Staging Reality in Order to Discover the Historical Paradigm

Peter Kerekes’ opus began to shape more significantly around the year 2000. Those days, in fact, saw the creation of one of his first thematically oriented documentaries, Most Márie Valérie or The Mária Valéria Bridge, which intentionally discusses the impact of historical events on the behaviour of individuals. In the subject of discovering the historical paradigm, his work always relies on a certain firmly established, in most cases, heterogeneous point around which the specific historical functionality or the social/sociological meaning develops – meaning that not only carries that functionality with, but may also cause it. Finally, based on the discourse thusly limited, the author may explore the stirs of history in order to stress or create the new museum of history, founded on the interaction of specific events and on the strong subjectively narrated story. The ways of constructing the statements in which a departure from the specific historical event is possible do not, in fact, interest him as author. The primary importance falls on the polemic s between great histories and its repercussion on the destinies of specific individuals.
In the The Mária Valéria Bridge documentary the expressive value of the film focuses on the history of the bridge on the Danube that in the past used to unite and divide the Slovak town of Štúrovo (Párkáň) and the Hungarian Ostrihom. In another film, 66 sezón or 66 Seasons, the role of the charged heterogeneous point of such stories, that is, the town, dependent of the private past of individual, is played by the Košice public swimming pool. And in the film Ako sa varia dejiny or Cooking History, this specific point is the military field kitchen. All of the abovementioned focal points, that is, locations, are also deciding factors, pivots determining the multitude of subjective narratives by a certain meta-individual historical stage. Therefore, as history stirred, so did the relations surrounding the focal points in question and then, under the pressure of changes, the destinies of specific individuals changed as well. Kerekes deliberately employs this principle in order to realize the concept of subjective interpretation of the past by using the category of actual witness. The individual narratives in his films become “audible” primarily by the use of orally communicated history and by maximally exploiting the various archive materials from the time in question: starting from painted postcards, all the way to photographs, amateur videos or commercial audiovisual materials, as the ideologically biased official weekly film reviews with a tendentiously imposed comment. Kerekes most meticulously develops his own authorial method, perhaps even in his full-length documentary Cooking History. The orally presented testimonies are envisaged as staged micro-narratives, and during their reinterpretation he makes use of the fictitious repertory, oftentimes borrowed from the narrative patterns of feature films. The speech scenes of the character at an image level are enriched with a mise-en-scène, often even with the use of a film metaphor whereby the original meaning is proliferated. Some feature dramatic proceedings might, from a directorial standpoint, be seen as part of the documentary as well, as an end in itself. Regardless of such remarks, one should stress the intelligence with which the author manages to communicate the historical events to the viewer particularly in order to make them more appealing and comprehensible. The viewers can best form an opinion by themselves, drawing from the multifaceted arrangement of indications, on a certain aspect of the “small” subjective history as opposed to the “great” history, which was oftentimes tendentiously promoted by historians in the past. It is precisely the dialogue with the past the viewers experience while watching Kerekes’ films that raises in them the question of the logic of historical truth, as well as challenge the conventional mode of understanding the past founded solely on the context of passing of great historical stages.
The Mária Valéria Bridge falls into the category of Kerekes’ stylistically most readable works from a documentary standpoint. In them the director left out the excessive use of dramatic proceedings and focussed more on the collage aspects of the film and on the combination of contemporary and archive materials. The result is seen in the characters’ speech delivered in the form of “talking heads”, and that is exactly the non-cinematic mode of shooting that Kerekes abandons in his later years. In the context of his later work, The Mária Valéria Bridge seems as a certain verification of the accuracy of the method. The concept of the film is fairly simple and generally comprehensible. It is about a bridge between two nationally mixed territories. The bridge was built before the two world wars in order to connect the two banks of the Danube which in those days were part of a single territory within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. After World War I and during the foundation of Czechoslovakia, the Danube became a borderline river flowing between two independent countries, and the two parts of the bridge came to symbolize the divide. The problems resulting from this turn of events for the ethnically diverse population often came to be fatal. During the wars and after their end there were transfers, exiles and transport of the Jewish population; injustice was served on the part of both national states. Toward the end of World War II the strategically vital bridge was destroyed. During narration Kerekes alternates several audiovisual materials to underscore the significance of the subjectively recounted stories. The bridge serves as an important symbol that, under the sway of individual historical stages, that is, depending on how these stages are subjectively and chronologically presented by the characters in the film, in its history managed to evoke occasionally positive feelings, and sometimes traumas based on the subjectively grasped interpretation of historical facts. Witnesses’ personal statements and their stories cannot be regarded in isolation, regardless of the fact that in places they differ significantly, infected as they are by the interests of the two national states (Hungary and Slovakia). The bridge is interesting for the narrative as a central symbol from the perspective of the historical changes of its function. In fact, even in the consideration of the citizens of both towns the bridge stands as an extraordinary symbol. Through this subjective view of the interpretation of events the differences and evaluation of historical events disappear. On the other hand, such reports bring us back from the historical results to the repercussions of historical development on the specific individual, identity, people and collective memory of the diverse society with diverse populations on both riverbanks. And that, from the standpoint of Kerekes’ documentary analysis of a heterogeneous territory, represents the most crucial conclusion. A separate chapter in the documentary is assigned to the contrast between subjective interpretation of historical events and the impersonal formulation provided by the tendentiously imposed comment in the film weekly. It is difficult to accurately verify the positions presented in the film and it is thus impossible to be partial to either side (Slovak or Hungarian) without running the risk of losing sight of the objective assessment of the whole. Should we wish to approach the meaning of Kerekes’ concept and thereby recognize the author’s view, then we must surrender to the symbolic core of the documentary. That core alone might create the impression based on which we could manage to understand the history of the area. That history hides behind the stories of the subjective histories of the specific society of the population of the area. It is impossible to distinguish the territory from the people living there, as well as from their local histories, regardless of the fact that they separate from any historical perspective.