Szindbad, Csontvary and Elegia: five short films (Zoltan Huszarik) 1963 – 1979
Second Run Blu Ray 3x Disc set
The great pleasure of this box set is to discover the remarkable work of a Hungarian director whose films have sadly slipped off the radar. Now thanks to the Hungarian Film Institute’s immaculate 4k restorations on Second Run we can properly evaluate Zoltan Huszarik’s achievements: a mere two features and five shorts from an artist who died at the age of fifty
Being poetic can be a misapplied attribute in cinema but there are directors like say Andrei Tarkovsky whose vision commands our attention without being self-conscious: not surreal artifice but the poetry of an individual’s intensely lived moments set against the natural world. This is also the case with Zoltan Huszarik’s 1971 film Szindbad an adaption of stories by Gyula Krudy. You might assume that a film set in Hungary, during the decadent backcloth of the 19th century Hapsburg Empire, concerning the memories of a rich, bourgeois philanderer might be an excuse for erotic excess. This is far from the case. Szindbad is tender, gentle, elegiac and gracefully understated. A meditation on love, desire and a search for meaning, all free flowingly executed with rapturously sensual images of visual magic, one after another
Szindbad (played with brilliant languorous warmth by Zoltan Latinovits) is, like the Sinbad of the Arabian Nights, a traveller seeking romance and adventure, now turned into a dead, or dying, man lying in the back of a cart, driven only by a horse, going backwards and forwards, across fields by night, journeying in his mind over his relationships with women
In Szindbad’s dream landscape (often akin to Proust) he critically examines himself (“I never loved anything but my vanity”) and assesses what he’s achieved (“It was all indolence…only planning…planning.”) Yet redemption is more important than succumbing to regret or self-pity – note the beautifully lit night scene where Szindbad lies down in a candle-lit field, next to old peasant women, who nestle against him, not with erotic intent, but as part of a healing religious ceremony.
An equally astonishing moment centres round gourmet Szindbad in a restaurant when ordering elaborate dishes. It’s unlike any food sequence in film for its strangely compelling enchantment. Huszarik’s camera zooms in to linger on the food to give it an extraordinary tactile and surreal quality. Huge close-ups of soup had me recalling Godard’s gigantic image of a coffee in a cup in the opening to his 1969 Two or Three Things I Know about Her. But what follows in Szindbad is more original for he dwells on the living texture of food to make us see it anew, making it more real than real and simultaneously dreamlike. Our senses are super-heightened in this other alternate world. And all this is revealed whilst Szindbad asks probing questions to the waiter about his love life!
So many scenes in Szindbad are painterly (Huuszarik wanted to be a painter) as he frames his protagonist and his ex lovers against the backdrop of the seasons. We have summer courtly-like dances of young women, loving partners skating on the winter ice and a mysterious mistress named Duskia who only appears at dusk. All this is accompanied by hypnotic music from Zoltan Jeney, radiant photography by Sandor Sara and the exquisite editing of Huszarik and Mihaly Morell. The effect is affirmative even though this selfish philanderer’s affairs have proved fleeting, fickle and left him melancholic and questioning. Yet such is the warmth of Szindbad’s character and the generosity of Huszarik’s depiction of his women (lovers who in some cases have transitioned into close friends) that the film, although it’s about, amongst many other matters, the temporary nature of male and female desire it remains very human, very forgiving and very wise. Huszarik is sympathetic to all his characters. We really care about their present and past lives as Huszarik eloquently orchestrates time and memory through the reflections of a deceased or not quite (the film leaves us with a pleasing ambiguity) Don Juan.
This is a powerful film of time and memory, with some of the quietest most softly spoken dialogue in a film that I can recall, alongside a sensual imagery that opened up the language of film in the 1970’s: a wonderful poetic achievement that’s universally loved in Hungary and ought to be now revered elsewhere.
Szindbad’s a masterpiece doing what all great books and films do, to change, for a moment, how we experience the world.
I would have liked to have continued with unqualified praise of Huszarik when it comes to his second feature Csontvary but alas this proved to be a major disappointment. It’s not that it’s bad but desperately uneven. A project that suffered from many rewrites, a shift of focus and most of all a re-casting for the role of the artist Tivadar Csontvary Kosztka (1853 -1919). Sadly Zoltan Latinovits, who was set to play him, died in a tragic train accident
The role was then given to the actor Itzhak Fintzi (who looked very like Csontvary) and Huszarik developed the idea that he’s also an actor known as Z (Zoltan Huszarik?) attempting to interpret, for a cinema audience, the struggles within Csontvary’s family life and relationships against his deep spiritual need to be solitary and paint. Fintzi may have looked right but is miscast. In the sense that he never really brings his character to life and it becoming a stubborn cipher in the film. Csontvary was a complex and irascible man who Fintzi makes us feel very little sympathy for (Imagining Zoltan Latinovits in the part presents us with a frustrating what might have been project)
Still Fintzi is convincing in an awkward birthday dinner scene with his mother, and when pitted, with his paintbrush and canvas, against formidable mountains, deserts and waterfalls Huszarek visually captures well a manically fixated artist confronting the forces of nature. That is until Fintzi speaks and launches into some raving rhetoric about madness, creativity and the future of art in Hungary. Then the clichés about art, madness and destiny begin to rain down!
But Csontvary is unlike any conventional biopic of an artist you are likely to see. In his excellent Second Run booklet notes Michael Brooke notes similarities with Ken Russell’s TV film The Debussy Film and Karl Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman when it comes to an actor or fictional filmmaker attempting to translate a artist’s creative universe into a very different medium. It’s very hard to pull this of without it feeling contrived and tricksy. In occasional odd ways Csontvary does partly succeed yet at a cost, for the Z character emotionally keeps us at a forbidding distance. The film’s high art utterances about art and life prove tiresome even when the visual force of Csontvary’s actual paintings grips you. Let’s say I dearly loved Szinbad but only tolerated Csontvary.
Yet all is forgiven with disc three which is the short films of Zoltan Huszariik. Putting his too obviously Kafkaesque student film Grotesszk (1963) to one side, the other shorts are absolutely stunning. Elegia (1965) is a masterly essay on our use and mistreatment of the horse, made 6 years before Szindbad, and flying through Hungarian history. What could easily have been an academic exercise becomes a disturbing and reflective chronicle. Huszarik’s editing and precise eye for landscape, the troubled bodies of frightened horses, stoical faces of farmers, an abbatoir scene recalling Franju’s upsetting Le Sang De Bete and grainy documentary war footage all result in a disconcerting tapestry of thoughts and feelings round equestarian responsibility. Like Szindbad Huszarik’s Elegia is formulating an exciting and original poetic film language.
Three other films Hommage to Old Women (1971) Capriccio (1969) and A Pieacere (As you like it) (1976) contain, amongst other symbolically charged things, intense shots of ageing peasants, real and set up funerals, dressed up snowmen, birds in flight and stark documentary footage of the two world wars and the camps. Their culminative effect being dark, harsh, tragic and witty: both lucid and mysterious essays.
“These people know nothing about the beauty of life, about a good meal, about a good rest. I don’t like the world of today. They say it’s a transitional age. But I never wanted a transitional age. I don’t remember having asked for this life either. I surely didn’t pull any strings. I no longer want to know what’s there for a Hungarian to be happy about.”
Well Szindbad’s reflections may have arrived at an unhappy conclusion. But my conclusion to having sat through these remarkable films is to thank Huszarik for his unique vision of what’s still possible in cinema.
Alan Price©2025.
Szindbad, Csontvary and Elegia: five short films (Zoltan Huszarik) 1963 – 1979
Second Run Blu Ray 3x Disc set
The great pleasure of this box set is to discover the remarkable work of a Hungarian director whose films have sadly slipped off the radar. Now thanks to the Hungarian Film Institute’s immaculate 4k restorations on Second Run we can properly evaluate Zoltan Huszarik’s achievements: a mere two features and five shorts from an artist who died at the age of fifty
Being poetic can be a misapplied attribute in cinema but there are directors like say Andrei Tarkovsky whose vision commands our attention without being self-conscious: not surreal artifice but the poetry of an individual’s intensely lived moments set against the natural world. This is also the case with Zoltan Huszarik’s 1971 film Szindbad an adaption of stories by Gyula Krudy. You might assume that a film set in Hungary, during the decadent backcloth of the 19th century Hapsburg Empire, concerning the memories of a rich, bourgeois philanderer might be an excuse for erotic excess. This is far from the case. Szindbad is tender, gentle, elegiac and gracefully understated. A meditation on love, desire and a search for meaning, all free flowingly executed with rapturously sensual images of visual magic, one after another
Szindbad (played with brilliant languorous warmth by Zoltan Latinovits) is, like the Sinbad of the Arabian Nights, a traveller seeking romance and adventure, now turned into a dead, or dying, man lying in the back of a cart, driven only by a horse, going backwards and forwards, across fields by night, journeying in his mind over his relationships with women
In Szindbad’s dream landscape (often akin to Proust) he critically examines himself (“I never loved anything but my vanity”) and assesses what he’s achieved (“It was all indolence…only planning…planning.”) Yet redemption is more important than succumbing to regret or self-pity – note the beautifully lit night scene where Szindbad lies down in a candle-lit field, next to old peasant women, who nestle against him, not with erotic intent, but as part of a healing religious ceremony.
An equally astonishing moment centres round gourmet Szindbad in a restaurant when ordering elaborate dishes. It’s unlike any food sequence in film for its strangely compelling enchantment. Huszarik’s camera zooms in to linger on the food to give it an extraordinary tactile and surreal quality. Huge close-ups of soup had me recalling Godard’s gigantic image of a coffee in a cup in the opening to his 1969 Two or Three Things I Know about Her. But what follows in Szindbad is more original for he dwells on the living texture of food to make us see it anew, making it more real than real and simultaneously dreamlike. Our senses are super-heightened in this other alternate world. And all this is revealed whilst Szindbad asks probing questions to the waiter about his love life!
So many scenes in Szindbad are painterly (Huuszarik wanted to be a painter) as he frames his protagonist and his ex lovers against the backdrop of the seasons. We have summer courtly-like dances of young women, loving partners skating on the winter ice and a mysterious mistress named Duskia who only appears at dusk. All this is accompanied by hypnotic music from Zoltan Jeney, radiant photography by Sandor Sara and the exquisite editing of Huszarik and Mihaly Morell. The effect is affirmative even though this selfish philanderer’s affairs have proved fleeting, fickle and left him melancholic and questioning. Yet such is the warmth of Szindbad’s character and the generosity of Huszarik’s depiction of his women (lovers who in some cases have transitioned into close friends) that the film, although it’s about, amongst many other matters, the temporary nature of male and female desire it remains very human, very forgiving and very wise. Huszarik is sympathetic to all his characters. We really care about their present and past lives as Huszarik eloquently orchestrates time and memory through the reflections of a deceased or not quite (the film leaves us with a pleasing ambiguity) Don Juan.
This is a powerful film of time and memory, with some of the quietest most softly spoken dialogue in a film that I can recall, alongside a sensual imagery that opened up the language of film in the 1970’s: a wonderful poetic achievement that’s universally loved in Hungary and ought to be now revered elsewhere.
Szindbad’s a masterpiece doing what all great books and films do, to change, for a moment, how we experience the world.
I would have liked to have continued with unqualified praise of Huszarik when it comes to his second feature Csontvary but alas this proved to be a major disappointment. It’s not that it’s bad but desperately uneven. A project that suffered from many rewrites, a shift of focus and most of all a re-casting for the role of the artist Tivadar Csontvary Kosztka (1853 -1919). Sadly Zoltan Latinovits, who was set to play him, died in a tragic train accident
The role was then given to the actor Itzhak Fintzi (who looked very like Csontvary) and Huszarik developed the idea that he’s also an actor known as Z (Zoltan Huszarik?) attempting to interpret, for a cinema audience, the struggles within Csontvary’s family life and relationships against his deep spiritual need to be solitary and paint. Fintzi may have looked right but is miscast. In the sense that he never really brings his character to life and it becoming a stubborn cipher in the film. Csontvary was a complex and irascible man who Fintzi makes us feel very little sympathy for (Imagining Zoltan Latinovits in the part presents us with a frustrating what might have been project)
Still Fintzi is convincing in an awkward birthday dinner scene with his mother, and when pitted, with his paintbrush and canvas, against formidable mountains, deserts and waterfalls Huszarek visually captures well a manically fixated artist confronting the forces of nature. That is until Fintzi speaks and launches into some raving rhetoric about madness, creativity and the future of art in Hungary. Then the clichés about art, madness and destiny begin to rain down!
But Csontvary is unlike any conventional biopic of an artist you are likely to see. In his excellent Second Run booklet notes Michael Brooke notes similarities with Ken Russell’s TV film The Debussy Film and Karl Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman when it comes to an actor or fictional filmmaker attempting to translate a artist’s creative universe into a very different medium. It’s very hard to pull this of without it feeling contrived and tricksy. In occasional odd ways Csontvary does partly succeed yet at a cost, for the Z character emotionally keeps us at a forbidding distance. The film’s high art utterances about art and life prove tiresome even when the visual force of Csontvary’s actual paintings grips you. Let’s say I dearly loved Szinbad but only tolerated Csontvary.
Yet all is forgiven with disc three which is the short films of Zoltan Huszariik. Putting his too obviously Kafkaesque student film Grotesszk (1963) to one side, the other shorts are absolutely stunning. Elegia (1965) is a masterly essay on our use and mistreatment of the horse, made 6 years before Szindbad, and flying through Hungarian history. What could easily have been an academic exercise becomes a disturbing and reflective chronicle. Huszarik’s editing and precise eye for landscape, the troubled bodies of frightened horses, stoical faces of farmers, an abbatoir scene recalling Franju’s upsetting Le Sang De Bete and grainy documentary war footage all result in a disconcerting tapestry of thoughts and feelings round equestarian responsibility. Like Szindbad Huszarik’s Elegia is formulating an exciting and original poetic film language.
Three other films Hommage to Old Women (1971) Capriccio (1969) and A Pieacere (As you like it) (1976) contain, amongst other symbolically charged things, intense shots of ageing peasants, real and set up funerals, dressed up snowmen, birds in flight and stark documentary footage of the two world wars and the camps. Their culminative effect being dark, harsh, tragic and witty: both lucid and mysterious essays.
“These people know nothing about the beauty of life, about a good meal, about a good rest. I don’t like the world of today. They say it’s a transitional age. But I never wanted a transitional age. I don’t remember having asked for this life either. I surely didn’t pull any strings. I no longer want to know what’s there for a Hungarian to be happy about.”
Well Szindbad’s reflections may have arrived at an unhappy conclusion. But my conclusion to having sat through these remarkable films is to thank Huszarik for his unique vision of what’s still possible in cinema.
Alan Price©2025.
By Alan Price • film, year 2025 • Tags: Alan Price, film