2018
video, 10’13”
Miklós Erhardt’s “…that I won’t become who I wanted to be” is a re-enacted monologue from István Dárday’s 42-minute-long, 1975 documentary The Raggedy Princess,[1] in which we hear a young anonymous Roma worker candidly speak about his life. Erhardt ironically claims that the genre of the film is “complaining”—as to how one fails to achieve what one wanted in life, blaming the circumstances and, to a lesser extent, oneself.[2]
Dárday’s film introduces a cultural campaign of the Kádár era in which low-budget theatre performances were offered to workers’ hostels all around the country, in order to raise the morale of the working class. The documentary, that amplifies the absurdity of the situation with its distanced manner, includes scenes from a shabby performance of My Fair Lady, cutaway shots of the audience, as well as interviews with the actors, the director and the officials responsible for the campaign. Two members of the audience are also asked about their experience: an elderly worker who is duly enthusiastic at expressing his gratitude to the organisers, and the young, touchingly sincere man, whose words stand out from the fabric of the film and have nothing to do with either the performance, or the communist cultural mission in general. He speaks with complete frankness about his own failure and bitter resignation, uttering repeatedly the phrase that Erhardt chose as the title of his work: “…that I won’t become who I wanted to be”. This strikingly personal statement seems to transcend the scope of the documentary and raises to universal value, pointing to the general incompatibility of society and the individuum.
In his re-enactment, Erhardt strives to complete mimesis; in addition to his choices of make-up, clothing, gestures and intonation, also the camera and sound settings imitate the original black-and-white interview. Erhardt, like the worker, speaks in a performative situation to an invisible interviewer, whose questions—audible in the original film—here are replaced by subtitles. The work alludes to the common tendency of artistic re-enactments to present stories that have been omitted from official memory, as well as narratives of marginalized social groups, from a different perspective. Erhardt consciously assumes the role of mediator, but, precisely through the performative act of repetition or iteration, he also seeks to achieve a complete but unrealisable identification. Thus he does not merely represent his subject matter but through the artistic form he has chosen, also makes it tangible and present—for us, too.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxX65s4qV78&t=1s (23’05” to 37’10”)
[2] Kókai, Károly: Today I am somehow interested in smaller things – Conversation with Miklós Erhardt, A Mű, 22 February 2022., https://amu.hvg.hu/2022/02/22/ma-valahogy-kisebb-dolgok-erdekel-nek-beszelgetes-erhardt-miklossal/
[3] Gelencsér, Gábor: Ki békül? Erhardt Miklós: „…hogy már nem leszek az, aki szerettem volna lenni”, Pannonhalmi Szemle, 28. évf. 4. sz. 2020, pp. 134–138.