Current (1964): a calm surface with a darker undertow (Review)

The new Hungarian Masters set is the second time Second Run have released a box set themed around Hungary’s cinema. The previous one was released in 2010 and showcased the work of Miklós Janscó, Károly Makk and Márta Mészáros, three of the most prominent Hungarian directors of the 1950s-1970s era. Janscó is also represented on the new collection with 1970’s Agnus Dei, but the other two directors – Zoltán Fábri and István Gaál – are less well-represented on British home media. It may be, of course, that the other three directors are more famous because of the patronage of Second Run, since the label has a history of giving a reputational boost to directors unjustly overlooked in Anglophone circles. If that’s the case, then the new box set offers British audiences the chance to say they rediscovered István Gaál’s Current before it became an acknowledged cult favourite.

Gaál’s fortunes were once very different. Current was cited in its day as the first film in Hungary’s New Wave; a 1969 poll of Hungarian critics and directors named it one of the twelve greatest films made in the country since 1948. In his booklet, Peter Hames suggests the director’s current obscurity can be blamed on much of his later work being made for television, which wasn’t then regarded as seriously as it is today. I wondered, watching Current, whether it also suffered from lack of context. There aren’t many Hungarian directors who break out internationally without moving to Hollywood; for a long time, the main one was István Szabó, whose lavish, co-produced historical allegories really could not be any more different to Current.

What Current offers is minimalism at its most seductive. The opening might take a while to settle into, with Gaál’s camera hanging back some distance from the group of friends the film follows. It can be hard to differentiate one character from another, which eventually becomes recognisable as the film’s point: at this time, in this place, the friends are one unit rather than a group of individuals. In place of characterisation, we hear snatches of dialogue – “You’re always joking about serious things…” – that seem to offer some kind of thematic guidance.

Despite being narratively opaque, there is plenty to enjoy in Current‘s first act. It’s set on the kind of beach Agnès Varda would kill to film on, and cinematographer Sándor Sára captures everything in long, fluid takes, as gentle and as winding as a summer breeze. Now that it’s easier to see Hungarian films from this era than it has been in a long time, we can note some stylistic similarities between Current and Janscó, as well as the recently reappraised short Wind by Marcell Ivány, which also unspools in one serpentine take. The influence that hangs over the whole film, though, is Antonioni. Once the fun times at the beach are over, it turns out one of the revellers has disappeared without trace, and Current becomes an insoluble, existential mystery to rival L’Avventura.

In the decades to come, Antonioni imitations would become something like a cottage industry, but back in 1963 the boos that greeted L’Avventura at Cannes were still echoing. Gaál’s decision to work in this style wasn’t purely inspired by the Italian director – they were both responding to new developments in literature, and an interview with the critic Gareth Evans in this disc’s extras highlights some points of comparison between Current and Albert Camus’s seismic The Stranger. Whatever the source, Gaál deserves credit for finding this style early and doing it well. After Gaál’s countryman Béla Tarr made Sátántangó, it could be argued that slow cinema had nowhere to go bar self-parody, but Current‘s early slow cinema shows the style at its most compact and paradoxically nimble. Gaál knows that the purpose of setting a mood and pace is – pace Paul Schrader in Transcendental Style in Film – to break it to explosive effect, which he achieves here with some truly breathtaking musical montages.

Current is a modest, low-key work, but its focus and stylistic confidence makes it something of a minor revelation. That’s the up-side to reissuing a largely forgotten film; the down side is that it can be hard to find decent extras. Fortunately Second Run have selected wisely in this department too. In addition to the aforementioned booklet and video piece, there’s a 1963 short from Gaál which feels very much like a series of early sketches for Current. Tisza: Autumn Sketches is a seventeen-minute document of life, work and nature along the titular river; unlike the black-and-white feature it experiments with sections in colour and documentary elements, but the similarities are palpable. Here, Gaál’s skill at montage ties together images of river banks eroding and crashing into the water – beautiful, but as destabilising and troubling as the impossible mystery of the main feature.

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THANK YOU FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF CURRENT (1964)