PRESENTS
the
WITNESS a Tanú DIRECTED BY
PÉTER BACSÓ
1969
WORLD PREMIER OF THE 4K RESTORED ORIGINAL UNCENSORED VERSION
the
WITNESS a Tanú 1969
4K RESTORED ORIGINAL UNCENSORED VERSION WITH OUTTAKES
DIRECTED BY PÉTER BACSÓ SCREENPLAY BY PÉTER BACSÓ DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JÁNOS ZSOMBOLYAI MUSIC GYÖRGY VUKÁN SOUND KÁROLY PELLER ART DIRECTOR TAMÁS VAYER COSTUME DESIGN KATALIN JÁN CAST FERENC KÁLLAI, LAJOS ŐZE, ZOLTÁN FÁBRI, LILI MONORI, BÉLA BOTH, KÁROLY BITSKEY, IDA VERSÉNYI, LÁSZLÓ VÁMOS, GEORGETTE METZRADT, GYÖRGY KÉZDY, JÓZSEF PECSENKE GENRE SATIRE PRODUCTION MAFILM STUDIO 1, 1969 TECHNICAL SPEC COLOUR, 111 MIN FORMAT 2.35:1, 4K RESTORED DIGITAL COLOUR GRADING SUPERVISED BY TAMÁS ANDOR DOP (HSC)
THE PLOT It is now 30 years since the change of regime started in Hungary. Nothing characterizes the ousted socialist dictatorship better than Péter Bacsó’s biting satire The Witness filmed in 1969, which became a cult movie in Hungary despite the fact that (or precisely because) it was sealed up in the cans by the Kádár regime for ten years.
A tanú/The Witness is set in the Rákosi era during the 1950s. Dyke-reeve József Pelikán lives with his large family far from civilization in a small house on the dyke. It is his job to monitor the water level of the Danube. One day he comes across a poacher fisherman who turns out to be an old friend, Zoltán Dániel, who was made a minister of state in 1949. In 1944, the two of them had battled against the fascist Arrow Cross party, and Pelikán had hidden the one-time resistance fighter in his cellar, precisely where he now has pork sides of an illegally slaughtered pig concealed. When the State Security Force (ÁVO) turns up in response to an anonymous tip, it is the minister himself who betrays his friend and reveals his one-time hiding place to the police. After this, the naive Pelikán finds himself caught up in a series of incomprehensible events. Pelikán is driven in a secretive black limousine from the prison to the managing directorates of an amusement park, swimming pool and then orangery, in order that comrade Virág, who is pulling all the strings in the background, can eventually ask a big favour of him: will Pelikán be the key witness in a show trial against his friend, Zoltán Dániel, who stands accused of spying and treason. Pelikán, a simple person, is ideologically insufficiently ‘developed’ for lying. It proves hopeless teaching him the trial text he has to stick to, the charge is so absurd that he forgets his role and himself ends up in prison, for the fourth time. The day of execution arrives. However, in vain does he shout for the executioner, the prison director congratulates him on winning his freedom and Pelikán returns to the dyke.
PÉTER BACSÓ “József Pelikán, that’s me” “I feel that our past and our character are very similar. I also started as an absolute loyalist in 1945, I believed in the socialist utopia and I was a fighter for its ideal.” (András Gervai: The Witnesses. Film – History. Saxum, Budapest, 2004. 101.) Péter Bacsó, Kossuth and Balázs Béla Prize-winning director, screenwriter, lyricist, studio director, Master of Hungarian Moving Pictures, and ‘institution’ in the history of Hungarian film. The list of his activities as script consultant, ideas man, screenwriter, studio director and producer is inexhaustibly rich. He had a lion’s share in the creation of numerous outstanding works. As screenwriter and script consultant he collaborated in the production of such pinnacles of Hungarian filmmaking as Zoltán Fábri’s Édes Anna/Anna, Két félidő a pokolban/Two Times in Hell and
A Pál utcai fiúk /The Boys of Paul Street, Károly Makk’s Liliomfi/Liliomfi, Szerelem/Love, Egy erkölcsös éjszaka/A Very Moral Night, Macskajáték/ Catsplay, András Kovács’s Nehéz emberek/Difficult People and Zoltán Várkonyi’s Simon Menyhért születése/The Birth of Menyhért Simon. He was born in Kosice in 1928. His mother was the Hungarian writer Boris Palotai. His parents divorced and in 1940 he and his mother escaped the deportations in the countryside by moving to Budapest. Bacsó studied at the Barcsay Secondary School, Budapest. From 1946, he attended courses at the College of Theatre and Film, learning to be a theatre director, but Géza Radványi, founder of the Film Academy, invited him to join the first film director’s class. He took part in the shooting of Valahol
Európában/Somewhere in Europe, and then he was appointed secretary of the Árpád Horváth Folk College. As assistant on the film Úttörők/
Pioneers by Károly Makk, which was banned in 1949, he was relieved of all functions and posted to the central dramaturgy department of the film factory. He maintained contact with film writers in the period when the censor demanded they rewrite every screenplay and take secondary shots in order to reformulate characters. In the 1950s he was a script consultant and screenwriter.
For quite some time he could only work as a script consultant because of his role in the Revolution of 1956. He directed 33 full length feature films and TV series. His first film about youth still fascinates with its freshness (Nyáron egyszerű/No Problems in Summer, 1963). Szerelmes
biciklisták/Cyclists in Love (1965) featuring the Illés band, and the New Wave Fejlövés/Fatal Shot (1970) filmed with famous rock singers, Kati Kovács and Charlie Horváth, became cult films. He gained international fame with his film Nyár a hegyen/Summer on the Hill (1967) processing the war and internment camps in Modernist style. The best-known work in his oeuvre, The Witness (1969) depicting the show trials of the 1950s, became a symbol of the era. (“Life is not a cream cake… A touch green, a touch sour, but at least it’s ours… I won’t start an argument… The international situation is heightening…”) These wisecracks from the film banned for ten years but still, in the end, screened are quoted even by those who didn’t see the movie. He analysed this era also in a biographical-like dramatic form in Tegnapelőtt/A Day Before Yesterday (1981), Sztálin menyasszonya/Stalin’s Bride (1990), and in operetta form in …Te rongyos élet!/Oh, Bloody Life! (1983). He directed a canning factory musical (Szikrázó lányok/Dashing Girls) and historical films of various genres (Titána, Titiánia/Titania, Titania or The Night of the Replicants and Hány az óra, Vekker úr?/What’s the Time, Mr. Clock?). In 1995, at the urging of friends, he made the change-of-regime adventures of dyke-reeve Pelikán (Megint tanú/The Witness Again), and in 2001 he shot a movie (Hamvadó cigarettavég/Smouldering Cigarette) about Katalin Karády, the greatest diva of pre-war film production.
SHOOTING, CENSURE, BANS “Why does history go like this? In order that humanity parts from its past
of ‘I’m angry at you, and not against you’, while Péter Bacsó – in the
happily.”
interest of having the film screened – was willing to make several cuts
The script and the film start with this saying of Karl Marx.
and insertions, according to notes he wrote to János Tárnok, who worked
One could not find a more apposite quote to characterize the desire
in the film directorate, on 2 December 1969.
Bacsó had to settle accounts with the teething problems of communism
“I cut the entire prison scene of Zoltán Dániel - Pelikán, so by doing this
through the cathartic impact of laughter at the time of reform communism
I make it impossible to draw even the most tenuous connection to the
and the New Economic Mechanism. The concept and screenplay of the
Rajk trial.”
film were realized in a period of turmoil when the reform endeavours
In the scene, Zoltán Dániel (Fábri) says to Pelikán: “Dániel; Look, Jóska...
of the 1960s culminated in the events throughout Europe and in Paris
I certainly did not end up here by accident... One can be guilty even when
of 1968. Society was transformed Europe-wide and people began to
one does not know about it.” The figure of Zoltán Dániel is the only sombre
think differently about power, history, family, lifestyle and culture. The
character in the satire dissolving the fears and absurdities of the era in
invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the consequences of this in Hungary,
humour. The authorities were concerned about any associations to Rajk,
halted reforms, regression in politics and in culture, determined the fate
minister of interior found guilty at the first show trial, because a mass
of the film. In this ‘two-faced’ period, the screenplay was approved with
demonstration at his reburial on 6 October 1956 largely contributed to
the cooperation of friend and studio director Szilárd Újhelyi, and György
the outbreak of the ‘56 Revolution.
Aczél, the all-powerful figure of Hungarian culture policy, assigned “one
Bacsó considered the reason for the ban to be that the dictatorship could
of the most reliable comrades”, Péter Rényi, president of the Film Council,
not bear to be laughed at.
to the shooting. According to Sándor Révész, author of a biography on
He told András Gervai that masses of people saw the film in the
Aczél, the culture czar considered The Witness to be an ‘experimental
communist youth association (KISZ) camps and it was also screened for
film’ similarly to films of the Balázs Béla Studio founded by him, which
foreigners. Finally, in 1979 they started to show the film legally in Tinódi
had no guarantee they would ever be screened. The shooting and the
cinema through the intercession of Imre Pozsgay, then culture minister,
series of shutdowns, the cutting of certain scenes and inserted shots –
and in 1981 it was shown at Cannes at the special request of Gilles Jacob,
the squabble between authority and art – was typical of the ‘bargaining’
Cannes festival director, in the Un Certain Regard section. This made
in the late 1960s. The leadership suggested behaviour along the lines
international distribution of the film in 32 countries possible.
“Perhaps the funniest of these disasters is the one which leads, by irresistible wonderland logic, to his apotheosis. Appointed director of the Orange Research Institute, he is expected to confound the imperialist lackeys by producing a home-grown fruit. Come the great day, however, only one orange is ripe and is unfortunately eaten by his son, so a lemon has to be hastily substituted. Assured that this is indeed the New Hungarian Orange at the ceremonial tasting, the Leader puckers his lips, pronounces it good, and pins a medal on the nervous director.” (Observer Review/Arts. Orange and Lemon. By Tom Milne, 1 August 1982) Bacsó, who wrote the script, makes the same point: “I’m very well aware of the tragedy at the centre of each comically presented phenomenon of the period, and I wouldn’t like that to be absent from my film. My aim is not to make fun of the absurdities of the period, but to spotlight, through the distorting vision of comedy, the tragic contradiction of that time… Once folly and absurdities are ridiculed, there is slightly less chance of their being repeated. Bacsó is frank that he was himself ‘as much a loyal and naive believer in, and participant of, those years as the characters in the film’. At one point in the film there is a terrible patriotic song, Comrades with Stalin’s name…” The words were written, 30 years ago, by Péter Bacsó. (The Times. The Priceless gift of mocking horror. By David Robinson. 30 July 1982) “The Witness is something like a collaboration among Kafka, Orwell, Pinter and Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Svejk). It’s a blend of bureaucratic nightmare, Big Brotherism and evasive ambiguity that might have been sinister were it not for the comic, state-implemented misadventures of its bungling protagonist, József Pelikán.” (Newsday Garden City, N.Y. by Alex Keneas, 14 July 1982)
“In the Witness, however, I wanted to make these past events funny, because I think that if something is shown to be ridiculous, it cannot be repeated. This was a difficult film to release, because the theme was dealt with comically. It is easier, in fact, to make a serious dramatic film than to make a comic film, because the politicians are very nervous about comedy, they have no sense of humor.” (Variety. Politicians Have No Sense of Humor. An Interview with Péter Bacsó. By Gary Crowdus)
THE RESTORED VERSION This version was reconstructed by the Hungarian National Film FundFilm Archive on the basis of the only uncensored version surviving in the stock of MOKÉP, film distributor company during the age of socialism. This version differs from the version screened in 1979 in that it still contains the cell scene referring to László Rajk, and the conversation between Pelikán, Gulyás and the Priest is extended, where the Priest contrasts the millennial stability of the church with the newly-born communist system. In the director’s version, the inspiration behind the film, the quote of Karl Marx, appears at the beginning of the film, whereas in the standardized version it is at the end. The scene ‘comrade Virág and Pelikán on the tram’, although shot, does not appear in this original version. This was a sort of explanatory frame in the film, generally made at the request of the censor. In the era, such frames were inserted in other films as well, as in the cases of Feldobott kő/Upthrown Stone and Tízezer nap/
Ten Thousand Sun, in order to distance the story, give the viewer the possibility of an overview, and thus help get the film shown. “Just a single copy survived in print form, thus it was not possible to duplicate it. It lacks the highly dramatic scene when József Pelikán visits Zoltán Dániel on death row. This was cut out of the film and destroyed, and later on I could not reconstruct it,” Péter Bacsó told András Gervai when talking about the surviving copy we found. (The Witnesses, 105.) While the film’s content was being assembled, the Film Archive discovered the negative outtakes of the censored parts during processing of werk materials received from Mafilm, which could then be integrated into the film in full. The reconstruction and the full, 4K restoration of the film was carried out at Hungarian Filmlab as part of the long-term digitalization and film restoration programme of the Hungarian National Film Fund, supervised by Film Archive. Written and edited by Eszter Fazekas restoration manager Hungarian National Film Fund-Film Archive
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Photos: Sándor Domonkos