Whooping Cough:

Hungarian film’s
hew humanism

WHOOPING COUGH. A Hungarian film
directed by Peter Gardos. Screenplay by
Andras Osvat. With Marcell Toth, Eszter
Karasz, Dezso Garas. In Hungarian with
English subtitles at the Vancouver East
Cinema, May 11-17.

Political systems are one thing. But peo-
ple are people, fragile, vulnerable victims of
the crossfire when systems and ideas collide.

Such are the messages of the latter-day,
post-Brezhnev cinema of Eastern Europe, it
seems. A case in point is Whooping Cough,
a 1986 Hungarian film which views the
counter-revolution of 1956 with humanistic
eyes.

Made ata time when things were thawing
out, politically speaking, and new thinking
was challenging historical orthodoxy,
Whooping Cough tells the story of a minor
bureaucrat and his family caught in the civil
strife and the subsequent invasion of Soviet
forces. Politically, this film does not really
take sides, although it does give a sympa-
thetic nod or two to Hungarian independ-
ence.

The bureaucrat (Dezso Garas), a former
manager of some enterprise until the
counter-revolution removed him from that
position, is simply known as Father. With
him in their crowded but fairly comfortable
flat are Mother (Judit Hernadi), Grand-
mother (Mari Torocsik), the Maid (Anna
Feher), and the children: Annamari (Eszter
Karasz) and 10-year-old Tomi (Marcell
Toth).

Tomi, with a face continually furrowed in
a serious frown, is the narrator of the story.
A person who would be in his forties now,
he obviously mirrors the perspective of the
filmmakers, and of many middle-aged
Hungarians old enough to remember the
events of 1956 and to be the governors and
opinion makers of today.

For Tomi and his companions, the civil
war means a break from school and contin-
uous play time. For the adults, however, it is
a time of trepidation. Fearful of the
counter-revolutionary forces, they keep to
the apartment most of the time; at one
point, the family feeds a collection of works
by Stalin to the furnace.

Much less timid is Grandmother, an
apparent old party stalwart. The woman
whose job it is to keep watch on an air raid
siren constantly reads the Swedish socialist
novel, Pelle the Conqueror, puffs cigarettes
and stoically remains in the flat when the
rest of the family flees temporarily. Both
admirable and seemingly obtuse — “I’m
bullet-proof,” she remarks after bringing
home loaves of bread: bearing tell-tale
holes — Grandmother represents both
courage and stubbornness of an old order
that the film’s creators evidently admire.

Equally fascinating is Annamari, Tomi’s
younger sister whose ingenuousness produ-
ces endless, inconvenient, truths. She shouts
from the rooftop the family’s political alle-
giances until the distraught Father drags her
down: the child also divines when. the

Father tells lies about his alleged affection for
the Grandmother. Standing on a chair, she
urinates, declaring, “I can pee where |
want.” Representing total honesty and
freedom, Annamari is in stark contrast to
the unseen fetters that bind most of the
others.

But even children can’t escape the effects
of war. When Annamari is suspected of
having whooping cough, the doctor advises
that while this is not the case, the cough
could be produced by fear. Hijacking an

10 ¢ Pacific Tribune, May 7, 1990

abandoned track crew pumper car, the
children are caught in either an ambush or
an exchange of fire, which claims one of
them.

But despite all the grimness, Whooping
Cough has as much humour as drama.
Father gets drunk and does an impromptu
tap dance, declaring he’ll become a profes-
sional dancer in America. Listening to a
British short-wave newscast on the Suez
Canal crisis, the adults who know a smatter-
ing of English only pick up the phrase,
“ceasefire,” and believe it applies to their
situation.

Director Peter Gardos gets the most out
of his first-rate cast, with the camera closing
in on those human expressions that lift a
movie out the realm of artifice. The filming
itself is sometimes spectacular, as when the
camera follows at pavement level three boys
running through Budapest’s wet, deserted
streets.

With many scenes shot under an over-
cast, foreboding sky, Whooping Cough
reinforces its view of what -has been
acknowledged in the East as a dark period
in Hungary’s history. But in showing a few
bullet riddled corpses to remind us of con-
flict’s cost, the film offers one of its many

ambiguities — who fired the shots? While
undoubtedly anti-Stalinist, it is less con-
cerned with laying the blame on the oppos-
ing sides thani in lamenting the partisan
rigidity that saps people of their humanity.

Whooping Cough presents a view of the
1956 uprising without a class analysis —
and after years of being force-fed class polit-
ics by bureaucratic decree, who can blame
Eastern Europe’s filmmakers if they turn
away from that approach, no matter how

Death touches children in movie of 1956 counter-revolution.

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valid it may be? What we’re receiving isé
kind of humanism, which has served us
in Western cinema and which, by its natu
does not serve the cause of reaction.

wk ok

Whooping Cough runs May 11-17, @
7:30 p.m., at the Vancouver East Cinems
Also running is the Portuguese film, Reco
lections of the Yellow House, at 9:30 p.m
Separate admission.

— Dan Keeto

Oscar Deras is struck by the irony. A
refugee from El Salvador, he had found
work in the Kamloops armoury museum
painting murals and signs for the displays.

“It was very strange, because in El Sal-
vador, the military can kill me. Here, I get
a job (with them),” the artist muses.

A painter who was jailed briefly in 1979
for doing sketches near a military base,
Deras knew it was only a matter of time
before he would be imprisoned, tortured
or killed. Like seven fellow artists who will
be displaying and selling their works at a
special art auction May 12, he fled perse-
cution from the U.S.-backed government
of his Central American country.

Alfonso Quijada, like Deras, was forced
to leave El Salvador and head for Mexico.
He faced the double-barrelled persecution
of threats on his life and being blacklistec
from finding work.

Unlike his colleague, Quijada is primar-
ily a writer. He has several books of poems
and short stories to his credit, published in
North American anthologies, in El Salva-
dor and in Cuba. He has a novel and other
works awaiting publication.

“If you’re a writer, that fact is an act of
subversion in El Salvador,” he notes.

Quijada also paints. “I translate my
mood onto the canvas,” he declares, dis-
playing a painting of a white horse, its lips
curled into a kind of snarl against a full.
moon. Appropriately, it’s entitled, “Night-
mare.”

For the interview Deras has brought

waif hunched on the steps of a house. The
artist describes himself as a “humanistic,
realistic” painter, and the social nature of
his work is evident.

Deras apprenticed for three years in the
late Seventies with Camilo Minero, El Sal-
vador’s most prominent social realist
artist.

Deras was arrested in 1979 while draw-

along his “Lost Child,” a painting of a~

Art sale for Salvadoran cause —

ing sketches of his neighbourhood, the
barrio Belen in the nation’s capital, San
Salvador. The military claimed he was
doing reconnaissance drawings of a local
military outpost.

While sympathetic to the growing cause
for liberation in his country, Deras says he
“was not a politician, | was just making
murals on the streets.” Murals, which
appear overnight ona wall and are almost
as quickly erased by the military, are a
popular form of social statement in El
Salvador.

He was held for one month and
released, but heard the secret police were
looking for him. He used the occasion of a
special festival of opposition artists in
Mexico to leave the country.

Deras was an illegal’ refugee in that
country and was jailed briefly before
attaining legal status. He came to Canada
three years ago.

Quijada was a legal refugee in Mexico,

Alfonso Quijada (I) with ‘‘Nightmare”’ and fellow artist Oscar Deras.

and he also lived in Nicaragua five years” *
before moving to Vancouver. He was
member of parties which were legal ver
sions of the Communist Party of El Salva=
dor, and belongs to the Association for *
Peace and Self-Determination in El Sak)
vador. ; —

The association, and the Youth Sup-
port Group of the Farabundo Marti
National Liberation Front, are co
sponsors of the art sale and auction on
Saturday, May 12.

Organizer Myra Johnson said the work _
of the Salvadoran artists, all refugees in
Canada, shows that “the struggle (for lib-
eration) is creating a cultural expression.”

The event begins at 6 p.m. at the Rus- _
sian Hall, 600 Campbell Ave. in Van-
couver. Refreshments, a Salvadoran
buffet and entertainment are included.
Tickets are $12 and $10. Phone 251-1186
for more information. q