Kádár-Era Satire

Hungarian Film & Television

Course 1 · Chapter 5 · Kádár-Era Cinema & Satire

From the 1960s to 1989 Hungary was run by János Kádár's government, with a policy that gave citizens more material comfort and cultural room than most of the Eastern bloc, summed up in the phrase "goulash communism" (check). Film in these years was not only the New Wave of Chapter 4. It included popular comedies, historical epics, young directors' experiments and one of the most famous banned films in Hungarian history, Péter Bacsó's The Witness. This chapter looks at how comedy and allegory worked, and how the system limited and supported them. Names and dates are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Kádár Compromise

The bargain

After 1956 the government offered stability and rising living standards in return for political quiet, and it summed up its attitude in the saying "whoever is not against us is with us" (check the attribution). Culture was supported, and limits were applied selectively.

The "three Ts"

Works were informally sorted into those supported, tolerated or banned, a scheme discussed in Hungarian Music 7 and Hungarian Literature 7 (check the term and how it applied to film).

The audience

Cinema attendance remained large through the 1960s and fell with the spread of television and, later, video (check the figures; see Chapter 7).

A Banned Satire: A tanú

Point (check each)Note
DirectorPéter Bacsó (1928 to 2009).
The filmA tanú (The Witness), a comedy about a humble dyke-keeper, József Pelikán, who is repeatedly pulled into absurd schemes by officials in the Stalinist early 1950s.
HistoryMade in 1969 and held back; it was shown in 1979 and became a cult film (check the dates and who decided).
Why it workedIt satirised the Rákosi era (the Stalinist early 1950s) while the Kádár government was distancing itself from that period, which helps to explain how it could be made at all and why it was nonetheless shelved (check).
AfterlifeLines from the film passed into everyday speech and it is still widely quoted (check).
Satire of the past, or of the present? Because the film's target was the early 1950s, officials could allow it to be made and still find its tone dangerous when it was ready, since viewers could apply its jokes to their own day. Later accounts differ about how far the delay was a ban, a decision to wait, or an accident of timing (check the sources). A careful summary is that it was made in 1969, shown with delay in 1979, and became popular after that.

Other Strands

  • Popular comedies and adaptations. The historical adventure Egri csillagok (Stars of Eger, 1968), based on Géza Gárdonyi's novel, was a great popular success, and Zoltán Fábri's A Pál utcai fiúk (The Boys of Paul Street, 1969) was nominated for an Academy Award (check both).
  • Young documentary and fiction filmmakers. The Béla Balázs Studio and its documentary tradition produced directors such as Gyula Gazdag, whose A határozat (The Resolution, 1972) examined a local political meeting in a pseudo-documentary manner (check).
  • The 1980s. Younger directors such as Péter Gothár (Idő van, Time Stands Still, 1982; check) and Gábor Bódy experimented in style and subject, and showed a generation's view of the Kádár years.
  • Comedy as release. Comedies about work, housing and officials gave audiences a way to laugh at daily frustrations without direct political statement (check examples).
  • Co-productions and exports. Hungarian studios also made co-productions and foreign service work, which brought in income and contacts (check; see Chapter 9).
A British comparison The British satire boom of the early 1960s, with That Was The Week That Was, was a similar flowering of political comedy, but it ran in a free press. A closer parallel is the long British life of Ealing comedies, which poked gentle fun at officialdom, whereas the Hungarian examples had to be made with state funding and under review (check).
Check the details Titles, dates and the circumstances of banned or delayed films are from general knowledge, and accounts differ. Verify with film histories, archive records and interviews, and take care before claiming that a film "was banned" when the sources describe a delay.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain the Kádár compromise and how it shaped what films could be made, using the idea of supported, tolerated and banned.

→ Solution
Exercise 2

Tell the history of A tanú in three or four sentences, marking what is documented and what is disputed.

→ Solution
Exercise 3

Discuss how comedy can act as both release and criticism, giving one example from this chapter.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

  • The system: "goulash communism", supported, tolerated, banned (check)
  • The satire: A tanú, made 1969, shown 1979 (check)
  • Other strands: popular adaptations, Béla Balázs Studio, 1980s experiments
  • Method: comedy, allegory and the past as cover
  • The caution: "banned" and "delayed" are different claims