Career Portrait - Guided tour of Judit Elek’s films

When it comes to Hungarian cinema, which was renewed in the early sixties, we usually talk about the search for historical truths and the possibilities of social action. Undoubtedly, the passionate evocation of the past and the associated clash of social and political attitudes has been the main theme of Hungarian film ever since. However the discussion of fundamental national issues, the interior realities of small groups and personal psychological sketches have been relegated to the background. This is worth talking about in connection to Judit Elek, a director of our middle-generation¹, who, during the “fashion” for large-scale historical tableaux, and ever since, has been creating interiors and painting human portraits. With passionate consistency, she is concerned with the way in which close social relationships are shaped today. Now the subject of relationships is becoming increasingly topical and is the theme of several Hungarian films that are currently in production.

If we compare Judit Elek’s films with those of her immediate colleagues, István Szabó, Ferenc Rózsa, or Ferenc Kardos — who were also her classmates in college — it is striking how rarely she shot compared to them; a few documentaries, and two feature films that took up an entire evening. Moreover, there are quite long temporal gaps that separate the films from each other.

However, the main reason for the lower number of debuts is that works about loneliness, poor or difficult-to-maintain human relationships, and struggling lives are not always met with a strong social and public demand. It is a testament to the filmmakers’ depth and perseverance that these films were made, albeit with major gaps in time, with the same themes and interests.

Variations on the theme of loneliness

At a time when the main theme of Hungarian film was collective social action, Judit Elek’s choice of subject matter seemed unusual. She made films about the lack of social relationships, and isolation from community, as an additional comment to a larger collective demand.

In the first work, Encounter / Találkozás made in 1963, two middle-aged ordinary people, a man and a woman, sit on the bench of a deserted square in Pest barely able to converse, despite all their efforts to establish contact with each other. Their rendezvous comes about when they each place a classified advertisement in the newspaper looking for a partner. Yet here they sit, isolated in their loneliness, unable to connect. This first film, which wishes to use the so-called “cinéma direct” method, is only outlined by the director as a draft of a few lines, without any social or personal explanation of what could have happened that brought these two people to this point. Yet the snapshot is memorable.

In her next film the director explored the theme of loneliness from the point of view of spatial-geographical isolation — that is isolation from the world. In Inhabitants of Castles in Hungary / Kastélyok lakói (1966), she explored the former aristocratic houses of the Little Hungarian Plain in search of the reasons for the anachronism and hermeticism of human life, finding examples in which isolation from the world can become a condition for tranquillity and creativity. In five parts the documentary presents five old castles. Moving from the exteriors of the buildings to their enclosed natural surroundings, and then through a maze of arches and columns, the film shows the inner beauty of the buildings in the same way Resnais did with his long takes in his powerful film Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Elek shows these buildings, which preserve the memory of time, and then the people who live within, who in a certain way are isolated from the present. We first meet a couple, among their photographs and memories, who once carried the title of Count: the man goes to work in the city, his wife manages their household, and although they are at peace with the world, their life seems to be inevitably anachronistic.

Loneliness surrounds the castle-turned-social home as well as the elderly people who are withdrawn. Their forced closeness is sharply contrasted by the elementary school — noisy with children. There is a harmony of silence and stillness in the shady garden of the former castle, which now operates as a creative house, where writers and poets work on their poems and literary translations, of which we can even hear a few lines.

In her first films, Judit Elek explores loneliness as a condition in itself, looking closely at small groups of people and describing what she sees. Broadening her interests, she searches ever more systematically for the causes of their isolation, for an explanation of why these people have become so secluded from their community, and what might be the reason for their loss of contact.

In her next film, How Long Does Man Live? / Meddig él az ember? I-II (1968), she attempts to find a satisfactory answer: one of the fundamental causes of unhappiness and loneliness resides in the human relationship to work. The documentary depicts the process of a man’s final farewell to his job at the factory where he has been working for fifty years. Uncle Vallovics parts with the friendly collective of the brigade with honours and affection. But these moments of recognition and emotion are unstoppably followed by hours and days that turn into lonely idleness. For a worker from Csepel, who is used to constant activity, the idleness becomes unbearable. The old man, in his small house and home, cannot occupy himself in the ways he did in the factory. He sits motionless in the kitchen next to his wife, his hands folded idly, listening to her monotonous, languid mutterings. He takes out his bicycle and, as he has done every morning, rides out to the road. He stops at the intersection, staring aimlessly at the oncoming traffic. This first part of How Long Does Man Live? is a harrowing analysis of the retired state of mind.

Pista, another character in the film, moves in the opposite direction. He is moving away from his family and his small community towards the thick of society. He moves from his village to Pest — a huge change in itself — where his mother has enrolled him as an apprentice. We witness Pista’s complete change of lifestyle. He bids farewell to his friends and sister, and rides his bicycle around the village with his peers for the last time. The change is as much a test for him as the old man’s farewell to the factory. Yet what happens to him does not emit sadness, but cheerfulness, and in places, humour. When he hangs his newly bought clothes in the wardrobe of the student dormitory in Pest and climbs onto the bunk bed, he accepts the new order of community rules previously unknown to him. He begins to feel a real sense of liberation when he lifts a hammer and for the first time, strikes the material that is being shaped by his hands. The film depicts the end of childhood and the beginning of old age, the social endpoints of human life. What happens between these two stages is particularly emphasised throughout the film, and the question of whether a complete and useful human life is spent at work. The director’s idea in How Long Does Man Live? clearly suggests that solitude is the sense of a lack of completeness.

How can we replace the lost or involuntarily missed wholeness of human life? Elek’s following films seek to answer this question. The aptly titled The Lady from Constantinople / Sziget a szárazföldön (1969), explores the duality of loneliness, how it isolates and separates from community, whilst allowing unlimited space in the psyche for fantasy and recollection. At the same time, this increased role of evocation and imagination separates the personality from its environment. In Elek’s first feature film an old woman, left behind from the past, lives in a tenement in Pest together with her objects, old furniture, carpets, paintings and gramophone. Her father’s portrait, the figure of a uniformed sailor that is hanging on the wall, occupies a central space in her life. She knows the cities and the monuments he once visited, the vast seas he sailed. The old woman acquires an unheard-of skill in this indirect and inherited field of memory. She is acquainted with the secrets of Constantinople, although she has never been there herself. She knows many stories of her father’s past, and she is ready to tell them if she can find an audience. Yet such a situation, practically speaking, almost never arises. This freedom of imagination is combined with a seemingly insoluble isolation. The unexpected birth of the plan to swap her flat, which is then realised with dreamlike speed, is a huge adventure for her. It is an opportunity to break through the strong veil of loneliness. People looking for a new home give the woman a glimpse into their own homes, and thus into their lives. The intricate worlds of tenants are exposed, light streams onto the kitchen-tiles from the slit-windows of a narrow inner courtyard, revealing the fallible lives of families. Opening curtains and underwear on drying racks float up, unveiling the true selves of people, who are waiting for their destiny to take a turn for the better. The old woman, portrayed by Manyi Kiss, peers into their homes, exposing their pyjama-clad daily lives. She empathises with these people enough to host them all for a late lunch.

During the climactic scene of the film, newly acquainted strangers crowd among the aunt’s old furniture. In this image, reminiscent of a surrealist dream, the old woman’s reclusiveness seems to dissolve. In the end, she trades the apartment with the people she finds most appealing. She moves from a tenement in Pest to a sunny house with a garden in Buda. Paradoxically, with this seemingly ideal change of scenery, her loneliness becomes final and complete. In the final images of the film, she is permanently cut off from even the possibility of social contact, sitting by herself on the tree-shaded terrace.

The best parts of The Lady from Constantinople, with its memorable images of domestic interiors and objects, filmed with a particular urban cinematic poeticism, manages to evoke the surrealist elevations of Mándy’s writing, providing a literary basis for the film. The funeral, held on the roof terrace of a tenement lined with chimneys and firewalls jutting out, is so atmospherically precise that it seems natural in its absurdity. Like when the ashes of the old man, who lived his entire life in one of the servants’ rooms of the tenement, are placed in one of the walls in a grotesque ceremony. This collective ceremony is not in the least melodramatic: on the contrary, it is a happy moment for the protagonist, who becomes part of a collective act.

Decision-making, situations and choices

In Elek’s next feature-length documentary, On the Field of God in 1972–73 / Istenmezején 1972–73-ban (1973), and its sequel, A Commonplace Story / Egyszerű történet (1975), the subject matter and purpose are fundamentally different from her earlier films.

The director spent more than four years making A Commonplace Story. The film started out as a sociography about the village of Istenmezeje, with the intention to explore the life of the inhabitants of a mining village in the northern tip of Heves County. Elek had previously made a documentary for television called Bányászok/Miners, and presumably that film guided her choice of subject. However it becomes clear that the Elek is more interested in human relationships than social conditions. The first documentary film focuses on the way of life and the heroic work of the miners, and features the chairman of the council as well as the village teacher. In the second, the focus is on the lives of two girls from Istenmezeje Ilonka and Marika, and follows a different line of enquiry, that of family.

Elek follows the fate of the girls as they finish primary school, the same stage of life we began to witness Pista’s journey in How Long Does Man Live? Elek explores the choices that school-leavers in the mining village face. The geographic and social isolation of Istenmezeje, with its long-established traditions, makes it a very suitable setting for examining these choices. Women here have largely remained unemployed, working only at home, playing a decisive role in the family. While the fate of the two little girls is itself a sharply defined situation which the film follows, at the same time the lives of Marika and Ilonka complement and contrast with each other in their own way. Ilonka’s fate — transitioning from a child to a pregnant woman over four years — brings about a dramatic clash of wills, conflicts and possibilities. The result is a harmonious resolution of the village story of Romeo and Juliet, with the parents putting aside their differences in wealth, Ilonka’s family coming to terms with Laci’s poverty, and the young couple marrying.

Marika’s choices on the other hand are more difficult, and it is no coincidence that her fate is dealt with in more detail. She wants to continue her education and moves to the city to become an apprentice. Living against community norms, or transgressing them, is also to defy them. Marika’s lifestyle is at odds with her surroundings. She takes the bus to the city with the men, and one night is attacked by village-bullies on the long-distance bus. She is bitterly aware of how difficult it is and how much effort it takes to live differently from the majority. The temporary result of all this is nothing but a feeling of insecurity and loneliness.

By following the fate of Marika, Elek returns to the earlier subject of her films, following the socio-psychological state of isolation with documentary precision. The state of mind of a person in search of something new, or of a rebel who is determined to shape their destiny, can similarly be characterised by the lack of social relationships already highlighted in Elek’s earlier films. Marika has separated from her mother but has not yet managed to put down roots in her new environment in the city. Her mother files a lawsuit against the villagers who attacked her daughter, and the trial, while stigmatising her attackers, only increases her isolation, and makes it final. Marika attempts suicide, then, having recovered physically and mentally, leaves the institution and takes a job as a casual worker in a factory canteen to build up the strength and security to continue her studies.

We follow the life of Ilonka and her family in parallel with that of Marika. They live in a nice big house where two generations can live comfortably together. The men spend 10 to 12 hours a day in the mine, and the women who stay at home preserve and strengthen the customs of the community. Ilonka manages to break the resistance of her mother and her aunt, Bori, against her lover, before then voluntarily accepting the constraints of the traditional family system. She stays at home, has children and cares for her family and animals. Activities around the house fill her life. In accordance with her nature, she accepts the stability of the extended family, which offers benefits and protection. By settling into this inherited lifestyle, she gives up the more modern but difficult path that comes with entering the workforce. The film is distanced but clear in its commentary on the stifled confinement of Ilonka’s lifestyle.

A Commonplace Story follows the fate and relationships of two girls from Istenmezeje and analyses the human and social relationships that develop. It portrays the unchanging and transforming structures of two families that are shaped differently. The strengthening of Ilonka’s family and the disintegration of Marika’s are the result of a series of dramatic events, emerging from the continuous interactions between family members. Already in this film we can observe that a harmonious relationship between family members is by no means a prerequisite for the existence of a family. The family can survive and even function dynamically during conflict.

Marika lacks the willingness to help, as well as the moral calm and order which Ilonka inherited from home as both a burden and a relief. She is raised by her single mother, who was left alone due to tragic circumstances, in a family where three women — three generations — live together, locked together with their various moral problems. The male hand is absent, and not only the right of decision-making but the burden of it, falls on the shoulders of these self-sufficient women. The film is able to portray everything Marika inherited from her mother: her features, her cadence, her movements. But there is also an inherited spirit of rebellion that drives the little girl to leave the village where she and her mother were marginalised after the death of her father. She manages to do what her forty-year-old mother cannot do anymore: she leaves Istenmezeje for the second time and finds work as a partner in the city. Her mother, left to herself, is no longer able to keep her grandmother at home — who, even on her deathbed, proves to be a strong-willed matriarch.

In this film, the camera observes the plight of two girls from Istenmezeje in a tense, tight situation. In the unique experimental situation produced by reality, the film has proved to be a privileged way of illustrating social psychology. From A Commonplace Story, more can be learned about the subject of partner selection and family formation than from many clever textbooks. Examples of how inherited determinants, support and moral prejudices shape the development of human relationships in youth. These determinants prove to be more complex than the demands of wealth and the lifestyle of the moment. Marika and Ilonka must navigate their way through a complex system of prejudices at the beginning of their lives. It is perhaps no coincidence that at a dramatic moment in the story, both feel they have reached the end of their tether and attempt suicide. In completely differing family circumstances this gesture of crying for help wins them both the support of their immediate environment.

Indecision

In order to assess the director’s latest film, Maybe Tomorrow / Majd holnap (1979), it seems necessary to know her previous films. A guided tour of these works suggests that, in her cinematic exploration of the ways in which social relationships are explored, Elek has found a fundamental theme: the analysis of the family. Several versions of today’s family appear in the new film. Its pillars, a husband and wife who are thirty to forty years old, they have children and live with their elderly relatives.

In the home of the film’s central character, Eszter, the husband plays the dominant role as head of the family, caring for their child, living under the same roof as Eszter’s mother. In line with the traditional family structure, the main internal cohesion of cohabitation for Eszter’s household is the strength of belonging, along with economic solidarity and social participation. However, this is not very strong and is not unequivocally blissful. The cohesive strength of the family cannot replace the love between man and woman, which is fading and dying away. This feeling — and this is what this new film is about — cannot be replaced by a sense of belonging and a desire to help each other.

A man and a woman, Eszter and István, who came from different families, meet at work and fall in love. Nevertheless, Maybe Tomorrow does not aim to follow the birth and unfolding of love. The relationship between István and Eszter is portrayed in a way that does not focus on romantic sympathies and the attractive presentation of new partners, but rather on a relationship based on shared human sensitivity.

We see love in its developed state already at the beginning of the film. “Illegal” coexistence in a borrowed flat has become as common as returning home from work to join the family. The relationship is only formally illegal. Everyone — even the relatives in the countryside, it turns out — knows about it, and the constant telephone connection between the two homes sanctifies its existence. But this love, unlike that of Ilonka in A Commonplace Story, is not passionately opposed from the moment it is born. There are no bans or attacks that would exacerbate the situation and force a decision or a choice. The characters do not know, nor do they seem to wish for, a compromise to the paradoxical division between family and love.

Maybe Tomorrow sets out to illuminate the passivity — or putting it more sharply, the helplessness — of its heroes, to make it understandable and therefore relatable. Therefore an unexpected twist in the plot puts Eszter and István in a tense situation, when he inherits a house in the countryside. In their new environment, the possibility of sudden solitude may test their relationship.

In the village they do not have the means to focus on themselves. István’s rural relatives enter their lives, with all the family’s many problems. They knock on their door in the most inconvenient situations, and then open up to them: they literally break in and overwhelm them with their private matters. Through their presence, and the relationships which emerge, they provide an involuntary example and answer to the question that István and Eszter have silently asked each other: how to live together within a family.

These people live bickering, fearing each other, worrying about each other, bitterly. They attack each other every day, and at the same time they try to help each other to further the common cause. The small house in which they are forced to live together is filled with passion that is repressed but then constantly resurfaces. The memories of old grievances are mixed with the joys of their everyday lives. Yet they know they can’t get along without each other.

István is surrounded by an atmosphere of affectionate reproach when he is informed that they are moving into the house he has just inherited. Individually and then together, the family rush ahead with their plans. The couple is welcomed into their turbulent, restless lives. In the meantime, the strict rules of coexistence based on selfishness and love are emerging, which they must accept if they want to live here.

And thus Eszter is initiated into the life of another family. She is not just accepted as István’s companion, she is expected to clean and tidy up the old house. She also becomes part of the family’s emotional life and learns about their most intimate secrets, loves, reproaches and demands. They sit down to dine together, and Eszter, with the taste of strange food, senses the worries and pain of their lives. She projects her own world onto her newfound relationships, in this way measuring herself and her feelings for István.

This will lead to Eszter’s decision of whether she and István will stay together for good, or if they will separate. The alternatives are obvious, but the choice is increasingly delayed. It is postponed until the final formulation of the indecision between the two of them. As expected, Eszter flees the village to escape this overwhelming, unresolved state of existence. However, the final scenes of the film show that the shared experiences in the countryside, while deepening the relationship between Eszter and István and leading to a stronger understanding of each other, have confirmed that they cannot choose each other exclusively. They cannot live together or without each other.

Judit Elek, with the help of excellent actors, especially Ildikó Dobos and Béla Székely, portrays the depth of dissonant emotional relationships. Their characters, Zsuzsika and Béla, for example, have wanted to separate from each other many times, but now understand why they cannot. This forced conformity is a source of repressed emotions which is bound to erupt sooner or later in a confrontation that could easily turn fatal, such as when the man shoots at his wife, only for them to forgive each other.

It is striking how in the intricate human relationships of Judit Elek’s Maybe Tomorrow, labour is an un-emphasised, almost inconceivable shaping force. Just as it played no part in the life of Ilonka in A Commonplace Story, or was taken for granted in The Lady from Constantinople. For the heroes of Maybe Tomorrow, too, it is almost irrelevant what they do for a living. Curiously, they neither seem to suffer from the lack of meaningful activity nor from their problems. Yet we can suspect that (although this is not a direct subject of the film) their socio-psychological determinacy is also explained in some way by the fact that their primary and direct experience of life does not derive from purposeful human activity.

Elek, who used to attribute a fate-shaping significance to being employed or leaving a job, is now not particularly concerned with who, when and what one does for a living. We only see István and Eszter in a brief scene in a ceramics factory, where the work is predictably monotonous. But it cannot be said that these people would be happier or more fortunate in a socially more active state. Nor, fortunately, does the film have any didactic ending. On the contrary, the creators — György Pethő, screenwriter, and Elemér Ragályi, camera-man — depict their heroes with such intimacy and affection that they might find it surprising to know that they have actually become the narrators of a sad story with Maybe Tomorrow.