Unfortunately for Pudovkin—and for Eisenstein and the rest of the Soviet avant-garde—Stalin was an avid film buff, and he very much admired linear storytelling. As Stalin’s power increased, Pudovkin’s popularity declined. His films first failed to please the leader. Then they failed to please Soviet critics. Then they failed to please the cultural bureaucrats, who prevented Pudovkin from making any more of them. Eventually he dropped his old theories, abandoned experimental montage, and began making “realist” films in which communism triumphed, one way or another, over its enemies.65 It was at this late point in his no longer illustrious career that Pudovkin was sent to Budapest.
In principle, Pudovkin should have found it extremely difficult to teach Hungarian directors anything at all. Before the war, the Hungarian film industry had been the third largest in Europe and one of the world’s most sophisticated. In its technology and in its directors’ experience, it was far ahead of the Soviet Union. Hungarian film distribution was sophisticated too. A network of 500 cinemas had operated around the country before the war, at least half of which had not been destroyed and were still fully functional in 1945, far more than in Poland or Germany. Although anti-Semitic legislation had divided the industry in the 1930s (and resulted in an exodus of an extraordinarily talented group of Hungarian Jews to Hollywood), much of the equipment remained. In Poland, by contrast, the postwar film industry was relaunched with cameras “captured” in Germany and removed as war booty.
The postwar Hungarian film industry had not started out with the goal of propagating communism either. In the summer following the liberation of Budapest, Hunnia, the most important Hungarian studio, applied successfully to the Soviet occupation forces for permission to begin operation as a state company. Hunnia’s carefully balanced new board of directors included three communist party members, two social democrats, officials from three government ministries, and some noncommunists as well. Private film production companies optimistically opened their doors for business at the same time. All of the four major parties founded film production companies and theoretically divided the movie theaters between them. In this, as in so many other things, the communist party was more equal than others: along with the social democrats the communists controlled the majority of the cinemas, as well as most of the funding.
Despite this relatively optimistic beginning, inflation prevented much progress—only three films were made in 1945 and none in 1946—and by the beginning of 1947 politics began to intervene too. In the summer of that year, István Szőts, a talented young director—he had won the main prize at the Venice film festival in 1942—began work on a film in conjunction with a private production company. The film, Song of the Corn Field (Ének a búzamezőkről), was based on an older novel about the tragic impact of the First World War on a Hungarian peasant family, and it included a love affair between a Hungarian girl and a Russian POW. By all accounts Szőts adapted it with great success. But despite the Hungarian–Russian love theme he thought would protect him, Szőts had trouble with the censors. They disliked the religious scenes, which were a touch too powerful for their liking. They disliked the pacifist message, which was no longer politically correct. They also disliked the fact that the Hungarian peasants in the movie were so deeply attached to their land: that was an ill omen for a regime that was planning further land reforms and eventually collectivization. Szőts was surprised but he made some changes, declared the film finished, and, at least initially, received rapturous praise from those who saw the early screenings.
The praise did not last, as Szőts later remembered:
The premiere date and place were fixed when critics began attacking the film, saying it was reactionary, religious, and even that it supports Mindszenty … Ten days before opening night, the film was banned without any justification … Finally the film was shown at party headquarters, though not to the end because Rákosi, when he saw the first scenes of [people] praying and singing for the beloved sons in the faraway country, stood up and went out in a demonstrative way … The case was closed, the film was banned.66
Song of the Corn Field never appeared in theaters. Nor, after that, did any other privately produced films. In 1948 the industry was completely nationalized, Hunnia’s carefully balanced board of directors was dropped, and all pretense of artistic freedom was abandoned as well. Following Stalin’s example, József Révai, now minister of culture, began monitoring every aspect of film production, from planning to shooting. Wanting to leave nothing to chance, he immediately turned to the Soviet comrades for aesthetic advice. He invited the Soviet deputy minister of film to visit Budapest, who declared that “the first thing I can advise Hungarian film artists is that they must thoroughly study Soviet film … great art can only be made if you add your special Hungarian Bolshevik aesthetic to what you learn from us.”67 An invitation to Budapest was immediately extended to Pudovkin. Like schools, workplaces, and public space, cinemas were to become another venue for ideological education, and the Soviet director could show the Hungarians how to do it.
In later accounts, the Pudovkin who arrived in Budapest in 1950 is often described as a “broken man.” In his case the cliché seems accurate. His instincts for experimentalism had been quashed long ago. He had just been awarded the Stalin Prize for Zhukovskii, a dull, hagiographic film about the founder of the Soviet aeronautics industry. He could certainly teach Hungarians the psychology of subservience, but not much else. Pudovkin’s own descriptions of his experiences in Hungary are disappointingly stiff and not very revealing. If he was impressed by the architecture or the material culture of Budapest, which even after the war was still far wealthier than Moscow, he never said so. If he admired anything about prewar Hungarian film, he never said that either.
Unusually, for a film director, there is no folk memory of Pudovkin flirting with Hungarian girls or drinking in the bar after work either. Instead, in a short book he published in Hungarian in 1952, he expounded on the importance of theory: “To understand life it is necessary to know Marxism-Leninism … without political education it is impossible to make a movie.” He also wrote of the need for what Hollywood would call happy endings: “The drama has to show the struggle and the victory … of people walking on the path of socialism.” He highlighted the significance of positive role models: “Creating a positive character is one of the most difficult but beautiful tasks a socialist artist can ever have.” He criticized Western movies as “pessimistic” and praised the “organic optimism” of Soviet films.68 The director also gave extensive interviews to the press, one of which Szőts, now an ideological pariah, read with horror. In essence, Pudovkin argued that a historical film had to be ideologically accurate, not factually accurate:
The important thing, he said, is that a film should follow events as determined by the ideological argument. Everything that did not fit into that was considered false “naturalism,” something different from the ideological, historical reality necessary for this kind of film … No matter how much I had previously respected Pudovkin … after these comments I read in the press, I was glad not to have been introduced to him.69
But Pudovkin’s impact extended far beyond bland statements. In the Hungarian film industry, as in the Polish film industry, film projects had in the past been spearheaded by directors who conceived, designed, and organized the production of a new movie. In the Soviet Union, the leading role was played by scriptwriters who discussed with censors every aspect of a film, the themes as well as the dialogue, even before they began to write. Ironically, or perhaps tragically, Pudovkin—a director who had been an early master of visual, soundless imagery—imported this system to Hungary, and thus created a Hungarian studio system dominated by obedient scriptwriters and cultural bureaucrats. There was no avoiding his advice or influence: from 1948, anyone wishing to work as a director had to be a graduate of the Hungarian Academy for Theater and Film Art. Until 1959, they could offer their services to only one studio, Hunnia, later renamed Mafilm. During that period
, every filmscript had to pass through several stages of ministerial approval, as did every finished film.
While he was in Budapest, Pudovkin sat in on many script discussions at the Ministry of Culture. Most of his contributions focused on a given movie’s political and social themes, rather than visual or technical issues. He chided the scriptwriters of a film about peasants joining a cooperative movement for their focus on the moral rather than the practical and material advantages of the cooperative: “This is a serious deficiency.” He proposed the creation of new characters and plot twists that would dramatize the advantages of the cooperative. There might be a child, he suggested, for example, who was devastated by his father’s refusal to join the cooperative and who feared his future might be compromised as a result.70 On another occasion, Pudovkin criticized a film because a worker died in the final scene, a conclusion he found insufficiently optimistic. In both cases his critique was accepted without argument. The written account of one of his meetings ended with a single sentence: “We accept the proposals of Comrade Pudovkin and we will correct the movie as suggested.”71
Pudovkin also worked directly on several Hungarian films. One of these was Katalin’s Marriage (Kis Katalin Házassága), a film about two factory workers, Katalin and Jóska, whose relationship begins to falter when Katalin loses interest in her work and her studies and begins to mope around the house. Instead of helping her, Jóska concentrates on his own work. Katalin moves back home with her mother but is eventually “saved” by Barna, the party secretary at the factory, who teaches her how she can become a shock worker, a good student, and even a party member. Eventually Jóska realizes it is he who must learn from her. As the scriptwriter explained at the time, “The film shows how both of them are put back on track by the party, and it also shows how it is possible that one member of the couple works in the factory shop and the other in an office.”72 Following the principle that the “best” socialist realist films contained multiple lessons, the movie also contained an episode involving a saboteur. From Katalin’s Marriage viewers were thus meant to learn about the leading role of the party; the significance of work competitions; the need to battle against reaction; the value of different sorts of work; and the importance of marriage. They also got to see some scenes shot outdoors, outside the studio. As Pudovkin put it, “the movie has to show the truth of life.”73
Any Hungarian filmmaker who wanted to direct or write a film had to work within these kinds of parameters. The only other option was to leave the profession—or starve. After the disastrous cancellation of Song of the Corn Field, Szőts was invited to become a state director:
I did not take this opportunity because I knew that I would never shoot a film, a script that was full of lies, loud propaganda, and politics … So I tried to survive … which was not an easy task since I had no revenues. I sold my apartment … I also started to sell whatever I had, the camera, the lenses, and realized that you could live out of such trade but it was not very well seen by the authorities, they considered it black marketeering, since I had no documents whatsoever for these activities. After a while I started to be afraid to be sitting in a café, I was afraid that if I was asked for my documents I would have to say I had no job and I would end up in an internment camp.74
And thus the year 1951 saw the release of A Strange Marriage (Különös házasság), the story of a man forced to marry a girl who had been made pregnant by a priest—a Hungarian classic, which happened to fit nicely into the party’s campaign against the “reactionary clergy.” In the same year, Mafilm released Underground Colony (Gyarmat a föld alatt), a movie about American sabotage of Hungarian oil refineries. The hero is the secret policeman who uncovers the sabotage, and the film ends happily, with the nationalization of the Hungarian oil industry. At about the same time, the East Germans were exploring anticapitalist and anti-American themes too, notably in The Council of the Gods (Der Rat der Götter), whose plot revolved around the collusion between American chemical companies and I. G. Farben, the Nazi chemical company that produced the Zyklon-B gas used for mass murders, and thus between American officials and the Nazis.
Yet the harsh systems of control over filmmaking put in place by Pudovkin in Budapest, by the Soviet authorities in Berlin, and briefly by communists in Warsaw did not last. Directors and scriptwriters initially agreed to make socialist realist movies because there was no choice. But as soon as it was possible, they began searching for ways around the rules. In later years, directors of Eastern European films and plays would raise the non-verbal “joke”—the unspoken visual political commentary, comprehensible to viewers but invisible to script-reading censors—into something close to an art form of its own. Andrzej Wajda, one of the founders of postwar Polish cinema, notes about filmmakers in Poland:
We knew from the very beginning that there is nothing we can do about dialogue … the censors had their eye on our words, which is understandable because ideology is expressed in words … But although we knew there was no chance to express ourselves in words, pictures were completely different. A picture can be ambiguous. The viewers might understand the message in a picture, but the censors do not have any basis for taking action.75
Wajda’s film Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) contains, for example, a scene in which two characters sit at a bar and set glasses of vodka on fire, each time repeating a name. Nobody says that these are memorial candles for friends who died in the Warsaw Uprising, an event that was by then taboo, but audiences understood immediately what was happening. Hungarian cinema would eventually develop similarly elaborate metaphors, perhaps most famously in Mephisto, István Szabó’s modern-day Faust. Set in Nazi Germany, Mephisto tells the story of an actor who agrees to collaborate with national socialism in order to advance his career. The audience watching the movie knew that this story was also a commentary on the recent communist past: actors in Stalinist Hungary had collaborated in order to advance their careers too.
Hints and allusions could also be found in plays, both contemporary and classic, and directors made full use of them. In communist Poland, even Shakespeare became a form of contemporary political commentary. The line “Denmark is a prison” could be understood as an allusion to the Soviet occupation of Poland. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” had the same force. Even the division of King Lear’s kingdom could be seen as a metaphor for the division of postwar Poland and the loss of the eastern territories.76
Odd though it sounds, genuine realism—spontaneity, authentic-sounding dialogue, and scenes viewers would recognize from their own lives—was also a tool that could be carefully deployed against the socialist realism imported from the USSR. This technique paid off in a Hungarian film with the unpromising title State Department Store (Állami Áruház). Though there was nothing radical about the plot or the setting—a state department store, in fact—the film included a few charming scenes by the Danube, during which people jump in and out of the water, splash one another, and generally move about in a messy and disorganized fashion, just as in real life and not as in a carefully constructed May Day parade. In another scene, customers mob the department store when they hear a shipment of goods has arrived—a familiar sight to filmgoers at the time—though fortunately truckloads of goods arrive in time to sate them. Everyone watching would have known that this was ridiculous: in reality there would have been no truckloads of goods, and thus it became a kind of insiders’ joke.
Wajda’s first film, A Generation (Pokolenie), released in 1955, deployed this kind of “realism” too. Though it contained several scenes that might well have been designed to please communist bureaucrats, it also included several that seemed spontaneous, as indeed they were. Several of the young actors, including a teenaged Roman Polanski, had been part of the resistance as children and remembered the occupation well. When they scampered up and down stairways and hid in alleys from the Gestapo, they were simply playing themselves and behaving as they remembered behaving during the occupation. Audiences un
derstood that too.77
In due course, the most obviously Stalinist films became embarrassments to their directors, some of whom denounced or disavowed them after Stalin’s death in 1953. The crudest High Stalinist paintings, sculpture, poetry, fiction, and architecture met the same fate. Wisława Szymborska, a distinguished, Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, rarely spoke about her Stalinist poetry and didn’t include it in later collected editions of her work. The very titles became embarrassing: “Lenin”; “Welcoming the Construction of a Socialist City”; “The Youth Building Nowa Huta”; “Our Worker Speaks About the Imperialists.” Her elegy for Stalin—“That Day” (“Ten Dzień”)—includes the immortal lines “This is the party, the vision of humanity / This is the party, the power of people and conscience / Nothing from His life will be forgotten / His party will push aside the gloom.” She went on to write beautiful and enigmatic poems about many other subjects, and in later years avoided discussion of this difficult era altogether.78
But even after it had passed, the moment of High Stalinism left its mark on the culture of the region. East German painters went on arguing about definitions of “realism” for decades. Ágnes Heller, one of Hungary’s most distinguished philosophers, remained focused on the problem of totalitarianism most of her life. Milan Kundera, the exiled Czech writer, wrote stories about censorship, secrets, and collaboration. The best-known novel by the East German writer Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T., is a story about a woman’s struggle against the pressure to conform.79 Wajda kept returning to themes of totalitarianism and resistance throughout his life, whether during the French Revolution or the Second World War. For myriad reasons—historical, political, psychological—some Eastern European artists did agree to become “socialist realists” between 1949 and 1953. But they, their contemporaries, and their successors often spent the rest of their lives trying to understand why, and how, this had been possible.
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 Page 49
