During his trip to Budapest last year the representative of the San Francisco Film Festival was strongly discouraged by several members of the movie community from seeing the latest film by Zoltan Fabri. He was told the movie was too long and too traditional to merit viewing. This reaction seemed surprising not simply because Fabri is one of the leading Hungarian directors, but because the movie was the adaptation of one of the most important socialist novels of Hungary and had received the Special Jury Award at the Moscow Film Festival. The Unfinished Sentence by Tibor Dery is a vast volume which attempts to mirror Hungarian society in the 1930s through the stories of various members of an old established aristocratic-industrialist family. That the film was received with such indifference is an indication of the discomfort Hungarians feel when confronted with “yet another” film with a historic subject, “yet another” film depicting the class struggle.

To understand their displeasure, we must understand the experience of Hungarian film audiences since World War II. During the years of Stalinist autocracy the cinema was enlisted in the struggle to transform society. The doctrine of socialist realism was applied to all the arts, resulting in predictable stories with predictable endings featuring predictable heroes. They portrayed the struggle of the workers to rid themselves of their exploiters. Often that meant a traditional war story, since World War 11 offered the most clear-cut confrontation between good and evil, the bastion of socialism attacked by Nazism, the vilest, most degenerate form of capitalism. which was seen not simply as a variant. but as the quintessence of that decadent order under which the rest of the world suffered. Historical movies abounded, since here was a new terrain to show the struggle of slaves against their masters, serfs against lords, peasants against foreign burghers, workers against factory owners, and of course, Reds against the Whites in the October Revolution, the first and most glorious of successful conflicts fought in modern times against the omnipresent oppressors. But the movies dealt with more contemporary problems as well. The struggle to establish a new order had to be illustrated.Time and again the-efforts of the dedicated peasants and workers to collectivize the land or increase production are frustrated by scheming, corpulent kulaks and treacherous bourgeois collaborating with unspecified foreign interests. Despite certain setbacks, even deaths of brave individuals, the cause triumphs: the new order relentlessly marches on, sweeping aside those bizarre and anachronistic opponents of progress.

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