Iron Curtain (65 page)

While he was in Budapest, Pudovkin sat in on many script discussions at the Ministry of Culture. Most of his contributions focused on a given movie’s political and social themes, rather than visual or technical issues. He chided
the scriptwriters of a film about peasants joining a cooperative movement for their focus on the moral rather than the practical and material advantages of the cooperative: “This is a serious deficiency.” He proposed the creation of new characters and plot twists that would dramatize the advantages of the cooperative. There might be a child, he suggested, for example, who was devastated by his father’s refusal to join the cooperative and who feared his future might be compromised as a result.
⁷⁰
On another occasion, Pudovkin criticized a film because a worker died in the final scene, a conclusion he found insufficiently optimistic. In both cases his critique was accepted without argument. The written account of one of his meetings ended with a single sentence: “We accept the proposals of Comrade Pudovkin and we will correct the movie as suggested.”
⁷¹

Pudovkin also worked directly on several Hungarian films. One of these was
Katalin’s Marriage
(
Kis Katalin Házassága
), a film about two factory workers, Katalin and Jóska, whose relationship begins to falter when Katalin loses interest in her work and her studies and begins to mope around the house. Instead of helping her, Jóska concentrates on his own work. Katalin moves back home with her mother but is eventually “saved” by Barna, the party secretary at the factory, who teaches her how she can become a shock worker, a good student, and even a party member. Eventually Jóska realizes it is he who must learn from her. As the scriptwriter explained at the time, “The film shows how both of them are put back on track by the party, and it also shows how it is possible that one member of the couple works in the factory shop and the other in an office.”
⁷²
Following the principle that the “best” socialist realist films contained multiple lessons, the movie also contained an episode involving a saboteur. From
Katalin’s Marriage
viewers were thus meant to learn about the leading role of the party; the significance of work competitions; the need to battle against reaction; the value of different sorts of work; and the importance of marriage. They also got to see some scenes shot outdoors, outside the studio. As Pudovkin put it, “the movie has to show the truth of life.”
⁷³

Any Hungarian filmmaker who wanted to direct or write a film had to work within these kinds of parameters. The only other option was to leave the profession—or starve. After the disastrous cancellation of
Song of the Corn Field
, Szőts was invited to become a state director:

And thus the year 1951 saw the release of
A Strange Marriage
(
Különös házasság
), the story of a man forced to marry a girl who had been made pregnant by a priest—a Hungarian classic, which happened to fit nicely into the party’s campaign against the “reactionary clergy.” In the same year, Mafilm released
Underground Colony
(
Gyarmat a föld alatt
), a movie about American sabotage of Hungarian oil refineries. The hero is the secret policeman who uncovers the sabotage, and the film ends happily, with the nationalization of the Hungarian oil industry. At about the same time, the East Germans were exploring anticapitalist and anti-American themes too, notably in
The Council of the Gods
(
Der Rat der Götter
), whose plot revolved around the collusion between American chemical companies and I. G. Farben, the Nazi chemical company that produced the Zyklon-B gas used for mass murders, and thus between American officials and the Nazis.

Yet the harsh systems of control over filmmaking put in place by Pudovkin in Budapest, by the Soviet authorities in Berlin, and briefly by
communists in Warsaw did not last. Directors and scriptwriters initially agreed to make socialist realist movies because there was no choice. But as soon as it was possible, they began searching for ways around the rules. In later years, directors of Eastern European films and plays would raise the non-verbal “joke”—the unspoken visual political commentary, comprehensible to viewers but invisible to script-reading censors—into something close to an art form of its own.
Andrzej Wajda, one of the founders of postwar Polish cinema, notes about filmmakers in Poland:

Wajda’s film
Ashes and Diamonds
(
Popiół i diament
) contains, for example, a scene in which two characters sit at a bar and set glasses of vodka on fire, each time repeating a name. Nobody says that these are memorial candles for friends who died in the Warsaw Uprising, an event that was by then taboo, but audiences understood immediately what was happening. Hungarian cinema would eventually develop similarly elaborate metaphors, perhaps most famously in
Mephisto
, István Szabó’s modern-day
Faust
. Set in Nazi Germany,
Mephisto
tells the story of an actor who agrees to collaborate with national socialism in order to advance his career. The audience watching the movie knew that this story was also a commentary on the recent communist past: actors in Stalinist Hungary had collaborated in order to advance their careers too.

Hints and allusions could also be found in plays, both contemporary and classic, and directors made full use of them. In communist Poland, even Shakespeare became a form of contemporary political commentary. The line “Denmark is a prison” could be understood as an allusion to the Soviet occupation of Poland. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” had the same force. Even the division of King Lear’s kingdom could be seen as a metaphor for the division of postwar Poland and the loss of the eastern territories.
⁷⁶

Odd though it sounds, genuine realism—spontaneity, authentic-sounding dialogue, and scenes viewers would recognize from their own lives—was also a tool that could be carefully deployed against the socialist realism imported from the USSR. This technique paid off in a Hungarian film with the unpromising title
State Department Store
(
Állami Áruház
). Though there was nothing radical about the plot or the setting—a state department store, in fact—the film included a few charming scenes by the Danube, during which people jump in and out of the water, splash one another, and generally move about in a messy and disorganized fashion, just as in real life and not as in a carefully constructed May Day parade. In another scene, customers mob the department store when they hear a shipment of goods has arrived—a familiar sight to filmgoers at the time—though fortunately truckloads of goods arrive in time to sate them. Everyone watching would have known that this was ridiculous: in reality there would have been no truckloads of goods, and thus it became a kind of insiders’ joke.

Wajda’s first film,
A Generation
(
Pokolenie
), released in 1955, deployed this kind of “realism” too. Though it contained several scenes that might well have been designed to please communist bureaucrats, it also included several that seemed spontaneous, as indeed they were. Several of the young actors, including a teenaged Roman Polanski, had been part of the resistance as children and remembered the occupation well. When they scampered up and down stairways and hid in alleys from the
Gestapo, they were simply playing themselves and behaving as they remembered behaving during the occupation. Audiences understood that too.
⁷⁷

In due course, the most obviously Stalinist films became embarrassments to their directors, some of whom denounced or disavowed them after Stalin’s death in 1953. The crudest High Stalinist paintings, sculpture, poetry, fiction, and architecture met the same fate.
Wisława Szymborska, a distinguished, Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, rarely spoke about her Stalinist poetry and didn’t include it in later collected editions of her work. The very titles became embarrassing: “Lenin”; “Welcoming the Construction of a
Socialist City”; “The Youth Building
Nowa Huta”; “Our Worker Speaks About the Imperialists.” Her elegy for Stalin—“That Day” (“Ten Dzień”)—includes the immortal lines “This is the party, the vision of humanity / This is the party, the power of people and conscience / Nothing from His life will be forgotten / His party will push aside the gloom.” She went on to write beautiful and enigmatic poems about many other subjects, and in later years avoided discussion of this difficult era altogether.
⁷⁸

But even after it had passed, the moment of High Stalinism left its mark on the culture of the region. East German painters went on arguing about definitions of “realism” for decades. Ágnes Heller, one of Hungary’s most distinguished philosophers, remained focused on the problem of totalitarianism most of her life.
Milan Kundera, the exiled Czech writer, wrote stories about censorship, secrets, and collaboration. The best-known novel by the East German writer Christa Wolf,
The Quest for Christa T.
, is a story about a woman’s struggle against the pressure to conform.
⁷⁹
Wajda kept returning to themes of totalitarianism and resistance throughout his life, whether during the French Revolution or the
Second World War. For myriad reasons—historical, political, psychological—some Eastern European artists did agree to become “socialist realists” between 1949 and 1953. But they, their contemporaries, and their successors often spent the rest of their lives trying to understand why, and how, this had been possible.

LIKE SO MANY photographs of its era, the carefully posed picture was intended to educate. On the left, a young woman with her hair tied back in a peasant scarf stands with her hands behind her back, listening attentively. She wears a gingham shirt and overalls. On the right, another woman, her foot placed firmly on a step, points into the middle
distance. She wears a more formal skirt and blouse, carries a pencil and paper, and is giving instructions. Both women are members of an all-female construction brigade, and they are hard at work on the new steel mill in the new city of Sztálinváros—Stalintown. The woman on the right with the pencil is Zsófia Tevan, an engineer and architect. The woman on the left in the gingham blouse is Júlia Kollár, a bricklayer.

Kollár had arrived in Sztálinváros in 1951. The daughter of peasant farmers, she finished school at the age of thirteen just after the war and then went immediately to work—“at that time we accepted any job that was offered to us”—eventually making her way to a construction site in the town of Mohács, near the Yugoslav border in southern Hungary, where work had begun on a major steel mill. In the summer of 1949, special courses were organized in Mohács for unskilled workers like Kollár. She learned how to mix mortar and how to lay bricks. She also joined the communist youth movement, by then known as the League of Working Youth (Dolgozó Ifjúság Szövetsége, or DISZ). But after only a few months, work at Mohács came to an abrupt halt. The authorities announced that the building site would be moved to the village of Dunapentele, situated along the Danube in central Hungary. All of the Mohács workers and supervisors were invited to move as well.

Kollár accepted, received five more months of training at the Construction Ministry in Budapest, and arrived at the new construction site in the spring of 1951. At first, she was shocked by the conditions. In Mohács, she had lived in a house with her mother and her siblings, but in Dunapentele the young workers slept in tents and makeshift dormitories: “There were five or six people in a single room, people were sleeping in bunk beds.” She almost gave up and went home, but was convinced to stay by Tevan, her work supervisor.

Unusually, Tevan had her own apartment: “There was a hostel for engineers but since everybody was a man, I got a separate room in a half-ready building. The walls were not plastered, the room was so damp that I had to sleep with my clothes on and by the morning all my clothes had become wet.” But the apartment did have indoor plumbing and a small kitchen, and Tevan lived alone. Though she didn’t tell Kollár at the time, her fiancé was then in prison, having been swept up with dozens of others in the wake of the Rajk trial. She invited Kollár to stay with her, and the two women lived together until Kollár married a year later.