An excerpt from the Csontváry booklet essay by Michael Brooke

It's easy to draw superficial comparisons between Huszárik and his great Russian counterpart Andrei Tarkovsky. Almost exact contemporaries, they were born less than a year apart and died prematurely in their early fifties. Both consciously sought to elevate the potential of film as a serious art form, in the process developing unique, instantly recognisable approaches to their chosen medium. Both were ranked high among their country’s greatest filmmakers from the moment their debut features premiered. And, perhaps most intriguingly, both chose to make their second features about one of their culture’s major visual artists – and in both cases, the artists in question, whether the medieval icon painter Andrei Rublev or the turn-of-the-20th century avant-gardist Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853-1919), have substantial holes in their biographies, a gift for imaginative filmmakers determined to avoid producing conventional biopics.

Of course, the differences are substantial too. Almost the entirety of Andrei Rublev (1966) takes place during a period of self-imposed creative silence on Rublev’s part, a reaction to witnessing the manifold horrors of the era in which he lived; we only get to see his actual art in the closing minutes, when the hitherto black-and-white film suddenly bursts into resplendent colour. By contrast, Csontváry is in colour throughout, the better to showcase not just dozens of the artist’s canvases but also their alleged visual inspiration.

Another major difference, which is where Csontváry definitively breaks free of Rublev’s shadow, is the way that Huszárik and his numerous screenwriters (István Czászár, Péter Dobai and, uncredited, Tibor Gyurkovics and József Tornai) concoct a parallel narrative whereby an actor, known only as Z, has been charged with interpreting Csontváry for a modern audience and has to wrestle with the double challenge of trying to get to grips with convincingly portraying him both as a creative artist and as a human being, while at the same time having to deal with the kind of everyday challenges that Csontváry himself consciously renounced when he went into hermit-like seclusion. On top of that, there are recurring appearances by a bearded man (István Holl), who may or may not be insane, and who equally may or may not be a figment of Z’s understandably overheated imagination.

Although it’s unlikely that Huszárik would have had the chance to see it, Ken Russell’s BBC-produced The Debussy Film from 1965 attempted something similar, in his case the story of the French composer and his saturnine nemesis Pierre Louÿs interwoven with the story of a filmmaker – played by the same actor as Louÿs, Vladek Sheybal – attempting to translate Debussy’s life and creative universe into a different medium. And in 1981, the year after Csontváry’s premiere, Karel Reisz and Harold Pinter interpreted John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman through a similar framing device, in this case paralleling the novel’s own contemporary commentary on its Victorian events. There is, inevitably, something gimmicky about structural devices like this, but in all cases they allowed the filmmakers to delve far deeper into the psyches of their subjects than a more conventional treatment would have facilitated.

Not that Huszárik would ever have been remotely interested in a conventional treatment. By the time Csontváry finally went before the cameras, he’d spent nearly two decades refining an approach to film that was far more poetic than narrative-based, making notable use of abrupt associative cutting to forge unexpected, sometimes flash-cut links between objects, colours and shapes as well as events. (Csontváry’s editor was Éva Kármentő, who also cut several Márta Mészáros films, as well as Pál Gábor’s internationally fêted 1978 film Angi Vera.)

 

Michael Brooke's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the Csontváry booklet which accompanies this release.