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Picturing the Body in Hungarian Cinema After the Fall of Communism

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Picturing the Body in Hungarian Cinema After the Fall of Communism STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA, 2016 VOL. 7, NO. 2, 153À167 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2016.1155268 Remembering bodies: picturing the body in Hungarian cinema after the fall of communism Terez Vincze Department of Film Studies, E€otv€os Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary ABSTRACT KEYWORDS One of the most interesting features of contemporary Hungarian Contemporary Hungarian cinema is the frequent use of bodies and corpses as central tropes cinema; post-communism; in films. The directors of the so-called Young Hungarian Cinema of body; memory; Istvan Szabo; Sunshine;Gy€orgy Palfi; the 2000s often build their stories around bodies in order to discuss Taxidermia various psychological, social and historical problems. The great number of such films seems to indicate that this phenomenon is part of an overall trend in Hungarian films that, in many cases, has a direct connection to the representation of historical memory and the depiction of post-socialist identity formation. In this article, I examine two films, Istvan Szabo: A napfeny ıze/Sunshine (1999) and Gyorgy€ Palfi: Taxidermia (2005), that use the body as one of their main tools for dealing with the questions of historical memory and the depiction of socialist and post-socialist identity. The selection of these two films also provides an opportunity to detect the differences between the approach of two generations of filmmakers to the historicization of socialism and to the post-socialist condition. Introduction The Hungarian film Meteo, directed by Andras Monory Mesz, was produced in 1989, the emblematic year of Eastern Europe’s political transformation. This highly symbolic film, which gained cult status soon after its release in Hungary, takes place somewhere in East- ern Europe; the allegorical location is a worn-out factory district that is destined for demolition. The main characters live in the factory, so they will soon have to move out. Downloaded by [National Taiwan University] at 01:48 01 June 2016 One of the characters À aptly called Little Cloud À is a meteorologist who spends his time daydreaming, and he symbolizes a certain type of the prophetic and vulnerable East- ern European intellectual.1 Little Cloud has figured out the ultimate winning strategy at horseraces and with it his friend, Berlioz, hits the jackpot at the next derby. Meanwhile, Little Cloud loses his life in an accident. The planned demolition of the factory district is cancelled, although the inhabitants of the godforsaken land seem to be eager to escape. Berlioz takes the money and gets on a plane, while the corpse of Little Cloud is sent up into the clouds with the help of several meteorological balloons. One of the last images of CONTACT Terez Vincze [email protected] © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 154 T. VINCZE the film captures Berlioz staring out of the plane’s window to see the corpse of Little Cloud ascending towards the sky. The story of Meteo À set in a place where a community on the verge of disintegration try to find (often illegal) ways to survive À not only symbolizes the general situation of Eastern Europe at the dawn of the political and social changes caused by the fall of state socialism, but also creates a telling bodily symbol. The unburied dead body of Little Cloud, that is, invokes the series of dead bodies that were exhumed, moved and reburied in many countries of the ex-socialist bloc at the time. According to Katherine Verdery, the trans- formation of the system reconfigured the structure of the world and the possible forms of existence in this world for citizens in ex-communist societies. The events of 1989 had an immediate effect on some basic conditions of everyday living that had been stable and tac- itly accepted for decades. The epochal shift in the system meant not only the alteration of abstract ideas about morality and social relations but had a literal effect on reality, which was materialized in everyday actions (Verdery 1999,33À34). In this situation, as a means of negotiation between abstract ideas and immediate reality, dead bodies played an impor- tant role. Verdery adds that Hungarians were extremely active in moving dead bodies within Hungary and across borders both before and after the political changes of 1989. Reburials of historical personalities had become part of enacting collective memory in Hungary well before communist times. For example, a change of political climate was signalled at the end of the nineteenth century by the reburials of the leaders and martyrs of the 1848 Hun- garian revolution (Rev 1995). During communist times, the rehabilitated show-trial vic- tim Laszlo Rajk was reburied in 1956 (and again in 1989). The years around 1989 appear to have been the busiest period: the remains of composer Bela Bartok was brought home from the United States in 1988, and several emigrant liberal and conservative politicians of the early twentieth century were reburied between 1990 and 1993 (Verdery 1999, 14À16). Probably the most important, highly symbolic act of reburial took place in June 1989 when the martyrs of the 1956 revolution, among them prime minister, Imre Nagy, and several members of the revolutionary leadership, were ceremonially reburied in Budapest. Traditionally, the bodies of political leaders can serve as symbols of political order, hence political transformation can also be symbolized through the manipulation of these bodies. As John Borneman argues in connection with the political systems of tyrannical authority, just as the symbolization of the leader’s living body is often central to such sys- Downloaded by [National Taiwan University] at 01:48 01 June 2016 tems, the public symbolization of his mode of death and the dead body can be central to the successor regime as well (Borneman 2004, 2). Also, the ruler’s body and its public, cer- emonial representation embodies power and authority, ‘that is why political disputes so frequently resort to visual caricature, in which the body-image of the rulers is physically distorted; caricature deforms in order to ridicule the imposition of an embodied authority’ (Connerton 1989, 90). As Connerton also notes, it is not a coincidence that the French Revolution, as an epochal event, brought drastic changes to the public representation of common bodies, and also involved the severing of heads (Connerton 1989, 4). It is not surprising then that the filmic representations of political change also animate deformed and dead bodies. One of the most interesting features of Hungarian cinema of the new millennium seems to be the reappearance of significant corpses on the screen in great numbers. The directors of the younger generation often use corpses and bodies as STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA 155 their central symbols in order to discuss various psychological, social and historical phe- nomena. The great number of contemporary Hungarian films that symbolically deploy bodies seems to prove that this phenomenon is an integral part of an overall trend that, in many cases, has a direct connection to the representation of memory (historical and/or personal) and the depiction of post-socialist identity formation (Strausz 2011b). In this article, I intend to examine two films, Istvan Szabo’s A napfeny ıze/Sunshine (1999) and Gyorgy€ Palfi’s Taxidermia (2005), which use the body as one of their main tools for dealing with topics such as historical trauma and progress, memory and for- getting, and the depiction of socialist and post-socialist identity. The former film was directed by a member of the older generation whose career started during, and has cov- ered the decades of, the communist regime, while the latter was made by a younger direc- tor who, although he spent his early years in the socialist system, became an adult after the fall of communism. Hence, the selection of these two films provides an opportunity to detect some generational differences between approaches to the historicization of social- ism and to the post-socialist situation. The return of bodies The members of the so-called ‘Young Hungarian Cinema’, the new generation of directors in their thirties who started to obtain international recognition at the beginning of the 2000s, were obviously interested in the body as an expression of varied historical and social phenomena. Hungarian cinema of the last 15 years is full of expressly body-oriented films, and many of them represent bodies in new and intriguing ways. Many Hungarian film critics have argued that contemporary films revolving around the body form a signifi- cant trend in Hungarian cinema (Kiraly 2015; Strausz 2011b; Gelencser 2014; Kalmar 2013b). In Adrienn Pal (by Agnes Kocsis, 2010) and Johanna (by Kornel Mundruczo, 2005), female bodies play a crucial role, and as Kiraly argues, in these films, the ‘body becomes a surface, a screen onto which varied cultural discourses (…) can be easily projected’ (Kiraly 2015, 205). Body-centred cultural and iconographic readings are also pertinent in relation to Kontroll (by Nimrod Antall, 2003), a film dealing with the (Eastern European) male identity crisis (Kalmar 2013a), and Feher tenyer/White Palm (by Szabolcs Hajdu, 2005), which tells the story of an athlete who was brought up and trained in communist Hungary Downloaded by [National Taiwan University] at 01:48 01 June 2016 but, upon moving to Canada to work as a trainer, has to overcome his bodily and cultural reflexes to avoid being cast in the role of the (post-)socialist Other. The significance of dead bodies in transitional societies, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, has been mirrored in Hungarian cinema during the last several years as dead bodies strangely started to come to prominence in films that regularly led their viewers into the mortuary by creating a certain subgenre of pathology.
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