Within and Without the Walls: Film in Eastern Europe
Biro, Yvette
Once upon a time in the East, there was film. Is it gone forever? Although dramatic changes have signaled the end of an era, the question is not an easy one. Final collapse is never the simple...
...Since there are now finally democratic institutions, one must no longer attempt to play the roles of both the fire department and the Parliament...
...He is handsome, young, and looking forward to a better future...
...K. complains to a neighbor that business is bad...
...We had become used to speaking of the omnipotence of this authority...
...What can be said of this erstwhile victor...
...This was the peak of its historical emancipation, since it had not only reached the stage of high modernism but also renewed the modernist forms of its expression...
...Subjection...
...The authorities said: no candor, no explicit message, then we'll talk...
...the golden age of Hungarian cinema occurred during the period of Kadarist consolidation, when compromise was possible...
...On the one hand, financing was total and risk free...
...But the authorities are no less so, by their very hypocrisy...
...Neither will they be able to rely on the ambitions of the financiers who will take its place...
...The huge superproductions must give way to more humble and personal works, which will no longer be able to count on the generous/ restrictive largesse of the state's patronage...
...That he thought himself charismatic but turned out to be a torturer...
...Lastly, the weekly closing effectively signified a relative vacation, even a "rest" in the literal sense, because we cannot speak of an even amount of oppression over forty years...
...It had been ailing for some time...
...Art accepts the reign of violent action and brutal ambiguity that, along with the continual leveling of the media and the raw vulgarity of present-day communication, are the absolute opposites of the hard-won elitist values of the avant garde...
...The debris of values is also concealed beneath the ruins, amid the rubble...
...If I can't call things by their names, then you cannot either...
...The individual is reduced to "me"—Every Man for Himself, says Godard —and this "me" will take on the dimensions accorded to it by God...
...Nothing but losses every day...
...If things are so bad, how is it that you're getting by at all...
...It is said that the image communicates only communication itself: it repeats or transmits all of the stages of the surface of life, all of its significant and insignificant incidents...
...Our own task is to take this debris, to salvage that which is hidden beneath the rubble but remains useful...
...The cinema of the socialist experiment, when it succeeded here and there, was grand, loaded, grave by necessity...
...The tacit consensus imposed a rule on both parties...
...Today, in a society overwhelmed by middle-class values, one must reckon with the aggressive and annoying dominance of petty individualism, which clearly supports the mass culture of easy consumption...
...It has no other value than the pleasure of futile and immediate consumption...
...Now, we must also recognize its weakness, since we know that it did not die by chance...
...Nevertheless, we must remark that, outside of mainstream film (in which, doubtless in order to accommodate the thirst for amphetamines of our time, the only recognized values appear to be speed and aggression), it is still possible to engage in undertakings that do not fall prey to this kind of hysteria...
...Before, in relegating the individual to a position of secondary importance, individual and communal values were relatively equal...
...Its skeptical renderings leave space only for relativized fragments that have been put in quotation marks and for the presentation of oddly disparate elements that cancel each other out...
...It seems that the moment of fertility, when the apotheosis of the image and of visual language itself seemed close at hand, was a fleeting one for the cinema...
...The problem, he said, is not with the people in power but rather the response of the subjects to it...
...it is an unrelenting fluctuation, one that provides no possibility for insight or empathy...
...Like so many parvenu tyrants, this one too was lacking in honor...
...Catastrophe is the order of the day: its task is to smash what appeared to be "whole...
...The West did not always understand the importance of this preoccupation with the past, reacting as if it were simply a question of a few clever applications of allegory, when, in fact, the reinterpretation of the past was motivated by profound needs...
...Nor did it signal a momentary short circuit due to negligence or short-sightedness...
...The unlimited power was thus limited by the weight of an unlimited responsibility, which caused more than a few headaches and uncertainty among those in power...
...It may be possible to create artisanal, low-budget films, which would inspire hope after so many illusions have been brusquely dashed...
...The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed...
...Because we are discussing Eastern Europe, we may have recourse to a joke...
...These jeremiads and stubborn confessions, these subtle and painful traces went beyond the established rules of film by appropriating the dramatic qualities of the courtroom, thus infringing upon a sovereign and alien territory...
...On one side were Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and then Miklos Jancsó, Tarkovski, and Theo Angelopoulos, who dramatically emphasized the sense of duration by stopping time itself...
...It demonstrates the public interest that rises above private concerns...
...the Czech New Wave came at the time of the genesis of the Prague Spring...
...The message and style of old have ceded to an empty technical prowess...
...Over the past few years, the place and role of the seventh art has changed everywhere...
...Unjustly accused, he is nevertheless condemned...
...At any rate, if there is a hope for continuity, the new cinema will have a different perspective on the nature of its role and influence...
...Let us recall the famous passage from Walter Benjamin's Angelus Novus...
...Leaving its position in the avant garde, the cinema has been forced into a new differentiation of its functions, which are more dissipated and less ambitious...
...The influence of this global phenomenon has started to win over the cultures of Eastern Europe as well, creating, rather than the freedom that was so longed for, an extremely ambiguous situation...
...They constructed a mythology denouncing everything without being dogmatic...
...With both the social utopias and the faith in the individual creative spirit coming apart at the seams, works of art seem to be no more than the result of a kind of ostentatious virtuosity...
...He or she took the stage in the name of a people, a nation, and became the voice of repressed discontent...
...Custine's remarks make us aware of the ambiguous nature of the problem...
...We may add that, because the future reception or success of the work was not taken into account, the authorities took sole responsibility for it...
...in depicting the Landscape after Battle...
...What remains is the powerful but ephemeral function of entertainment in a new technological culture WINTER • 1993 • 107 in which the producers and distributors, long past any sense of shame, seek only to practice a lucrative profession...
...One point has not been sufficiently dealt with: the pride of ideology, the authorities' thirst for prestige...
...Outraged by actions, it takes refuge in words...
...The "I," the author, could only be representing the "we...
...In the end, however, it could only assure itself of complete control by making all initiatives depend on it...
...These were times of revenge and angry iconoclasm, reports on The Party and the Guests, and it was the past, overwhelming the present, that was placed in the box of the accused for heinous acts it had committed...
...In the end, the impact of the obsession with seeing had a destructive impact on film as an art form...
...The arbitrary, the extorted concessions, the unavoidable game of tightening and easing up on the grip of power—all of this played a role in the successes as well as the gradual weakening of the system itself over the years...
...Have not our favorite films excelled in these virtues...
...In other words, there is no progress without a consideration of this debris "which grows ever skyward," all as we are pushed toward the future...
...The titles are eloquent in themselves: Handcuffs, Everyday Courage, Barren Landscape, or Man Is not a Bird...
...Final collapse is never the simple end of the obsolete or the doomed...
...Which means that no exercise of power exists without some underlying tradition or legacy...
...On the contrary, it implied that the mutual observation went on in an even more refined and deceptive manner It represented the times during which the authorities would not and could not continue their destruction...
...Those in opposition too, whether they like it or not, are shaped by the dominant ethos...
...Jean-François Lyotard himself mentions two extreme examples that are in a position to take up the challenge: the near immobility of the great tableaux and the capricious spread of lyrical abstraction—two contradictory forces that have referents in earlier periods...
...The arsenal of films is disarmingly rich, revealing a great sense of unity and coherence...
...They were forced to brave, according to varying periods and contexts, the arbitrary favors or fulminations of those in power...
...Let us recall Kundera's remark: the ideal political regime for art is not oppression but a dictatorship in decomposition...
...A new era is starting...
...On the contrary, it was the conversion of the conflict of material forces and of the impracticable social struggle into art and into principle...
...For once a project had been accepted, "unlimited possibilities" were opened up to the filmmaker...
...The government gave and took away the necessities, rewarding and punishing in turn...
...Once upon a time .. . but instead of leaving the past once and for all, discouraged with the fruits of that time, let us remember that progress is not a one-way street...
...In the fifties and sixties, it seemed that film had irreversibly risen to the level of high art...
...Translated from the French by JOHN SAVAGE WINTER • 1993 • 109...
...He underscores their strange interaction, the complicity between oppressor and oppressed...
...This meant abundance, and a series of privileges that should not be underestimated...
...Falsehood is so degrading that to force the tyrant to hypocrisy is a vengeance which consoles the victims...
...In its court, it sought to surround itself with true princes of culture and art, and revealed itself capable of remarkable flattery and unexpected concessions in order to seduce them...
...This storm is what we call progress...
...These modern anti-EroIcas all dealt with the violent momentum of life, with the dark whims of those in power in those Cold Days...
...Its ruthless and far-reaching oppressiveness has certainly taken its toll...
...In looking back on the production of the past four decades, the question is not, "What films were not made under the dictatorship...
...Cunning manipulation characterized both sides...
...Since the party could not be content with the entertainment of the masses and also had to be a patron of high culture, its attitude implied not only banning films but also supporting and encouraging them...
...Their example strips away the falseness and demagogy of slogans, unveiling their true This article first appeared in Lettre Internationale and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author...
...Clearly, but one that was by no means unilateral...
...These films address that which is fundamental, and with a grave sense of pathos and perhaps also pride, they focus our attention on worries, questions, torments, by juxtaposing Ashes and Diamonds, Silence and Cry...
...In Ashes and Diamonds, at the very moment of the war's end, Andzrej Wajda casts the enemy of communism onto the garbage heap of History...
...That art in Eastern Europe played a role in politics was not an example of the conversion of principle to material force, as Marx had postulated...
...The Polish school came onto the scene in the fifties, when the Stalinist dictatorship was being shaken there...
...It was this daily repressed anger that fed the passions and the imagination...
...On the other were those influenced by Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, and Luis Buriuel, the young generation that sought to express an imagination that was rich, playful, unpredictable, and deeply personal: Jai Menzel, Jan Nemec, Jura Jakubisko, and Zoltan Huszárik...
...On your side there can be no candor, no explicit messages, since I don't use them myself...
...that is, the time when the absolutism of the arbitrary relaxes 106 • DISSENT and leaves itself open to attack...
...The venerated, almost feared artists who were babied and deified: the Wajdas, JanesOs, Tarkovskis, just to name a few from the extremely diverse list...
...If the party's credo preached the revolutionary liberation of man, then religious rhetoric could not be far behind...
...The conditions of filmmaking in Eastern Europe were studded with paradoxes...
...And therein lies the second catch: the limitations on openness most affected the party that had initially required them...
...Quite at the WINTER • 1993 • 105 end of his rope, Mr...
...asks his surprised friend...
...Is it necessary to underline the fact that the best examples of cinema d'auteur, from East to West, were capable of creating a new sensibility, a contrapuntal simultaneity, a polyphony that only modern art and music had known up to then...
...It was the itat de grace where art bursts beyond its own limits and where it is temporarily forced to preach the good word...
...This is how the "brothers in arms" were born in Eastern Europe...
...This was a considerable achievement that had been reached not only thanks to the seriousness of its cultural mission but also thanks to the flexible complexity of its structure, to its rejection of linear narrative and its faculty of abstraction...
...Their pathos was the passion banished by the cynical pragmatism of bureaucratic culture...
...He'll be ruined...
...The angel of History is turned toward the past: [W]here we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet...
...The show had to go on...
...In the vast expanse of visual communication today, there is room only for new stimuli that cancel each other out in their perpetual flux...
...But a storm is blowing from Paradise . . . [which] irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows ever skyward...
...It seems that there is still room, even if only occasionally, for opposing tendencies, for exceptional works that go against the flow...
...Today, more than thirty years after this film, we must come to terms with the death of yesterday's victor in order to define the meaning of his downfall, as well as the nature of the funeral ceremonies...
...The artist said: O.K., I'll drown it in a sea of metaphors, but don't try to interfere because I too know only this indirect language...
...Curiously, the effects of this constraint were also generated by the defeated adversary, or rather they were the result of a duel from which the dominant power, once so sure of itself, had failed to walk away...
...The answer: "I close on Saturdays...
...The question is posed: what will be the 108 • DISSENT relation between the individual and the universal...
...It is more than a simple confrontation between two parties...
...History forced its fall from this pedestal...
...The different new waves, the new cinemas, the schools of Eastern Europe displayed this philosophical requirement, having freed the medium of "the tyranny of the real," while instead choosing deeply personal confession and universal abstraction...
...In fact it was precisely those values that were the least appreciated over the past two decades...
...Why and how did the state fail to control the reins of power once it had been forced into making concessions...
...Since today's postmodern culture speaks of the End of History, of the death of utopias and of great narratives (with generalized communication having swallowed up or homogenized everything), the religious or social vocation of art has manifestly lost its meaning...
...Mankind is very willing to allow itself to be disdained, sneered at, but is not willing to let itself be told, in explicit terms, that it is disdained and sneered at...
...meaning...
...In this way the weekly closing did not mean a suspension of attention or surveillance...
...Human dignity, crushed under absolute government, clings to any straw it can grasp in the wreckage...
...More than a hundred and fifty years ago, the Marquis de Custine had understood that God makes only the future, while the czar remakes the past...
...That he showed promise but became repulsive...
...but rather, "How is it possible that so many were made despite everything...
...In looking at the great periods of Eastern European film one discovers such moments of crisis when the concrete walls of totalitarianism were cracking and the political apparatus was on the defensive...
...This gets us nowhere...
...More important, in the shadow of the great principles of the past—even if they are skewed derisively—things of value survived: the films that carry the reminders of all the absurd drama of the period...
...To speak of Eastern European cinema, one should consider this weekly closing a bit more closely...
...If, supposedly, the most important art for it was film, then actions had to back up the slogans...
Vol. 40 • January 1993 • No. 1
