Like how its larger Eastern Bloc sister industry, the USSR, often gets its aesthetic debates boiled down to a massive leap between the silent Montage theorists to Tarkovsky with smatterings of Socialist Realism in between, Hungarian cinema is even more flattened in the narrative of its development. To Western audiences, the Hungarian cinema is Miklós Jancsó and Béla Tarr. Both filmmakers demonstrate a flowing visual prowess and long-take aesthetic, becoming auteurs par excellence of the time-image. A close examination of Tarr’s mise-en-scene, though, leaves little in common with Jancsó’s beyond their stalwart dedication to letting images unfurl rather than being constructed. Yet Tarr’s cinema is more contained than Jancsó’s sprawling and grandiose presentations of history. Tarr’s films are ones of empty streets and decay, and when he does have the chance to shoot larger crowds, his camera gets in close to focus on the actions of individuals within them rather than pretend to simultaneously encompass all of reality within his frames.
Having only a cursory understanding of Hungarian cinema myself, Márta Mészáros stands as a missing link between Jancsó and Tarr. Mészáros, who was divorced from Jancsó in 1973 after 13 years of marriage, separates herself cinematically from her husband by focusing on people’s lives rather than making them merely as the blocks that define an era. A film like Mészáros’s Adoption—always staying close to the lead, Kata (Katalin Berek), and her subjectivity—is anathema to the sweeping scope of Jancsó’s The Red and the White, which follows coldly moves between perspectives in the Russian Civil War as groups of soldiers and civilians keep crossing paths together.
Adoption—despite being about a woman in her 40s, on the cusp of menopause but still wanting children—isn’t an “issue” film. Instead, Mészáros weaves something much more human, much more tender. Kata, a woodworker by trade, catches the interest of a group of teenage girls who are in-and-out of foster care. One of them, Anna (Gyöngyvér Vigh), asks Kata if she can rent a room with her for her and her boyfriend, as their outdoor rendezvous have become untenable in the wintertime. Mészáros films their conversation in loose close-up, deliberately matching the speed of their moving bodies from a swivel head, the characters’ faces lit in black and white with the gentle white reflections of the signature overcast Hungarian sun. Kata, while her own love life is in unrequited shambles, is able to find motherhood as a stand-in for Anna as she tries to work around parental consent laws to let Anna marry her boyfriend.
To say Mészáros’s style of filmmaking is “better” than Jancsó’s is a matter of taste, although these days I find myself much more drawn to her intimacy rather than the didacticism of Jancsó. Moreover, there is something that feels distinctly modern in Mészáros’s filmmaking. This is in part due to Tarr, whose landscapes transpose communist collapse into some in-between temporality, neither past, nor present, nor future, but somehow again all at once. This makes the 1975 of Adoption feel like it could’ve been made in 2025, even more so because Mészáros’s style of realism, of deceptively simple camera movements masking brilliant staging in her clear and confident black and white images, seems like the exact kind of thing so many trying to win the Big Three European festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, the latter of which Mészáros did actually win with Adoption) aspire to be.
Mészáros, too, has a more feminist process in constructing her films compared to the more domineeringly masculine urges of Jancsó and Tarr’s formalism; Mészáros eschews that in favor of something liberating through its approach to the interpersonal. Take the opening sequence in Adoption of Kata awaking in her house. The morning light’s kept at bay until she opens her blinds, engaging in the quick domestic routines of the work day starting. Contrast this with the second shot in Tarr’s Sátántangó, where Futaki (Miklós Székely B.) is awoken by the bells. Tarr’s camera holds on Futaki’s window, with the aperture slowly opening to simulate the effect of dawn rushing in with the sound. While compositionally, Tarr is much closer to Mészáros than he is Jancsó, his direction asserts domination over the audience; it emphasizes the oppressiveness of the environment. In Kata’s case, she’s obliged to get up and go to work, but she’s the one letting the light in. Mészáros presents characters trapped within their conditions of bureaucratic and working lives, yet with her camera she finds everything in between the mandates and obligations. Mészáros focuses in on the small interactions, the way that people surprise each other, or give unassuming charity, or the way that people hurt each other in almost imperceptible ways. Mészáros’s cinema is one of life.