Zoltán Fábri: Late Season – press kit 2020

UTÓSZEZON

LATE SEASON a film by

ZOLTÁN FÁBRI

77th Venice International Film Festival Venice Classics official selection 2020 Venice International Film Festival 1967 ’San Giorgo’ Prize Cineforum Prize ’Citta di Venezia’ Prize

DIRECTED BY ZOLTÁN FÁBRI WRITTEN BY GYÖRGY RÓNAY SCREENPLAY BY PÉTER SZÁSZ DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY GYÖRGY ILLÉS MUSIC BY SZABOLCS FÉNYES SET DESIGN BY JÓZSEF ROMVÁRI CUSTUM DESIGN BY JUDIT SCHÄFFER CAST ANTAL PÁGER KLÁRI TOLNAY JÁNOS RAJZ LAJOS BÁSTI SAMU BALÁZS SÁNDOR KŐMÍVES NOÉMI APOR

PRODUCTION MAFILM STUDIO 1. 1966 GENRE TRAGICOMEDY, ADAPTATION TECHNICAL SPEC BLACK AND WHITE, 120 MIN FORMAT 1.37:1, 2K RESTORED GRADING SUPERVISED BY SÁNDOR KARDOS, DOP, HSC AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS 1967 - VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ’SAN GIORGO’ PRIZE CINEFORUM PRIZE ’CITTA DI VENEZIA’ PRIZE PRIZE OF CINEMA NUOVO – ANTAL PÁGER 2020 - VENICE CLASSICS OFFICIAL SELECTION

My films were always concerned with the issue of violence in this or that form, in this or that context.

Obviously, this derives from the fact that I fundamentally believe people are born for freedom and it is exasperating that one’s own opportunities for freedom are frequently hampered by oneself.

(Interview with Zoltán Fábri by István Zsugán.

Filmvilág, 13.10.1971)

ZOLTÁN FÁBRI (15 OCTOBER 1917–23 AUGUST 1994) DIRECTOR, SCREENWRITER, ART DIRECTOR, PAINTER

He studied painting and graduated at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1938, under István Réti, one of the founders of the Nagybánya school of painting, before attending the Academy of Performing Arts between 1938–41. He was a renaissance artist par excellence; starting his career as a painter, he later trained as an actor and stage director, followed by a qualification in stage design.

In 1941, at the age of 24, he was invited to direct the National Theatre of Hungary. He began working in the Hungarian film industry in 1950 as a production designer and as artistic director of Film Company.

He directed his first film, Vihar (Storm), in 1951. Zoltán Fábri became an internationally acclaimed director with his third feature, Körhinta (Merry-Go-Round), in 1956. This love film set in a rural environment, that introduced the world to Hungarian filmmaking at Cannes International Film Festival in 1956. The restored version of the film returned to the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. Two more films by Fábri, Édes Anna (Anna) and Dúvad (The Brute), also entered into competition at Cannes, while his other films, A Pál utcai fiúk (The Boys of Paul Street, 1968) and Magyarok (Hungarians, 1977), were nominated for Academy Award.

One of his most famous works, Húsz óra (Twenty Hours), won the Golden Prize of the 4th Moscow International Film Festival. Az ötödik pecsét (The Fifth Seal) won the Golden Prize of the 10th Moscow International Film Festival in 1976 and was entered into the 27th Berlin International Film Festival. Zoltán Fábri was a classic of Hungarian film history even in his lifetime. Most of his 21 films were based on literary works and his subjects were always dedicated to the ‘defenceless little man’. His style of filmmaking is mainly ‘classical’, using academic techniques of art filmmaking. During the modernism of 1960s, he experimented with flashback and highly surrealistic scenes (in Twenty Hours, Late Season and The Fifth Seal).

All of Zoltán Fábri’s films are about freedom, about the bliss of freedom gained in a fight for life or death, or about its being absent.

In Merry-Go-Round there is a wonderful symbol to embody the focal idea of his oeuvre. Mari Pataki boards the merry-go-round with a balloon received from her love Máté Bíró. After the ecstatic merrygo-round scene of happiness, her father, who in the village fair has just promised his daughter to Sándor Farkas, tears the balloon off the girl’s hand. Happiness is over here, but the balloon flies up into the skies with nothing to stop it. And the obstinacy making the two lovers defiantly insist on their happiness against the whole world, despite traditions, brings about the triumph of freedom.

Professor Hannibal, Anna, Two Half Times in Hell, Twenty Hours, Late Season, The Toth Family, The Boys of Paul Street, or The Fifth Seal – just to mention the most memorable of Fábri’s films – all go around the diverse forms of realising this idea, driven by extraordinary dramatic power. What is the little man, at the mercy of his time, to do with freedom? Fábri examined these questions between the poles extreme, in the borderline situations frequently offered by Hungarian history. What will happen to the little man in an inhumane age if he tries to be faithful to his principles?

(Professor Hannibal). Will a person like this have to become a murderess to be able to maintain her integrity? (Anna).

Can the dignity of human life be restored, let alone for just a few hours, even in the most hopeless of situations? (Two Half Times in Hell). How do the forced labour prisoners-of-war, ordered to play football, become heroes, and free within... and how does little Nemecsek, humiliated by everybody, become a hero himself?

(The Boys of Paul Street).

The topic of the Holocaust keeps returning in the oeuvre from its very early appearance in Professor Hannibal down to The Fifth Seal.

Freedom and choice are rendered in an apocalyptic parable also in Fábri’s masterpiece The Fifth Seal.

In Late Season, one of his most absurd “consciousness films”, Fábri revokes the tribulations of a man who does not dare to follow his freedom of conscience and causes his masters’ doom by pronouncing one single sentence: “unless they are Jews”. Society will give him no chance of self-examination.

LATE SEASON

The film is about the soul-searching of a pharmacy assistant who, in 1944, with the words “if only” spoken at the wrong moment, condemns his employer to the death camp. “If only the Szilágyis were not Jews,” Kerekes lets slip as his childhood friend Holl, captain of the gendarmes, makes him watch a resistance fighter being hanged. Kerekes is crippled by self-accusation as he watches a documentary film on the Eichmann trial in the cinema in 1960. While at a pub on the Balaton, a bored acquaintance plays on this situation by making a hoax phone call summoning him to the police headquarters as a witness “just for the time being”. The film is the story of that dramatic process of remembering that takes place over a single day in the mind of Kerekes. He travels by train to the rural town where nobody remembers anything and where only the former gendarme captain lives and works, as a petrol pump attendant. Kerekes slumps into nightmarish visions and reminiscences, in which past and present merge. Suddenly, the film takes a Dürrenmatt twist: at Kerekes’s request, the group of friends establish a court trial. They first find him guilty, then they acquit him, but still Kerekes attempts suicide. However, the train does not run on the track on which Kerekes is lying, thus fate brings him back to life. The events playing out in several temporal planes, the mixing of surrealism, the grotesque and real drama, make the Fábri work magical and strained. Moreover, this is the first-time gas chambers appear in a Hungarian film – in a grotesque vision.

Fábri’s own favorite and one of his most exciting works. It won numerous international awards and evoked a scandal, becoming notorious not only for its taboo-breaking Holocaust subject and its choice of actors, but also for its eclectic form, partly relying on extremely modernist elements. What is Aryanisation? What is guilt? Where are the borders of human responsibility? A brilliant study about restitution, expiation and the long-lasting effects of war, told through the story of an assistant to a small-town pharmacist and a fellow traveler. Premiered in 1967 in Venice, the montage structure, framing and lighting of the film and its associations are still highly notable.

National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive

“The early films of nouvelle vague discovered for film what literature had already long known, that the internal world also belongs to the life of man...”

Zoltán Fábri

“For the humane and lively language in which grotesque elements do not neutralize the high principles and for the confession about individual responsibility and the statement against violence and intolerance.” ( Remark of the Cineforum Prize, Venice Film Festival, 1967)

“Variety carried a story from Tel Aviv April 23, spotlighting Antal Pager as the weak denouncer in the film for he is identified as a Nazi who denounced people during the war and played in anotorious anti-Semitic film of the time.

The Hungarian delegation was asked about this and director Zoltán Fabri replied that Pager ‘made mistakes’ and did appear in this film but did not do all the things stated in the Variety dispatch from Israel. This has yet to be verified, but, if true, it does bring up the question of using a player in a film purporting to castigate the very thing Pager is accused of.

So this aspect has to be resolved since the film deals with the most horrendous of man’s inhumanities to man….

The film seems to take a stand on the actual crimes and also the crime of standing by and not doing anything about it.

It is extremely well acted. Sometimes loses its thread but always comes back to taking its stand of showing the guilt of those who both participated in or condoned by silence the terrible genocide of World War II.” ( Variety, by Gene Moskowitz, 06.09.1967.)

“The first movie wholly dedicated to depicting the Hungarian (civilian) complicity in the action of sending half a million Jewish fellow citizens to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Fábri’s film reached an even wider audience than Semprún’s novel, as 400,000 cinemagoers went to see it.” ( The Holocaust in Hungary Seventy Years Later,

by Randolph L. Braham, András Kovács, 2016. 224.)

“In a climate of fear, the potential murderer lurking in every person can – out of self-preservation – suddenly emerge.”

Zoltán Fábri

RESTORATION

Restoration of the film was completed in 2017 within the framework of the long-term film restoration and digitization programme of the National Film Institute and as a result of the joint work of colleagues from the Film Archive and Filmlab. The project was carried out with the cooperation of the Hungarian Society of Cinematographers and the participation of cinematographer Sรกndor Kardos. The restoration was also supported by the Hungarian Academy of Arts. So far, nearly 100 films have been restored within the framework of the programme.

ZOLTÁN FÁBRI IN THE MEMORY OF THE EUROPEAN AUDIENCE Zoltán Fábri, dubbed ‘the japanese gym teacher’ in the trade because of his rigor, his precision and his exceptional openness, wonders at the absurdity of the world in Péter Bacsó’s film The Witness.

There was a reason why Bacsó cast him as the morally clean politician, a character unknown on the eastern European chessboard.

Zoltán Fábri was introduced to the moviegoers as the star of the banned movie which was to become a legend, after the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, 12 years after its completion. Zoltán Fábri lives in the memories of viewers as the minister who shows the secret police the hidden cellar, where the dike-warden had hidden him during the time when communism was outlawed. Fábri stares with a naive defiance into the abyss filled with sausage.

CONTACTS National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive info@filmarchiv.hu H-1021 Budapest, Budakeszi út 51/e Phone: (+36) 1 394 1322, (+36) 1 394 1018 György RÁDULY Director raduly.gyorgy@filmarchiv.hu Phone: (+36) 20 259 4965 Tamara NAGY International Sales Executive nagy.tamara@filmarchiv.hu Phone: (+ 36) 20 259 2835 National Film Institute Nonprofit Private Share Company www.nfi.hu/en PRESS CONTACT: sajto@nfi.hu Phone: (+36) 1 461 13 20 Fax: (+36) 1 461 13 32 Mailing address: Budapest 1365 Pf. 748, Hungary www.filmarchiv.hu Photos: Sándor Domonkos, József Hunyadi/FORTEPAN