The animation movie, directed by the Oscar-winning director, was made by forty employees of Kecskemétfilm.Continue reading
Three Hungarian films will be screened at the 38th Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna. The festival of restored classic films will present Mihály Kertész’s 1917 film The Last Dawn, the 1924 silent version of The Boys of Paul Street, and Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-Up, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the director’s death.
The Last Dawn was directed in 1917 by Mihály Kertész (Michael Curtiz), the creator of Casablanca (1942), in Hungary. Set in an exotic setting among aristocrats, the twisty story shows that Kertész knew even then that the audience could be captivated by spectacular and entertaining stories, especially during the difficult years of the war, writes the National Film Institute (NFI).
The institute recalls the story of how the film was found. A 5-reel nitrate-copy had been in the archives of the Dutch EYE for decades, but attempts to identify the film had failed. Another reel changed hands at a flea market in Vienna in the 1970s and was later transferred to the Austrian Film Archive. Gyöngyi Balogh, a film historian and researcher at the NFI Film Archive, helped to identify the Austrian fragment. The analogue restoration of the surviving copy in the Netherlands was carried out by EYE in 2009.
A detailed description of the film’s content was found in a contemporary Hungarian journal, and based on this source, a new digital restoration was completed using both copies at the NFI Film Lab in 2023.
The result of a joint effort by the three institutions, this reconstruction is more complete than ever before and is as close as possible to the director’s original vision.
Several film versions of the most popular Hungarian youth novel to date, The Boys of Paul Street, have been made. Béla Balogh adapted the novel in 1917 and 1924, but only the latter has survived. For a long time it was also thought to be lost until a copy was found in the Belgrade film archive. However, the only nitrate-copy that could be found was incomplete, and the analogue backup copy of the film is missing, and the analogue backup copy of the film is missing a scene and László Kalmár’s ornately designed subtitles.
Miklós Jancsó’s historical parable The Round-Up (1966) models the complex relationship between power and the individual. The film, which won awards at Cannes and Locarno, is a shockingly accurate vision of the systems that crushed freedom, a milestone in Hungarian film history and an internationally recognized founding work of modernism. It was in this film that the director first implemented the long-edited, Jancsó style of film-making, which he refined throughout his later career.
The film’s 4K full digital restoration was completed at the NFI Film Lab in 2021 to mark the 100th anniversary of the director’s birth.
The National Film Digitization and Restoration Program, launched in 2017, has so far restored 202 feature-length films thanks to the coordinated work of the NFI Film Archive and Film Lab. Over the past 8 years, the latest state-of-the-art techniques have been used to restore the films of Hungarian film-makers, such as Zoltán Fábri, Miklós Jancsó, Marcell Jankovics, István Szabó, Sándor Sára, Márta Mészáros, Zoltán Huszárik and János Tóth.
Via MTI, Featured image: Facbook/Cineteca di Bologna