As Blu-Ray upgrades go, it’s a hell of a glow-up. Second Run released the Hungarian director Zoltán Huszárik’s debut feature Szindbád on DVD in 2011; its cult in Anglophone countries can be largely attributed to this, given that neither the film nor the works of its source author Gyula Krúdy were easily available in English-language versions beforehand. Now they’ve released it on Blu-Ray, packaged with his second film Czontváry and five short films: Groteszk, Elégia, Capriccio, Homage to Old Women and A Piacere. Barring his earliest student work Játék and a short documentary about the sculptor Amerigo Tot, this means the box contains every single thing Huszárik directed for cinema release. That’s quite the thing to think about when you hold it in your hands.
You may have guessed that Huszárik didn’t have a long life, dying in 1981 in a probable suicide. It would be easy to say this has cast a pall of death over the films, but really that was there from the beginning. All of Huszárik’s films are about death, which in practice means they’re often about life. His two features both centre on men driven to embrace life by the knowledge of death. The title character of Szindbád is not a sailor but a seducer, trying to understand the world through sensual pleasures ranging from sex to an unforgettably-photographed meal. Similarly, Czontváry splits its narrative between a biopic of the painter Tivadar Czontváry Kosztka as he tries to capture the wonder he sees in nature, and a parallel story about an actor trying to capture the mystery of Kosztka’s life. All of these pursuits are presented as ultimately doomed, the actions of too-human men trying to understand the infinite. But what else can you do with your life other than live it?
Szindbád opens with a ferocious assault of nature, a barrage of flash-forwards of flowers opening, bubbles squirming under ice, swirling broth. It immediately announces the film as a very sensual film, and also a deeply experimental one. Huszárik wanted to match the nostalgic qualities of Krúdy’s multiple short stories about Szindbád’s life, many of which seem to be framed as deathbed or at least late-life memories. The result stands comparison to Resnais and Roeg, with Szindbád’s memories frequently gate-crashing scenes which seem to be about something else entirely. The result is challenging but never alienating, perhaps because of a strength in evidence throughout all of these features and shorts. Huszárik is always careful to ensure that his greatest flights of fancy are rooted in solid, instantly graspable, universal themes.
This is perhaps most evident in the short films. Groteszk is more abstract, a surreal tale of struggle and self-doubt that is most notable as a testing ground for Huszárik’s camera style. It’s the closest thing on this set to the long-take style of other Hungarian arthouse directors like Miklós Janscó – although Janscó’s later, more theatrical works like Elektra My Love are briefly recalled by the dance scene early on in Szindbád, or the historical pageant that stands in for a more conventional explanatory historical caption in Czontváry. Following Groteszk, the documentary quartet of Elégia, Capriccio, Homage to Old Women and A Piacere all display Huszárik’s signature style fully formed. Each has a very well-defined field of study which the director reliably expands to its conceivable limit: horses in Elégia, cemeteries in A Piacere, and, er, snowmen in Capriccio. (Homage to Old Women is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about)
The third disc has no extras but it does have the five aforementioned shorts, and to be honest being able to watch these incredible but extremely obscure films in luscious 4K scans is enough of a bonus for me.
Elégia tracks humanity’s relationship with horses from cave paintings through cinema to its terminal point: a brutal, unsentimental slaughterhouse. (This arc, along with the shots of horses transformed by distorting mirrors and limited light, suggests Huszárik’s short may have been an influence on Jerzy Skolimowski’s recent EO) Yet it’s a profoundly beautiful film, just as Capriccio – a more whimsical film from the title down – is chilling for reasons beyond the weather it depicts. Huszárik’s snowmen melt like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an image repeated with waxworks in Czontváry. There is also one snowman with a fully-populated bird cage in his chest, which may be inspired by Rene Magritte’s painting The Therapist – and sure enough, there are flash-cuts of Magritte’s infamously disturbing The Rape in A Piacere along with other great “M”s of art history: Munch’s The Scream, Millais’s Ophelia.
A Piacere is by necessity the darkest item in the box set: Huszárik’s survey of Hungarian cemeteries means getting to grips with the legacy of the Holocaust, which is shown in unsparing archive footage. Yet it still has a certain morbid wit, not least in the opening credits, where the crew’s names are shown on gravestones. It feels like it should have been the director’s last statement, but there’s Czontváry to get to grips with afterwards. Huszárik’s last film is also his longest and most ambitious, not as aggressively modernist in its film grammar as Szindbád or A Piacere but full of unforgettable imagery, and just as in love with great painting as A Piacere. Here, Éva Kármentö’s editing reinforces the central theme of art as a reflection of life by cutting without warning between real landscapes and details from Kosztka’s paintings. Péter Jankura’s cinematography, like Sándor Sára’s for Szindbád, is so lavish you may struggle to tell one from the other.
So what should Zoltán Huszárik’s cinematic memorial be? In one way he was a product of a unique time in film history: working with full state support at a film school that shrugged off commercial failure, he represents the best possible outcome of the Communist system for film-makers. But he also formed a bridge between two very different film movements that impacted directors far outside the Soviet-aligned countries. The radical editing and sensual, abstract close-ups in his work suggest the influence of experimental and early gallery-art film-makers like Stan Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann, but by bringing them into the world of narrative cinema Huszárik was a forerunner of directors like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson and Peter Strickland, the latter of whom turns up in the extras to Szindbád.
Discussing the textures and editing of Szindbád, which is a clear influence on his own The Duke of Burgundy, Strickland wonders how a film so decadent and Old World made it past the censors. Perhaps Huszárik pitched it to them as a film about the emptiness of hedonism and high living. Which it sort of is – but it’s also about those things as a sincere attempt to embrace the joy of life. The central characters of Huszárik’s two features – the rakish womaniser, the tortured male artist – might appear slightly retrograde if they appeared in a film now. Yet they really don’t feel like that here. Huszárik can appreciate the absurdity but also the painful loneliness of a character like Szindbád, and Czontváry has moments of real, shattering pain and suffering (not least in its surprisingly ahead-of-the-curve casting of actual disabled actors to play victims of war and asylum inmates).
Really, these two films – and the shorts, the best of which are as good as any short films you’ll ever see – are attempts to encompass the whole of human life. Huszárik knows better than anyone that this is an impossible pursuit, but the wonder of it is that he doesn’t fall embarrassingly short either. As well as Strickland’s interview, the extras include a featurette on the film-maker’s use of music, the stories of Krúdy and the film’s groundbreaking nature photography on the Szindbád disc, while the Czontváry disc contains an archive newsreel about the film’s production and a National Film Institute Hungary short on Huszárik’s life and influences. The third disc has no extras but it does have the five aforementioned shorts, and to be honest being able to watch these incredible but extremely obscure films in luscious 4K scans is enough of a bonus for me.
Films by Zoltán Huszárik is out now on Second Run Blu-Ray
