2022
video, 65’ (thesis film)

“Some fifty years ago a propaganda report called ‘The Kerényi-Case’ was released nationwide in the Hungarian state media. The film, which was commissioned by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was intended to enforce an inherent fear of western people among Hungarians, particularly of people from West Germany. The film retells the story of a cultural diplomat who has been misled by a German spy supposedly and enumerates the methods of the West’s assumed subversion of the Eastern Bloc. Regardless its widespread media coverage, the story didn’t quite stick in our memory, however it did ruin the life of its protagonist. The film is now archived at the Open Society Archives in Budapest and it is available for research, but not for publishing. I came upon this film when I began my Master’s studies and I was fascinated by its ambiguity that defies its original purpose. Our film uses the dialogue from the original transcript and dramatizes the situation through its technical restrictions and the original film’s framing decisions. It also gets rid of the agenda-driven editing of the original and devotes itself to contradicting it with a single, unedited take.” DM

The starting point for the thesis film Mária Kerényi, 41, July 1970 is a 1970 documentary/propaganda film about a woman arrested for espionage, which the authorities of the time used to stoke up xenophobia, isolation and paranoia in Hungarian society.

Dániel Misota’s work is both a feature film and a re-enactment, as the dialogue is identical to the conversation heard in the original propaganda film, the author used the transcript of the original interview in the Historical Archives of the State Security Services. Thus, the actors—Ágnes Krasznahorkai and Sándor Terhes—perform the original text, replaying Mária Kerényi as the interviewee and Sándor Vértessy as the well-known reporter of the time. However, the consciously constructed structure and perspective of the two films is radically different. The re-enactment does not use the usual cropping technique of reportage films; in addition to introducing the main characters, Misota’s film also reveals the whole interview setting, the entire crew and the process of making the reportage film. Furthermore, in contrast to the dramaturgical and cinematic mechanisms used in the source report—including the prominent editing that reinforced the image of the deceived, misled woman—the interview was recorded in a single sixty-minute take, using deconstructed film language.

Misota, by abandoning the editing technique and instead employing a sustained panning of the camera, subverts both the purposive and didactic layers of meaning of the source report. If we try to think of this difference between the two procedures in terms of some kind of hierarchical opposition, we might say that Misota exchanges the partiality and abruptness of the interruptive cut for the wholeness and lengthiness of the continuous take, which holds the promise of making things visible (e.g. the directedness) that the original film, for reasons of power ideology, did not allow to be seen, because moments that were useless for the regime’s purposes were forcibly and arbitrarily cut out.

In the first fifteen minutes of the film, we only hear the odd, slightly mannered and broken utterances of Mary; we do not see her, only the questioner, thus arousing our curiosity and encouraging us to activate our imagination. Suddenly, interrupting the hitherto silent but tense narrative, a personal question is asked outside the context of the interrogation, while the camera shows Mary for the first time in this moment of confusion. The film later widens its perspective further, gradually introducing the camera and its surroundings, as well as the entire crew. The work, starting with the interviewee, reveals an increasingly extensive and complex picture from the smallest details before returning to the now more vulnerable close-up of the protagonist.

The colour scheme is also deliberately composed; noticeable are Mary’s red sweater, Sándor’s white shirt and the green walls, the colours of the repeatedly evoked Hungarian People’s Republic. The red sweater is also a symbol of Mary’s feigned or real commitment to socialism.

The consistently structured, single long take, the meaningful camera movements, the deliberately staged dramaturgy, the unspoken conflicts and the compositions that momentarily coalesce and then fall apart in slow motion surpass the plot of the story being told in the film. Beyond the conversation, the interview, the interrogation and the visual articulation of the characters’ state of mind and emotions, we also gain insight into the tools of cinematic manipulation and propaganda.