Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Phases in East Central Europe 1949-80. 6 (37 ) Hungary Part 1

Zoltan Fabri b.17   Felix Máriássy b. 19    Miklos Janscó  (1969) b.21   Karoly Makk b.25    András Kovács b.25     Marta Mészáros (1979) b.31    Judit Elek b.37     Ferenc Kosá b.37    Istvan Szabo (1982) b.38     Ivan Gaál (1974) b.38    Figure in brackets indicates year selected as one of International Film Guide’s 5 Directors of the Year

Short-lived hope, repression and revival

Unlike other Eastern European socialist countries (except Czechoslovakia) before the World War II Hungary had a substantial film industry, first nationalised in 1919, which through the 30s produced 20 to 30 features a year. Hungarian films produced by private companies under political control found an important market in occupied countries during the war followed by a transitional period after 1945 when the few films that were produced were in the tradition of literary adaptation with some attempt at social commentary. In March 1948 after the Communist Party had taken control of the government by coup d’etat, the industry was fully nationalised. The next few years saw the absolute imposition of socialist realism. The political thaw following the death of Stalin in 1953 and the consequent weakening of the repressive Stalinist regime of Mátyás Rákosi resulted in his replacement in 1954 as premier by the more liberal Imre Nagy, who had months earlier returned from political exile. Nagy proceeded to release 10,000 political prisoners, bring members of the state security apparatus to trial and rescue an economy bankrupted and exhausted by failed central planning.

In 1955 Stalin’s immediate successor, Malenkov, who had supported Nagy, was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev. Nagy went on leave of absence “for reasons of health” and was subsequently accused of “rightist deviation.” Attempts to stop reforms were greeted with calls for solidarity with the Poles and for the return of Nagy who again became premier along with assurances that all Hungarian demands would be met. A few days later Soviet tanks which had earlier been greeted with Molotov cocktails in Budapest, occupied the whole of Hungary. Hundreds of protestors were shot in the streets by Russian troops. Nagy and many of his collaborators including revisionist Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukcás, who had been his minister for culture, were arrested. The new government was headed by a new first secretary of the Party, Janos Kádár, who oversaw the disbanding of the Hungarian Communist Party and its replacement by the Socialist Workers’ Party. There was a mass exodus of 200,000 from the country, many later returning. On May 27 1957 an agreement was signed concerning the “temporary presence” of Soviet troops in Hungary. After a secret trial in 1958 Nagy and others were executed.

The Liehms note that the historical records show that the period of freedom of expression was very short in Hungary compared with Poland, for example. This meant that there was no time for the emergence of a younger generation therefore the best films were made by the directors of the preceding period. Nor was there time to create an autonomous structure of thought and form that would leave a more permanent mark on following productions. “Hungarian films of the period were more notable for their content and the manner which they viewed reality, than for the manner in which they interpreted reality. Form remained merely a link with the traditions of Hungarian populism, and on the other hand, was simply an adaptation of Italian neorealism” (Liehm 164). Soviet influence was imposed by V.I. Pudovkin acting as special adviser requiring the imposition of dominance of the script over direction. The break with Zhdanovist socialist realist aesthetics was initially provided by Fabri’s striving for authenticity and the bringing to the screen real problems in place of cliches.                    

Zoltán Fábri

During the brief period of freedom of expression before the 1956 repression, the most notable films were directed by Zoltán Fábri (1917-94) who, it is noted, had a special feeling for rural life where he found the core of national life.  Fábri's second and third features Eletzel / Fourteen Lives in Danger (1954) were a first step towards “the new realism” in approaching Hungary's past, and with Körhinta / Merry-Go-Round (1955), were both landmarks in Hungarian cinema's break with Stalinist social realism. This was further realised by Felix Máriássy (1919-75) Egy pikoló világos/ A Glass of Beer (1955) “made in the best traditions of the doyen of Italian neo-realism, Cesare Zavattini, Máriássy and the scriptwriter, his wife Judit, focussing attention on the day-to-day events in the life of a family of workers. In Budapesti tavasz / Spring in Budapest (1955). Máriassy avoided some of the usual cliches in “attempting to show the end of the war as the inhabitants of the war-torn city experienced it” (ibid 165).

Merry-Go-Round, like most Hungarian films, was literary based, a short story by Imre Sardaki “whose populist-inspired work is exceptional in its cruel view of contemporary man’s morality.” The film is described by the Liehms as “one of the best Hungarian films” although his Hannibal tanár úr/ Professor Hannibal (1956) they regard “as more important” because Fábri succeeded, in a difficult political climate, in telling “a story about victims, execution and envy in the 1930s comparable with that of Rakosi's Hungary from 1949-53.

 A major hope of Hungarian film-makers for greater freedoms - the establishment of autonomous production units like those in Poland that would replace the central administration and give artists more authority - ended with the suppression of the revolution in1956. The Liehms point out that the the majority of noteworthy films had been made in 1955. The effort of Hungarian film-makers “to do away with the traces of the recent past, both in form and content, “had the effect of ‘a bolt of lightening’, not only at home, but also in other Eastern European countries […] It was, above all, the films of Fábri and Máriássys that became the symbol of faith in the possibility of speaking a new language for the countries that had, until then, been forced to hoe (sic) the Stalinist line”(164).

Károly Makk

Károly Makk (1925-2017) made “a remarkable debut” in 1954 with Liliomfi, an adaptation of a Molnár comedy, followed by an exposure of the wrongs in contemporary society with A 9-es korterem / Ward No.9 (1955), “a promising neo-realistic attempt to capture the atmosphere of waiting in a hospital, and the partial destinies of several patients.” This revival of film production was cut short by the 1956 revolution in which many film-makers took part.

Makk directed Megszallottak/ The Fanatics (1962) the release of which, with Jancsó's Cantata, indicated a change in the political environment as the film's story included bureaucratic misjudgment and indifference, abandoning  populist themes “a rut into which […] Hungarian film and literature were falling” (ibid 172). Makk subsequently made an international breakthrough with Szerelem/Love (1970)  in what Hendrykowski describes as a masterful “symbiosis of literature and film” with writer and poet  Tibor Déry (633), centred on an aged woman, her daughter in law, and her husband. Their absent son who is gradually revealed to have been imprisoned in a Stalinist purge, is suddenly released without explanation. The delicately balanced, emotionally bitter-sweet story does not ignore political realities. Her son will not be returning. The only encounter she can have with him is in her daydreaming. Makk’s considered peak is shared with Egymásra nézve / Another Way (1982) set in 1958, a story controversially involving the  issues of censorship and lesbianism, stylistically alternating between the realistic and the lyrical. “Although his best stories are set in the past,” Paul concludes, “their lessons relate unmistakably to current political problems” (192).  

Hungarian cinema was slow to revive. Seven empty years came to an end with films like Current (1963), The Age of Daydreaming and Andras Kovacs' Difficult People (1964), Gaal's Green Years and Ferenc Kosá's Ten Thousand Suns (1965), Fábri attracting international attention with Húsz óra / Twenty Hours (1964), an epic spanning of 20 years of Hungarian life. “The new poetical approach of these films was founded on the thoughts and emotions of the up-and-coming generation: it was no longer just a matter of coming to rationalistic grips with fateful events like the war and the resultant historical transformations, but also grasping, on an individual basis, the emotions of the day” (Liehm 386 ).”

Hungary's four production groups for fiction film had been finally set-up in the early 60s and fiction feature film production increased to 15 - 20 films per year Including what is referred to by the Liehms as a “comparatively large number of high-quality films – about 5 annually.” Although the relationship between artist and the establishment was far from ideal, it was indisputably more productive than in the other countries in Eastern Europe – with the exception of the brief Czech intermezzo. “The situation in the cultural sphere under the Kádár government began to again resemble situations in Hungary's past.”

István Gaál 

As one of a new generation of filmmakers beginning their filmmaking careers at the Bela Balázs Studio film school, István Gaál (1933-2007)  the complete auteur – scriptwriter, cinematographer, director, editor –  employed unconventional musical rhythms in structuring Keresztelo/Baptism (1968) “like a cantata”  (Paul).  Gaál places local communities and their lifestyles in starkly beautiful landscapes.  His first feature Sodrasban/ Current is essentially an emotion-filled film monologue on the subject of how we live, the lyrical confession of a generation (Lieham 387), one of a number of films made in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia at this time on existential ‘apolitical’ themes circumventing political requirements. In Falcons(1970), stylisation turns the birds into threatening symbols manipulated by their trainer who comes to be viewed with fear by his young helper and the villagers, described as  almost Buñuelian at times.  

István Szabó

István Szabó was 26 when he directed his first film, was prodigiously attuned to capturing what was happening with his generation. He was strongly influenced by the French New Wave when he directed   Álmodozasok kora/ Age of Day Dreaming (1964) in which he pays homage to Truffaut. ”His heroes are his contemporaries seeking their identity for their generation in the world formed by their parents.” In his second film, the lyrical diary-like Apa / Father (1966) Szabo displayed his originality in centring the story on representing an entire emerging Eastern European generation through an orphan boygrowing up amid postwar political chaos and social change. His third film Szerelmes/ Love Film (1970) is closer to Resnais in the interweaving of reality, memory and fantasy in presenting a specifically Hungarian story but marred by the lack of credibility in the relationship two young lovers separated by the national tragedy in 1956 (402). In this trilogy of films Szabo developed a visual technique that moves the stories from the personal to the universal (Paul 186-7). In his next featuresTuzolto utca 25 / 25 Fireman's Street (1973) Szabo further employs experimental narrative styles in collaboration with cameraman Sandor Sára to successfully return to “the illusive essence of his work, filming a story about the dreams and memories of the inhabitants of an old house in postwar Budapest” (Liehm 403).  Sára, described as “one of the motive forces behind the film renaissance, ” with his unrestrained  photography contributing  greatly to the original impressionist styles of Current and Father. He painted surrealistic visions of refined colours with his camera in Szinbad /Sinbad  (1971) in accord with the unique expression of the director, graphic artist Zoltán Huszárik’s revival of the hero of the stories of symbolist writer Gyula Krudy whose main theme is “life is not worth discussing” (Liehm 406).

Ferenc Kosá 

“From the very outset Ferenc Kosá (b.1937) differed from his contemporaries in his analytical approach to his own subjective creed” (ibid 388), the title referring to the number of days imprisonment the farmer is returning from for refusing to enter the collective farm. Ten Thousand Suns (1963) is a strong drama “that skilfully draws on the best traditions of Hungarian populism – which is rich in ballardry and folklore, and relies on beauty of expression as the only defence against poverty – at the same time a lyrical appraisal of, and farewell to, rural Hungary” (ibid).

András Kovács (2010)

András Kovács (1925-2017) in Hideg napok/ Cold Days (1965) tackles the story of three days in 1942 when more than three thousand Serbian and Hungarian nationals in an ethnically mixed region, were slaughtered by Hungarian soldiers merely because they were ordered to do so. Set in 1946 with most of the action taking place in an ascetic chamber providing a fitting background for the black and white images, the predominant close-ups and medium close-ups of the protagonists, their abrupt dialogue and frequent outbursts are interspersed with with flashback reminiscences to intimate moments and scenes alluding to the massacre. “The narrative cuts between conversations in the cell and flashbacks chronicling human degradation in the progrom, and, like the consciousness of the protagonists, the camera persistently shies away and avoids showing the killings directly. […] The greatest achievement of the film, however, is its representation of the responsibility that is shifted between the men, each of whom is an essential link in the chain of the massacre. The film […] illustrates how talking about the massacre proves more painful for the perpetrators than the actual slaughter.” In seeking answers Kovács makes a straight criminal accusation against Hungarian fascism (Iodonova 76).

Fabri and Kovacs (together with younger filmmakers like Kosá) of the generation that had been a motivating force in 1954-7, sought their inspiration in Hungarian history with its vicious circles of violence, repression, and resignation (Liehm 390).

Péter Bascó

Beginning as a scriptwriter and spending years teaching scriptwriting Péter Bascó.(b.1928) made his debut as a director in 1963. “Although he remained true to classical narrative structure with a precisely detailed script as the basis of his work, in his fifth film he found his own approach (Liehm 409). In 1969 his Kitorés / Outbreak  (1970)  as well as Jelenido / Present Indicative (1971) and Haramadik nekifutas / The Last Chance (1971) are all films about official heroes of the official Hungary, the working class. In Bascó’s films, however, “they are tragic heroes trying to remain “revolutionaries” in the land of a vicarious revolution,” but succumbing in the fight against slipshod attitudes, greed, and the new class stratification. In 1969 Bacsó’s Tanú / Witness, a political tragicomedy whose hero is a witness for the prosecution in the political trials of the fifties, was banned” - to be finally released in the early 80s with great success (ibid).

Judit Elek

For the Liehms, Judit Elek (b.1937) “is significant for her profound philosophical contemplation of the cycle of life.” After two documentaries on the theme of “humanity in its social context” appearing almost simultaneously with the publication of her novel,'The Awakening', she made a medium length fiction film Meddig el az ember/ How Long Does It Matter? (1967), a meditation on the beginning and end of one's working life. Elek's first feature, Sziget a szárazföldon/ The Lady from Constantinople (1969), is on the theme of the cyclical nature of life with an old lady trying in vain to accommodate her present world with the one that was “hers.” In two more features in the 70s, dealing with the life situation of two young girls in a Hungarian mining village, Elek continued to develop her politically engaged montage style working with non-professional actors whom she interviews on screen (ibid 400-1).

Márta Mészáros 

Márta Mészáros  (b.1931) is one of the first women to direct a feature film - Eltávozott nap/ Girl (1968) - in Hungary, one of three women making their directing debuts in feature filmmaking in the late sixties. She has always resisted “feminist” as a label imported from the West. Its open adoption in a difficult political  environment would remove a certain veil of ambiguity making the commitment of remaining true to one's intentions that much more difficult. The Liehms write of “her intense desire to speak of human relationships as they are experienced at moments of crisis.” They write further of her long road to find her own personal truth that keeps reappearing in her films. It is always female characters who are “the bearers of restlessness and social anxiety” (ibid).  Her films “disclose more than the bitter consequences of centuries of female inequality which weighed heaviest in contemporary Hungary on women in the lower social strata.” This struggle for emancipation is the subject of what has been described as “her first masterpiece” Orokbefogadas/ Adoption (1975). In addition Mészáros also tells, with unusual frankness for Hungarian cinema, of additional aspects of life in Hungary such as “the profound alienation of young people from socialist society”  as, for example, the stifling influence of class difference imposed on two young people in Szabad lélegzet/ Riddance (1973)  (ibid 399)

Mészáros's films have been reflective of her experiences of growing up in a climate of tragedy and oppression in Stalinist Russia. Her father, Laszlo Mászáros, one of Hungary's leading sculptors migrated with his family to the Soviet Union in 1936 as a communist artist. He was arrested and executed in 1938, a victim of the Stalinist purge of intellectuals. Her mother died giving birth. Mászáros was raised by a foster mother attending school in the Soviet Union, returning as a teenager to Hungary in 1946 and then back to the Soviet Union on a state scholarship having been chosen for training at the VGIK film school in the early fifties, returning to Hungary once again after her graduation in 1956 where she worked making 25 short documentaries over the span of a decade.

Mészáros has completed 20 features, 1968-2017, seven in the 70s. Her semi-autobiographical Diary films: Napló gyermekelmnek / Diary for My Children (1984), Napló szerelmelmnek/ Diary for My Loves (1987), and Diary for My Mother and Father (1990) made a major impact in Hungarian cinema for their impassioned and challenging portrayal of individual lives interwoven with the brutally tragic politics of the Stalinist and post Stalinist years. Mészáros completed a fourth film in the series: Kiswilma-az utolso naplo/ Little Wilma-the Last Diary (2000) which has reportedly not been subtitled.

Unlike the other socialist states, the film industry in Hungary in the 60s and early 70s was not deprived of an influx of new film-makers. The Bela Balazs studio set up in 1961 supplied young artists with basic  knowledge and material aid  (Liehm 398).                                                                                       

David Robinson in 1971 commented that “the films of the new Hungarian cinema are not, in a wide sense, popular...but they appear to reach the audiences for which they are intended. Cinema-going is an essential part of Hungarian intellectual life, and the aware young seem to follow the new films.”   

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Forthcoming: Miklos Janscó   

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

 6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

                                                                                                    

                                                       

Streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison recommends ASPROMONTE: LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN (Mimmo Calopresti, Italy, 2019)

 

The plot involving educated protagonists transplanted into a remote community, which they come to value, keeps on turning up in films made by people almost certainly unaware of one another. This appears to be a pretty much world wide experience. People I knew went through it working in New Guinea. Missionary movies like Vessel of Wrath and The Sins of Rachel Cade are wide of the mark. There are high end variations like Dances With Wolves and we've just had Patricia Font's exceptional Spanish El maestro que prometió el mar /The Teacher Who Promised the Sea. You can point to the 1986 Chinese Qing chun ji/Sacrificed Youth or a flock of these made by the Italians, notably Pietro Germi's In nomme della legge/ In the Name of the Law and the Francesco Rosi Cristo si è fermato a Eboli / Christ Stopped at Eboli.

In this line, we get Mimmo Calopresti's five year old Aspromonte - La terra degli ultimi / Aspromonte: Land of the Forgotten which has surfaced here on SBS and is now streaming on SBS On Demand, presumably because the producers couldn't get any better offers. That is a pity as the film turns out to be one of the most impressive currently circulating.

It kicks off in 1951 with the Africo village mob swarming into the Calabrian Prefect's office. In response to their "Volio un medico" chant demanding the facilities their remote settlement lacks, he signs an undertaking that they will be provided a resident doctor. Our protagonist however, as with Enric Auquer in The Teacher Who Promised the Sea, is a new school ma'am. Struggling up the donkey track comes the film's most familiar face, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (above) similarly finding a derelict classroom and the kids again off working in the fields. The village has had city teachers before but they didn't last. However, this one is a volunteer. She isn't got up glamorous, though local alpha male ex-African campaign soldier Francesco Colella tells her she's beautiful and steals a kiss.

A death, in an unattended childbirth, firms up the locals' resolve. They get stuck into constructing a road to their isolated home. At this point, the film starts out-guessing us. Local Don, the great Sergio Rubini (La caso Moro, La Bionda) no less, is scornful of their efforts telling them that their children will use the access to leave and forget how to speak Italian. He kills Colella's pigs to demonstrate his dominance. Colella's young son can't understand how this one man can assert himself alone – the way Rubini did when he took away the boy's mother. "They treat him like a leader because they have no one else."

This is only one of the film's complexities. The local priest supports the villagers but we see him just once joining the demonstration that gets an arrested local turned loose. Carabinieri, who are shown as ineffectual agents of the power structure, prove resourceful and sympathetic. The film's 'Scope frame photography is admirable. Cameramen Stefano Falivene's striking oceanfront scenics show how beautiful the Calabrian Coast is.  But the future is finally in leaving for the outside world Valeria demonstrates on her battered globe. The kids search for Australia, a place of some fascination because relatives have already gone there. Rubini is scornful. "When you lose the land, you lose everything." Their circus dance adds a glimpse of tradition. The use of location and the immaculate outfits of the officials contrasting with the grubby clothes of the villagers is already a comment.  

Finally, shots are exchanged. "When I killed in the war, no one said it was murder." Hope is lost. 

We get a flood destruction ending, curiously repeating Sacrificed Youth and, again resembling The Teacher Who Promised the Sea, we have a coda with the son now an old man.

This is the first film by writer-director Calopresti that I've seen since his intriguing 1995 La seconda volta which featured Bruni Tedeschi opposite Nanni Moretti. It's possible that some of his twenty odd intervening movies had screenings here but I haven't been able to catch them. I'd certainly be more interested in those than I am in our stream of Francois Ozon or Pedro Almodovar releases or festival favorites from Pedro Costa and Lav Diaz. It's another demonstration of how, without a Cinémathèque, the local movie scene has gone to seed – not that we needed another demonstration.

At the Hayes Theatre in Kings Cross - A terrific production of HOLIDAY INN (Irving Berlin, Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge)

The leads - Nigel Huckle,  Emma Feliciano, Mary McCorry (I'm presuming), 

Should I be just a bit ashamed to admit I’ve never seen Holiday Inn. It was made at Paramount  in 1942 by Mark Sandrich but the auteur was Irving Berlin who wrote the words and music.

Now I’ve just come at the film after seeing a wildly enthusiastic show on the tiny performing space of the Hayes Theatre up in Kings Cross where a five piece band sat around the back of the stage and ten young actors, singers and dancers knocked out their own version directed, for the first time, by choreographer Sally Dashwood. The new libretto is by Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge, with the same music and lyrics by Irving Berlin from this movie and others. The musical opened on Broadway in 2016 and I am assuming this is the first time it has been performed out here, in Sydney at least. 

It was fabulous and the talent on display quite remarkable. Most striking though were two features – the rapid fire costume changes of all ten cast members and the precision of the production. Entrances and exits were timed like a perfect version of Feydeau. The choreography, a huge amount of it involving large swathes of the cast working in some tiny spaces, was not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely brilliant.

It runs at the Hayes Theatre till December 22. Treat yourself to a great night out then find a copy of the movie somewhere, probably OK.ru if you are desperate, and watch Bing Crosby fighting off Fred Astaire for attention. That’s worth a look too even if just to note how smart Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge have been in getting this old show back front and centre.

At the Melbourne Cinematheque 7:00 on Wed December 18. Screening at ACMI - Bruce Hodsdon delves into CARLTON AND BEYOND: Melbourne University Film Society in the 1960s

         

Brian Davies (Photo: Lloyd Carrick)

                                                                                                                                                 

Editors Note:  This is the final Cinematheque screening of the year - marking the 75th anniversary of MUFS & the 40th of the Melbourne Cinematheque. Peter Carmody will be introducing Nothing Like Experience.

Eight films constitute the core of the Carlton ‘ripple’. Four of the films are features or short features (50 mins or more) three shorts and one quasi-documentary.  Members of the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) found inspiration in the French New Wave in what was a spontaneous outbreak of filmmaking taking advantage of lightweight 16mm synchronised cameras and sound equipment then becoming available, occupying a space between the fully amateur and the commercial feature film. Two key figures were then MUFS eminence grise Brian Davies (who produced, co-wrote and directed Pudding Thieves and Brake Fluid) and the agent provocateur Bert Deling (Dalmas, Pure Shit).

 

The French New Wave transformed a national cinema aesthetically and re-jigged it structurally marking the advent of cinematic modernism in mainstream narrative features. In this it can be distinguished from smaller and more focussed art film movements (often termed ‘new waves’). Anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace has offered the definition of ‘revitalisation movement’ as ‘a deliberate and self conscious attempt to provide a more satisfying culture’. In Carlton and the more tightly knit UBU Group in Sydney the outbreak of filmmaking on 16mm in the sixties was driven simply by the desire to make personal films in what was seen to be something of a moribund film culture. In this context ‘energy centre’ seems more appropriate than ‘movement’ or ‘school’ to describe the cluster of related films produced through the 60s in Carlton and in Sydney although the latter were closer to the above definition than the Carlton filmmakers. The recurring thread between the MUFS Production Group Films was Lloyd Carrick on sound and Nigel Buesst cinematography.

 

 For most of the MUFS films any validation through bums on seats or film festival screenings was never an overriding consideration of the individual filmmakers who were making films more or less to please themselves within the loose parameters imposed by funding from Unifed and University Union Councils.

 

The MUFS films

 

Pudding Thieves (54 mins), self-funded on a final budget $3,500 by Davies, was made over four years but was largely conceived and shot in 1963-4, its well attended premiere at the St Kilda Palais being in 1967. He felt that the Godard-like fragmentation of the narrative “was little more than fortuitous” a reflection on low budget filmmaking with a hand-held 16mm camera involving frequent improvised departures from the formal conventions of classical narrative. Davies nevertheless thought that at this stage his filmmaking aspired more to the dispassionate style of Claude Chabrol than of Godardian  or cinema-verite stylistics. “Starting with a bare outline of two male photographer-friends (Bill Morgan and George Tibbets) dabbling in pornography... a theme of betrayal, a reaction to Jules and Jim and Les Cousins - sentimental ideas of friendship...I got interested in each scene for its own sake.”  For Davies directing was a learning curve interwoven with his cinephilia. After directing Pudding Thieves he directed a number of plays produced by student theatre companies and at La Mama in Carlton, activity in the spirit of the Cahiers critics making films instead of just writing criticism.  Pudding Thieves is not included in the Cinematheque program.

 

Davies' motivation to make Brake Fluid (51 mins) co-scripted with John Romeril - the title is a red herring suggested by playwright Jack Hibberd – was also by Davies' own admission made “to overcome his fear of directing,” his feeling with Pudding Thieves, that he didn't have enough commitment to the idea that he was “actually directing a feature film,” that he was “far too tentative.” He said that in making Pudding Thieves”I was frightened (I) didn't know the actors, didn't relate to them properly.

 

 Pudding Thieves is more about liberating the camera and narrative from seamless classicism (the Jules and Jim influence). Brake Fluid, made on the eve of the Oz feature film revival, is more about freeing the narrative from cause and effect continuity (the 'Godard effect') while hanging onto the threads of a unifying idea – 'boy meets girl but finds he can't talk to her'. Assistant producer (uncredited) of Brake Fluid, Geoff Gardner, recalls in the late 60s Brian repeatedly viewing 16mm French Embassy prints of Jacques Rozier's Adieu Philippine with its special sense of spontaneity in the unfolding of a narrative, and the innovative cinema verite of Chronicle of a Summer .

 

Nothing Like Experience (1969 50 mins) a MUFS Production Group film commissioned by Unifed for filming at the Second University Arts Festival, direction and script by Peter Carmody. Comedy and documentary are loosely structured around three student 'types' filmed during the festival including a seminar replete with an in-joke or two in a Q&A including Brian Davies.

 

Watt's Last Voyage (1965 7 mins) was self-funded by Davies as the pilot of a proposed series of program fillers for TV, rejected by the ABC as too long for the purpose. Davies spoke of it as “a mistake,.. you should never leave an actor (here Graeme Blundell and Robin Laurie) to their own resources,” seemingly the first phase in Davies' engagement in the director-actor relationship.

 

Alan Finney Hey Al Baby

Hey Al Baby (1968 34 mins)  Dir,sc.ed. David Minter. Funded by Unifed. Al (Alan Finney) is temporarily left alone as the sole male in a Carlton flat with three female flatmates which generates a certain amount of tension partly attributable to Al's edgy response to the situation. Biographical threads structured as seven dialogue sequences varying from about 3 to 10 minutes in length, in what Minter called “dramatically small” situations played with  'extreme naturalism' comparable to Rozier's Adieu Philippine and the films of Czech directors Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. Filming was cut tragically cut short when Chrissie Loh playing one of the women with considerable camera presence died in a car accident before filming, as originally envisaged, had been completed.

 

The Girl-friends (1968 25 mins)  Dir.,scr. : Peter Elliott.  Cast includes Jack Hibberd, Graeme Blundell. Jane Washington. Funded by the Union Council Melbourne University, like Monash 66 funded as a student orientation film with two freshettes, one of whom forms a liaison with a character played by Hibberd. A comedy with a satirical edge perhaps the most adept of the Ripple films in capturing something of the surfaces of nouvelle vague comedy such as Godard's  Bande à Part (1964).

 

Monash 66 (1966 31mins), a MUFS production group film funded by Monash University Union directed  by Chris Maudson and Robin Laurie for orientation of new students through a series of interviews by Laurie intercut with tracking shots and music score seemingly evoking Alain Resnais' tracking camera through the endless rows of books in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Toute le Memoire du Monde (1956). Laurie subsequently appeared as an actor in feature films Molly and Dimboola and collaborated with Margot Nash on We Aim to Please (1976), a feminist inspired take on the theme of female sexuality,

 

An additional “MUFS film” not included in the Cinematheque program is the feature length Sympathy in Summer (1968 88 mins) originally titled None of Us is Perfect, written and directed by Tony Ginnane  “under the star of Godard, Resnais and Truffaut” and premiered at the Grand Cinema Footscray in 1971.  

 

The initial ripple was a planned feature with the working title of the Student Action Film written and directed by Bert Deling which never proceeded beyond the filming of shots for several sequences reported in the student paper 'Farrago' in 1962.

 

See also “The Carlton Ripple and the Australian Film Revival” Screening the Past (accessible online) and  “The Carlton Ripple – a prelude to the Oz Film Revival : Brian Davies and Bert Deling