ARS POETICA

„I became a filmmaker to be able to tell what I see around me, what I have lived, what the old people lived in this very ’draughty’ little gateway country, where there is always a different power than what the people would like it to be just and good, but they put up with it because they believe that this is the way of the world. And I, like a female Don Quixote, am fighting the windmill, not giving in to it, and I hope I die that way. Perhaps it is another motivation, that after 60 years of work I find that my oldest film is still alive and has an impact on people if they have opportunity to see it. In conclusion, I make films because I need to be loved; and through my films I can perhaps make people love me who have never met me in person.”

“I’m interested in all things that are documentary.” Hungarian film director and screenwriter Judit Elek is a Kossuth and Balázs Béla Prize laureate, and a member of the European Film Academy. In 1986, she was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.

She has created an impressive oeuvre, lifting raw reality onto the level of poetry and with considerable social boldness. Her work spanning more than half a century is remarkable in Hungarian film history. She has made taboosmashing films that are free spirited both in terms of theme and choice of form, whether presentday psychological vignettes, sociological reports or works serving to probe historical traumas. Her films have won prizes at, for example, Oberhausen, Locarno, Mannheim, Montpellier, Paris, Montreal, Salerno, Cairo, Louisville, Chicago and Toronto. As director and screenwriter, she became – from the start of her career – a leading female creative artist of resurgent modern Hungarian filmmaking together with Márta Mészáros and Lívia Gyarmathy.

Judit Elek was born in Budapest in 1937. As a child, she survived the Holocaust and the war in a ghetto. Her father was a book dealer so she grew up around books. Aged 18, she participated in the 1956 Uprising and she was in Paris in 1968, exactly at the time of the student protests. The historical events and trauma she experienced have been a fundamental determinant of her filmmaking.

Pál Gábor, Imre Gyöngyössy, Zoltán Huszárik, Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács, Ferenc Kardos and János Rózsa. She then became a member of MAFILM where she worked as an assistant. Members of her class made up the core of Balázs Béla Studio, the youth experimental workshop, and they won numerous awards at international festivals with their shorts assimilating the influences of European New Wave trends. Judit Elek’s initial works are lyrical analyses of loneliness in which she stylized the spontaneity of cinéma direct into ‘floating poetry’. Encounter (Találkozás, 1963) was the first Hungarian cinéma direct film featuring non-actors and improvized dialogue; it is about the fictional meeting of a nurse and a bachelor, the writer Iván Mándy. Inhabitants of Castles (Kastélyok lakói, 1966) and the two-part How Long Does Man Live? (Meddig él az ember?, 1967) were characteristic documentaries which in their lyrical relationships are closely associated with the Pierre Perraultstyle of cinéma direct. The director, who attended school in a working environment, and the cinematographer Elemér Ragályi, who joins her here, drew – after lengthy research and photography – a socio-portrait depicting human life in its entirety revolving around the lonely old worker on the cusp of retirement and the young apprentice. The film does not concentrate on an analysis of the social background but instead it is a documentary presentation of human relationships. The film was screened in the Critics section at Cannes in 1968, which famously closed early due to the student protests in Paris. It went on to win the grand prix at Oberhausen and the jury prize at Locarno.

In 1961 she graduated from the Academy of Drama and Film in the famed class of Félix Máriássy. Classmates included István Szabó,

Her first feature film, The Lady from Constantinople (Sziget a szárazföldön, 1969) is similarly a movie about loneliness and ageing packaged in a surreal tale of an apartment exchange. The screenwriter was Iván Mándy, who worked in countless Hungarian films including Pál Sándor’s cult movie Football of the Good Old Days (Régi idők focija). The figure of the little old lady, in whom the beauty of fantasy is combined with intense isolation, was moulded from two real women. The role is played by Manyi Kiss, one of the finest Hungarian actresses, in the company of a host of fascinating amateur and provincial actors. It is a masterclass in how to use the micro-realistic toolkit of documentary filmmaking in a feature film, blending authentic reality and construction. The scene of the flat viewing on Nyugati Square and the happening of the flat viewing were revolutionary in their approach; the professional actress enquires about the prices in the midst of those also attending the event. In the small maid’s room, the camera of the longtake rotation linking a dozen people shows as people have a glimpse into each other’s flat and, in the same way, into each other’s problems. The ‘sympathizing camera’ leaves the ongoing processes untouched while the unexpected micro-details become absurd. The film proved a hit at Cannes.

Her next films, the documentaries A Hungarian Village (Istenmezején 1972–73-ban) and A Commonplace Story (Egyszerű történet) were made over five years together with Elemér Ragályi in an out-of-the-way mining village. By tracing the destiny and relationships of two girls who yearn to get away, it presents a full 360-degree psychological report on the rural Hungary of ‘socialism under construction’, the embittered state of the peasantry reduced to the proletariat, and the tangled system of prejudices.

“I’m interested in all things that are documentary,” Judit Elek once declared in an interview. She wrote her first film with a historical theme, Identification- Martinovics’s Jacobin Conspiracy (Vizsgálat Martinovics Ignác szászvári apát és társai ügyében), using the documents of the Martinovics trial together with the brilliant Hungarian writer Péter Nádas in the early 1970s. Hungarian cultural policy headed up by György Aczél drew a parallel between the 1949 Rajk show trial and the film about the executed leader of the Hungarian Jacobin movement reacting to the French Revolution. As a consequence, filming was suspended. In 1980, it was released as a TV film, which proved extremely popular in France, being distributed together with Wajda’s Danton and Renoir’s La Marseillaise.

This was followed by the present-day snapshot Maybe Tomorrow (Majd holnap, 1978), which was shot with the actors of an outstanding experimental studio, Studio K: Miklós Székely B., Erzsébet Gaál, Judit Meszléry and Andor Lukáts. It is an extremely powerful Zeitgeist-capturing film that dissects the bleak prospects of the restoration after 1968, the drift, depressing unresolved issues, as two couples struggle against their living conditions and their own boredom with life. a maid who disappeared in 1882. They were subjected to the most horrendous torture in order to extract confessions. The film won several prizes in America and France, and this led her to Elie Wiesel, with whom she filmed her documentary To Speak the Unspeakable (Mondani a mondhatatlant) in 1997. This core work of Holocaust remembrance follows the life of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate writer born in Sighetu Marmatiei (Mármarossziget) in the sub-Carpathians and the Máramaros community all the way through Auschwitz to Buchenwald. Wiesel recreates his 15-year-old self with his own lyric monologues; it was shown at all the major international festivals, similarly to the film A Free Man – The Life of Ernő Fisch (Egy igaz ember – Fisch Ernő élete). name of Jancsó Miklós, István Szabó’s Father (Apa), István Gaál’s Green Years (Zöldár) and Sándor Sára’s The Upthrown Stone (Feldobott kő).

It won the FIPRESCI prize in Locarno. These ‘mindset’ films represented an entire trend in the late 1970s (Béla Tarr: Family Nest (Családi tűzfészek) 1977; Péter Gothár: A Priceless Day (Ajándék ez a nap), 1979; András Jeles: Little Valentino (A kis Valentinó), 1979.

Maria’s Day (Mária-nap) was also written with György Pethő in 1973, but she could only make it 10 years later, on the occasion of the 160th anniversary of the birth of Sándor Petőfi, considered the greatest Hungarian poet, because here the censor perceived in the film the parable of the post-1956 period. This is a typical Zeitgeist-capturing film, a work about relationships. It does not glorify the heroic Hungarian poet who fell during the War of Independence, instead depicting the chaotic situation in terms of how heavily the shadow of the failed revolution weighed on the family of this poet genius. The film was shown – to considerable acclaim – in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 1984. Le Monde termed Judit Elek ‘Ingmar Bergman’s sister’.

She launched her ‘Jewish period’ with Memories of River (Tutajosok) made between 1987–89. It processes contemporary documents of the infamous Tiszaeszlár blood libel show trial. Jewish rafters were accused of the murder of

The outstanding work of her oeuvre is Awakening (Ébredés) shot in 1994, which is her self-portrait from the 1950s. It is about a girl who loses her family and in the meantime is forced into adulthood. Elek started working on the screenplay in 1959; it was published in the form of a short novel in 1964. However, the film was made only 30 years later. The film is a dual story of the deceased mother and her daughter, where the imagination of the girl constantly recreates the mother reacting to ongoing events. It is full of overwhelming desires and emotions, while the historical background of the 1950s, the real world, impinges as a nightmare. By the time the girl grows up, the mother’s memory has faded. If the film had been completed at the time it was written, it could well have ranked as one of the most powerful, modern historical flashbacks of Hungarian film, standing, for example, alongside My Way Home („Így jöttem”) hallmarked by the

The first Hungarian cinéma direct film is the story of a classified ad. A nurse and a bachelor meet with the intention of going to the cinema but they cannot get tickets. Instead, they sit down in a cafeteria and talk. All dialogue between the nurse and the creative colleague of Judit Elek, the writer Iván Mándy, is improvized.

ENCOUNTER Találkozás (1963)

Directed by Judit Elek

Screenplay by Judit Elek

Director of photography: István Zöldi

Music: András Szőllősy

Cast: Iván Mándy

Genre: documentary

Production: Balázs Béla Studio

Technical specs: black and white, 22 min

Format: 1.37:1, 4K restored, grading supervised by Elemér Ragályi DP

The structure of the lyrical documentary, made at the Balázs Béla Studio, is based on the timeless elegance of lute music. Festetich Castle in Keszthely is a museum. A noble couple, elderly people, poets and writers, children – the inhabitants of the castles of Szécsény, Gödöllő, Szigliget and Hédervár in the 1960s.