Staging Reality in Order to Discover the Historical Paradigm

In another Kerekes’ film, 66 Seasons, we encounter the subjective memories of the citizens of Košice and their experiences in one way or another dependent on the area around the Košice public pool. Kerekes employs a playful mode of filming when, more than ever before, he investigates the past of the authentic mien of the place during three summer season following one after the other. Apart from the stories of the past, he enriches the report with a philosophical element with the help of which compares the pool to a so-called symbol of the world, and around the pool water he creates cosmogonic interpretations regarding the birth of life and the origins of death. He is interested not only in the stories of the pool in the past, but also looks for certain types of young people who might resemble the people who were swimming there 50 years before. He creatively connects a whole crew in the course of filming and frames the documentary in the memories of his grandfather who had only been at sea once in his lifetime. Several times he show amateur archive footage of the concrete walls of the pool and the water inside in order to invoke the shadows of the past as it once was by blending the long lost time and the authentic place where the footage was made. The film 66 Seasons falls into the category of the most feature-like auteur documentaries in Kerekes’ filmography, labelled as a family movie. That is confirmed by the choice of characters from his circle or friends or his immediate family.
Kerekes attempts to construct a much more complex message in the full-length documentary Cooking History. Considering that the film was intended for screening at movie theatres, Kerekes chose a globally comprehensible subject that could attract a wider audience in a European notional context. The fundamental heterogeneous point, the pervading location, the object of history explored through subjectively narrated stories, in this case is a military field kitchen. The repetition of the flight over unidentified land throughout the movie, as well as of the several musical/visual landscapes, is presented as a predominant symbol in Kerekes’ film aesthetic. In a traditional sense, the military field kitchen is a materialized symbol of cooking. It symbolizes food preparation in unconventional conditions – during the armed military conflicts that occurred in Europe in the twentieth century. This time Kerekes did not settle for one specific location, as was the case with The Mária Valéria Bridge and 66 Seasons. In his full-length documentary he attempted to create a dangerous symbolic/metaphorical collage dealing with the specific aspects of the duration of war from the war chefs’ perspective. As it turned out, this film collage is concerned with the very important activity of food preparation and eating. On the old continent, in the various war conflicts entered mostly uniformed, but from a historical standpoint, essentially unspecified masses, and the result of the conflicts often depended particularly on the regular food supply. Most wars in the history of mankind ended in defeat on account of the starvation of the opponent, even if that opponent had the military advantage. Due to this arrangement of events in Kerekes’ concept, his direction was facing a number of simplifying acts. He could not treat the given armed conflict in detail, so he chose to focus on the coverage of a broader spectrum of various events contributing to the establishment of less interaction of the whole of the work with its individual parts than one might wish. The versatility of the conflicts determined the author’s selection of the stories based on the fact how interesting they are, weakening the overall unity and the message of the narration. The author also failed to dismiss certain solutions that, even though acceptable in documentary film, might be considered as mainly authorial mannerisms. It is mostly a question of dramatic proceedings which in the concept of the documentary are often visible, so that some documentarians decisively dismiss them since they are incompatible with, for instance, the principles of cinéma vérité, or they threaten the authentic expression of the piece. And dramatization appears in Kerekes’ film on several notional levels, not merely on the level of segments, but even within the intelligently created collage composition. It is primarily concerned with the narrative proceedings, as we might immediately notice in the epilogue, in the first story of the cook about the substantial defeat of the calf before the cooking skills of the Russian army in the school for future military cooks.
Kerekes in this episode cleverly inverts the relation between image and comment. In this case, the image illustrates one the tendentious statement of one of the characters, not the other way round. The documentarily included pieces, thanks to the untraditionally chosen narrative, get a symbolic meaning that they previously did not have. The Russian soldier in the comment explains how they forcibly took away the cow from a local old man in Chechnya in order to diversify the monotonous army supplies. This move provoked the subsequent bombing of the unit. The comment is complemented by the collage sequence in which the trainees look at the calf tied down to a tree in the woodland. In the next frame, the freshly prepared beef is served in plates, and the comment continues, ending the event with the words: “… and thus it was repeated.” We then return to the trainees and the calf by the tree which is soon to be subdued with the blunt end of an axe. The scene, as per the narrative structure, is developed un-chronologically. We first observe the preparations to kill the animal, then the serving of the meat, and at the very end we witness the act of killing in the moment when the comment suggests the possibility of future repetition of similar events. The naturalistic portrayal of the killing of the animal is assigned more room in the documentary because it symbolically alludes to the killing of people brought about by wars. If the French legionnaire from the Algerian conflict cut the French symbol – the cock, in order to cook it with wine, then we once again witness a progression of symbolical levels in the small space of the dramatized recipe.
Another mode of staging is the part of the narrative about the Croatian cook who prepares food in a field. The shape of the pot placed on the embers, in which the food is cooked, closely resembles a landmine. During the whole sequence of preparing the meet, behind the cook is a soldier with a mine detector beeping and testing the terrain around the fire. His activity is seen in the background on account of his considerable lack of involvement in the shoot. In the symbolic/metaphorical core, his activity reinforces the connotation connecting the shape of the pot, the mines and the Balkan conflict in which these dangerous weapons were extensively used by both enemy formations.
The director also used a pretentious metaphor in the story of Josip Broz-Tito’s personal chef from which we learn how all peace negotiations in the attempts to reunite Yugoslavia ended. They ended in fiasco, which was to be assumed from the very selection of dishes on which the republican delegations were feasting. All three attempts, which took place in different capital, according to the nationality of the host, were marked by strictly ethnically determined selection of food at the receptions. In fact, neither side managed to consider the national particulars of the rest of the delegations in the negotiations. The failed political negotiations were a disaster that Kerekes visually shaded with three slow-motion frames. Each national dish was shot with a bullet which turns the set plate as the symbol of national pride into amorphous mass.