Reluctant feminism
Film still from Renata Gąsiorowska's Pussy; courtesy of goEast
The Symposium section of goEast is often seen as an opportunity to include academics and researchers in the festival dynamics, yet their work in Wiesbaden seems to occupy a layer of knowledge that goes beyond the interest of the typical event coverage. Without the historical comprehension of the processes that led to the rise of so many artistic and political waves in Central and Eastern Europe, though, one cannot really comprehend what moves these waves, and where to. This is why we are so thrilled that Rohan Berry Crickmar had the time and the courage to delve into the Reluctant Feminism sidebar, and came back with an amazing exchange on Hungarian cinema and feminism with Beata Hock, one of this year's Symposium speakers.
What makes goEast such an intriguing fixture on the film calendar for any enthusiasts and researchers in the region is the fact that it combines a film festival and industry set-up with an academic conference. This year’s Symposium was a real labour-of-love for the triumvirate of German-based academics Barbara Wurm (Humboldt-Universität), Borjana Gaković, and Christine Gölz (GWZO). The working title for the Symposium was For a New Axis – Affirmative Action Now! and once again highlighted one of this year’s festival themes, namely creating a critical opposition to the divisive and regressive ascendancy of chauvinistic and patriarchal politics globally. However, this title was then superseded by Reluctant Feminism: Women Filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe.
A primary critical touchstone for the Symposium’s re-visioning and revaluation of potential “feminist film and film practices” within Central and Eastern Europe could be found within Dina Iordanova’s 2003 study Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. Many of the speakers over the course of the Symposium had to deal with the critical specter of Iordanova’s term reluctant feminism: “leading female directors from the region have distanced themselves from 'feminism', a situation that leaves us facing the curious phenomenon of clearly committed feminist film-makers who are nonetheless reluctant to be seen as such.” The term is freighted with the complicating baggage of state socialism’s need to criticize concrete social issues over more abstract or elusive matters. Filmmakers such as Věra Chytilová, Márta Mészáros, and Agnieszka Holland were all caught between a clear adherence to some form of feminist critique within much of their work, but also a dismissive attitude towards feminism, at least within its Western constructions.
Wurm, Gaković, and Gölz's clear desire with this Symposium was to probe precisely what was at issue for many of these female filmmakers within Central and Eastern Europe, as well as looking at a forgotten, or overlooked, legacy of female filmmaking, particularly amongst documentaries, within the region. There was also a committed aim to try and examine how feminist thinking has developed within Central and Eastern Europe, and how this has impacted upon female filmmakers within the region, especially with regard to how feminism may have developed and formed a more coherent socio-political counterweight to the regressive political tendencies of Europe’s largely right-wing governments.
In her introduction to the section in the goEast catalogue, Wurm talks about “the dual shadow existence” that is the lot of female directors within Eastern European cinema. In sketching out the growth of the idea for the Symposium, Wurm recounts the victories for Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland at Berlin this year, as well as giving anecdotal evidence from a visit to Moscow of just how much skepticism Central and Eastern European filmmakers and practitioners have for any idea of a politically-inclined feminist film practice. The Symposium’s line-up of speakers and screenings was very much aimed at provocatively engaging with some of these issues.
That said, I could not help but feel that the presence of filmmakers like Holland and Mészáros somehow inserted a little more caution into critical stances that otherwise might have been far more questioning of how ideas of feminism have been constructed and why so many female filmmakers within the region seem to deeply mistrust what they view as Western feminist constructs that are not coherent with Eastern experiences and realities. Wurm and Gölz put together an effective survey of women filmmakers within Soviet and post-Soviet cinema that laid out much of the groundwork for the other speakers to move out into their narrower areas of focus.
Among the strongest of the Symposium lectures that I attended was the engaging look at feminist film practice in Hungary by Beata Hock (GWZO) entitled I’m the Woman of My Life – Feminist Perspectives on Eastern European Cinema. From the outset Hock established that her paper was not merely about female filmmakers within Eastern Europe, but also about practices within the female creative arts in the region and how they have a pan-European, or global reach. Referring to Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, as well as to Kumari Jayawardena, Hock described gender as an analytical category that changes over time and space, and is by no means a stable critical construct. By deploying this formulation, it then enabled her to critique the inherent normative effects of applying historical formulations of gender, entirely inattentive of contemporary developments, nuances, and critical shifts.
Her referencing of Jayawardena extended this idea of gender as an evolving analytical category by applying a radical commitment to a feminist awareness. For Hock, it is problematic to consider feminist movements as having an original location, particularly if that location is as nebulous as a large nation state. By highlighting that US' Second-wave feminism was essentially a liberal, middle-class, white, heterosexual movement, and by establishing how this has been then critiqued by activists, scholars, and theorists lying outside of this narrow strand of US experience, it could be suggested that a similar approach should be taken to what constitutes an engagement with feminism in the Eastern Bloc, where socialist-sponsored emancipatory movements undoubtedly exert a regional effect.
Where Hock’s talk became particularly intriguing was when she turned her attention to looking at the Hungarian situation. The post-WWII film landscape she briefly painted was one in which the bulk of female involvement with film in Hungary was to be found in “traditionally female” areas such as the Costume and the Editing Department. Hock describes Márta Mészáros as the first significant female feature-film director in Hungary, making her debut in 1968 with THE GIRL / ELTÁVOZOTT NAP. Prior to that feature, Mészáros had worked for over fourteen years on short films and documentaries, which may suggest a degree of difficulty for women transferring to feature filmmaking in Hungary, considering the much shorter apprenticeships that male directors of the period serve.
Rather boldly, Hock suggested that Mészáros was an instinctual feminist filmmaker, with a frequent commitment (especially at the start of her career) to making films about woman, but with a question mark over her output in later years. For Hock, Mészáros was a female filmmaker who could, in some cases, stray into misogyny that makes it hard to classify some of her films as feminist. Also, as Iordanova diagnosed earlier, Mészáros frequently expressed her skepticism towards being singled out as feminist filmmaker and also saw no contradiction in her ambivalence about feminism, the ostensible focus on women in her praxis, and her undeniably activist stance. The chutzpah of Hock’s argument has to be placed into the context of goEast’s related Homage program that was showcasing a cross-section of Márta Mészáros’ work, and had actually invited the legendary director to speak at this year’s event.
I caught up with Beata Hock for a short conversation about some of the issues within her talk, her wider research, and Mészáros:
Rohan Berry Crickmar: I found your talk yesterday to be a fascinating and provocative overview of the development of female-focused film in Hungary, and I was wondering if you would be able to expand upon this a little.
Beata Hock: So, I had these analytical criteria, tools identified from feminist film theory. Then I took Hungarian decades, as in overviews of Hungarian film history, it seemed more or less that decades worked fine as a means of periodization. Not only can you characterize decades as mechanical apparatus, but in the case of Hungarian cinema decades really do seem to be distinct passages of time.
RBC: I guess there is something comparable in Polish cinema, where the major events of Polish post-war film history tend to come together in decade-long passages of time through to about the 1990s, when things become a little more complicated.
BH: Yes, it is the same in the 1990s in Hungary. The 1950s are certainly when “the women” appear in Hungarian cinema, working women. [laughing] Now, yes, they are ridiculous from our present perspective, but again, in comparison with pre-war mainstream cinema, where women only really had these decorative side roles, this is a big step forward [the working-woman film]. However, all of these films were still made by men. At the time there were simply no female directors in Hungarian cinema. By the time we enter the 1960s, then there are male directors who are placing women characters at the centre of their historical-set narratives, because – and I have to say this is not my finding, as I was joined on the study by another Hungarian film scholar who proposed – through women characters you may be able to convey more critical positions. This is partly because women are still not taken as seriously as male characters at this point. They are seen as feeble figures, and I point to this because in the talk this morning on the GDR films, Kornelia Klauss was reporting the same thing. In quoting a male GDR director, she showed that he worked with female characters within the framework of contemporary parable narratives, in an attempt to critique the system. In this way women were still being depicted as “immature” political subjects and somehow still being interpreted rather offensively as naïve and feeble. These characters were then allowed to voice more daring critical positions.
RBC: It is almost like they are ciphers or caricatures, ways of getting at authority without suffering any significant censure.
BH: Yes, they are not taken seriously because they are women. Whereas, if a man criticizes something, then it means something, it has more weight. So this is one of the reasons that you get female-centred narratives emerging within the Hungarian case, especially during the 1960s. Then in the 1970s, Hungarian cinema begins to return to, and focus upon, more contemporary issues, especially social issues. There is the major theme of the crisis of the intellectuals, which is one of the areas where you still see male figures predominating. The 1970s was a period when filmmakers were a little freer to express criticism against the socio-political structures of their society, so women within these films are less important as a means of conveying critical positions. What does emerge during this period, however, is a different type of female look. In the 1960s, female characters in Hungarian cinema were still obligatorily pretty figures, but by the 1970s these female faces are converted into a more realistic and everyday appearance, deliberately undermining their previous glamour. However, it is interesting to note that in the 1970s this kind of conversion of female glamour into “realism” is seen as happening throughout global cinema through a feminist intervention into filmmaking. In one of the Hungarian films of this period (Péter Gothár’s A PRICELESS DAY / AJÁNDÉK EZ A NAP from 1979) there is a direct reference to one of Scorsese’s films of the early seventies...
RBC: ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974)?
BH: Yes, ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. This is shown within the Hungarian film as a film that the central couple go to see at the cinema, a rare direct reference to Hollywood. This is all the more striking, because the lead actress is shown as a rather dowdy and unglamorous everyday woman, even though in reality she was a quasi sex symbol of Hungarian cinema of the period. In that film she isn’t portrayed as being in any way glamorous, and by the end of the film she – her character – and her lover’s wife end up having a long and hearty night together, drinking, and trading confidences.
RBC: So what you are saying here is that there was a conscious effort to downplay the glamour of actresses who would have otherwise been seen as, for want of a better term, sex symbols? I suppose this would favorably compare with the journey of Hollywood actresses like Jane Fonda during a similar period.
BH: Yes and this is where it becomes interesting, as suddenly in the 1970s you can no longer talk about isolated filmmaking practice, because, especially through things like festivals, film begins to become far more transnational.
RBC: I understand this entirely, because this is what I argue you see happening with Polish filmmakers who are exposed to a much wider array of film influences through film school environments and the international festival circuit, and thus take things out into that sphere, whilst simultaneously incorporating elements of other cinemas back into their Polish work. You are also seeing things change at a practical technical level, with state socialist filmmaking practice being mixed with Hollywood studio practice and other complex production structures, which blurs any discernible boundaries between national film industries to a large degree.
BH: Certainly the way creative workers operate is through ideas an images, and these things aren't really restricted or confined by such borders. Returning to my timeline, I would say it is only really in the 1980s that we see female characters emerging fully-formed, within their own right, in Hungarian cinema. This is really the first point where these characters are of interest in themselves and not because they are a site of other narratives. Yet, even at this point, still a great number of these films are made by male directors, as I mentioned in my talk yesterday. That said, it is telling that there are such a number of films that emerge out of Hungary during this period dealing with social issues that may broadly be described as being of significance to women. So even though you have a film being made by a male director within Hungary, it is still a film that looks, say, at the problems of aging for a central female character. Now, these films may increasingly exist due to a greater presence of female figures in all fields of Hungarian society, or may be because of a greater influence of women upon Hungarian filmmaking of the time, or it may be because the state socialist system funds a film based upon the issue it is examining rather than the amount of profit it might make at the box office. So, ultimately, what I am trying to explain here is that there were other ways, rather than a grassroots feminist social movement and the theoretical insights emerging from it, to arrive at a very similar kind of critical film language. So I would argue that this kind of state socialist-supported film culture could quite easily arrive at the same sort of film production and consumption practice as feminist “counter-cinema” of the period advocated. It is also worth remembering that state socialist governments would have implemented female-targeted policies that could have helped promote such an atmosphere.
RBC: If I am right, in your previous research, you were also looking at the role played by performance artists within state socialist societies. Now the question that was gnawing away at me, as I was thinking about your talk yesterday, was do you see any overlaps between that female performance art world and the state socialist filmmaking world, in terms of women from the former making films within Hungary at an underground level, that then came to prominence? So what I mean here is female performance artists making films of their art that dealt with female issues and was for a predominately female audience, as you broke it down in your talk yesterday.
BH: Performance art is a bit difficult to discuss in a Hungarian context, as it was heavily male-dominated.
RBC: This is what I was suspecting...
BH: Women, if they appeared within the Budapest performance art scene, were less the central performer and more of a prop. An exception to this may have been Katalin Ladik, but she didn’t make films, she was more like a sound artist. Then Orshi Drozdik, perhaps the one unproblematically feminist artist in Hungary, she also made performance art, but it was rather captured through photography. But there was a textile artists workshop in rural Velem, where a group of Hungarian women artists came together and started to make performances, amongst themselves. However, almost all of these performances would only remain within the memories of those who experienced them. These kinds of workshops were really sites for spontaneous action, especially when it came to performance. The most you could hope for in terms of documentary evidence was that someone happened to photograph an event. I must confess that textile art is rather interesting, in other countries as well, but especially in Hungary, because it basically became a place of experimentation, as it somehow fell outside of the purview of state censorship. It was just textile art, you know. [laughing]
RBC: I hadn’t actually thought about it in that way!
BH: Again, this was a sphere that wasn’t taken seriously as a site of political critique. It is actually interesting how textile art develops during this period, as it becomes increasingly abstract, and a greater number of male artists begin to become involved in it, taking part in textile art "symposiums" (which you would call today residencies or workshops). These events would really push the limits of what constituted textile art. You might have a television exhibited, for example, with a series of colored lines on the screen, and this became textile art as in weaving. This was just the kind of geometric, abstract experimentation that was otherwise excluded from the official exhibition spaces. These textile art symposiums, or residences, became increasingly important, as a result. They are also important, as it was a medium that was still female-dominated, even if many male artists began to participate. My proposition in this regard would be that in Hungarian textile art, woman artists were among themselves, and the gender relations were toppled, so to speak, in comparison with the mainstream Budapest art scene. I think this is also where women really begin to play around with performance, but those performances are pretty much unrecorded. There is one other performer I should mention, but she isn’t a filmmaker either. No, wait! She turned into a filmmaker, but only really when she left Hungary. She left Hungary in 1980.
RBC: What is her name?
BH: Her name is Judit Kele. Kele left Hungary in 1980, and then a few years later she took to filmmaking, predominately television filmmaking, in France. This is perhaps why she is almost entirely forgotten in Hungarian art histories. The performance work of hers that I discovered is really exciting, but also, alas, not film or video based. She auctioned off herself as an artwork at the Paris Biennale, and that is how she got married and how she got to leave Hungary.
RBC: Now that is most definitely a performance piece. This has really interesting historical resonances I suppose, because certainly within the UK context – rewind 100 years and you have a common social situation of women, in effect, being sold off into marriage by their patriarchally-dominated families.
BH: This would have been the exact same situation in France as well.
RBC: Just to wrap up, can I ask you a specific question about an issue that you raised with Márta Mészáros in your talk yesterday. I felt you were about to make a fantastic criticism of her work, but you appeared to not have the time.
BH: Or maybe it just wasn’t the place. In my book [Gendered Creative Options and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema and the Visual Arts in State-socialist and Post-socialist Hungary, 2013] I go into this issue in more detail. In FETUS / A MAGZAT (1994) – a superficially similar film to the one showing here ADOPTION / OROKBEFOGADAS (1975) – a woman who cannot have children decides to look for a surrogate mother. Now, the way the woman who cannot have children is portrayed is as if she is almost demonized, and the way in which Mészáros chooses to photograph her suggests almost a moral dislike for her flesh. This was very hard for me to watch. I also think that in her later films, such as her diary films, I am not sure they offer too much in the way of a female perspective or sensitivity. In their portrayals of working women and “non-natural” mothers, these films seem to be recalling the sexist stereotypes of the heteronormative cinema that Mészáros was seemed to so directly challenge. These are films in which the possibilities for female solidarity are violently crushed. Other than given a pathologizing and demonizing portrayal, the childless woman is also a representative of ill-used “worldly” power in other films by Mészáros (political power, higher social standing, or wealth, inherited or acquired through marriage), while the natural mother is “always-already” and morally superior. The overall comportment of the non-natural mother or the woman seeking a surrogate mother is pitted against the self-contained femininity of the natural mother.