to escape from Magda’s clutches but is forcibly brought back at the behest of her politically powerful foster mother.
The plot also charts Juli’s growing affection for Magda’s friend János, played by Nowicki, who also appears in flashbacks as Juli’s sculptor father. The symbolism of the same actor playing both the father figure and the actual father is overt but evocative nonetheless; even more poignant are the flashback scenes of Juli’s father in a great cavern of stone. Memory is a specter here, a ghost that Juli is desperate both to revive and vindicate. It’s evident that she’s in love with János, who escaped prison and then fled to France, having previously been jailed during the years Miklós Horthy was in power—a tragic figure, János lost his wife and daughter in an air raid, which left his son disabled. Opting for subtlety, Mészáros conveys the political situation as a young person might observe it; for example, large portraits of Rákosi adorn the walls of Juli’s school, and updates as to the political atmosphere are heard on the radio and through speeches made at the characters’ workplaces and such. In the end Janos is imprisoned during Rákosi’s rule of terror, a period when the leader imprisoned up to 10,000 Hungarians and executed approximately 2,000.
Shot in crisp black and white by Mészáros’s son Miklós Jancsó Jr., Children may be the most visually stunning of the Diary films (the other three are in color). Documentary and newsreel footage appear sporadically; often Mészáros configures a scene so that it appears the characters are at an event represented by the archival footage. Diary for My Loves (1987) opens in a similar fashion, starting with a newsreel before revealing that Juli is at a theater watching it. In voiceover, we hear Juli narrating a diary entry she’s writing to her father, whose exact fate is indeterminate. Mészáros reveals that Juli has escaped from Magda and has started working at a factory and living on her own. Her independence is short-lived, however, as she’s fired from her job for having left her foster mother, then compelled to return to her. Juli soon applies for film school in Budapest, where she’s rejected (Mészáros was likewise rejected from the Hungarian Film School), and then in Moscow; parts of the film take place there, with Juli becoming close with a beautiful Russian acting student and with the ballerina Anna Pavlova, with whom Mészáros was friends in real life. Juli’s heretofore detached demeanor begins to assume the attitude of an observer looking for inspiration, austere though her experience may be. As she continues developing as a filmmaker, she finds closure in another part of her life when she discovers that her father, who died eleven years earlier in a gulag, had been rehabilitated in absentia by the Khrushchev regime following Stalin’s death in 1953. This revelation comes after Janos’s release from prison earlier in the film—one father figure lives, while the other is gone forever. It ends with Juli in Moscow going to the embassy to inquire about the burgeoning revolution.
In between Diary for My Loves and the third film of the series, Diary for My Mother and Father (1990), Mészáros made and released a family film, Bye Bye Red Riding Hood (1989), about the titular storybook character; per synopses of the film, it once again figures a parent abandoning their child. Diary for My Mother and Father is the most overtly political of the first three films: it opens with a recreation of the Stalin Monument in Budapest being torn down on October 23, 1956 (the recreation is startlingly accurate). It’s the first day of the revolution, and János and his new girlfriend are present. Mészáros then cuts to Juli in Russia, listening to news of her home country on the radio. Juli later returns to Budapest, the city in ruins after the fighting. The film largely concerns her attempts to keep János out of prison following the second Soviet invasion, the arrest of Prime Minister Imre Nagy (who would be executed later), and the installation of János Kadar as the country’s new leader.
Above: Diary for My Mother and Father
An extraordinary sequence near the end of Mother and Father stands out as one of the greatest of the first three Diary films. Juli and her boyfriend, a producer of newsreels (a stand-in, it would seem, for Mezsaros’s first husband), throw a New Year’s Eve party with many of the figures who’d appeared in all three films, including Janos and Magda, the latter of whom had had a nervous breakdown as a result of the revolution. The unlikely party guests represent all sides of the political culture. When they’re thrown together, metaphorically, the nation’s tensions come to a head. Janos is later arrested and executed; his girlfriend has a baby, which causes Juli to have flashbacks to her own pregnant mother’s traumatic birth. The final scenes shows Janos’s girlfriend, her son, and Juli trying to find his grave and being harassed by the police. Closure again evades Juli, and, it would seem, Mezsaros.
Above: The Last Report on Anna
Mezsaros’s career following the third Diary film consists of the following features: Fetus (1994), again about adoption; Edith Stein; Daughters of Luck (1999); the final Diary film, Little Vilna: The Last Diary (2000), a prequel centering on her early childhood in Kyrgyzstan; The Unburied Man (2004), a biopic about the exalted Nagy; The Last Report on Anna (2009), a narrative fiction exploring the later years of Anna Kéthly (the “Joan of Arc of Hungarian Politics,” she was president of the Social Democractic Party following the revolution and up until the second invasion) and centering on the sensitive concept of state informants; and Aurora Borealis (2017), about a lawyer who struggles to uncover a long-buried family secret. She’s also credited with having made documentaries and television movies during this time, as well as directing some TV and contributing to anthology films.
In Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, about which Roth was interviewing the celebrated Czech author, the character Mirek remarks:
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Mezsaros’s body of work stands in testament to this—through film, she commits to posterity the memories of a nation, of a people, and, perhaps most importantly, of women as individuals, during a time when the collective ‘we’ was compelled to drown out the singular ‘I.’
Above: Adoption