In the booklet accompanying Second Run’s new Blu-Ray release of Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round (1956), author and Hungarian cinema specialist John Cunningham highlights a comment made in 1995 by the then French president Francois Mitterand. At the time, a group of filmmakers were working on a commemorative documentary for the centenary of cinema and they asked Mitterand what he considered to be the definition of the medium. Mitterand responded with “… the laughing face of a girl. The girl is circling around in the seat of a village fair carousel, next to her there is a peasant boy in the other seat, they fly, they soar, sometimes they can touch, sometimes they get separated but the girl keeps on laughing and this laugh is unforgettable… for [me] this was the essence of film.”
On this occasion Mitterrand couldn’t remember the name of the girl, the film, the director, or even the country of origin, but it’s memories like this one that have come to represent, almost in their totality, Fabri’s film outside of his native Hungary. This isolated fragment of freewheeling, this explosion of joy, combined with the rapturous cinematography to make Merry-Go-Round a cause célèbre at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. Unfortunately, even though Jean Cocteau and Francois Truffaut were among its admirers, Merry-Go-Round would be controversially denied any jury prizes at the festival, and audiences on the French coast were aghast and protested vigorously about the decision that appeared to have been made for political reasons.
Spinning on the titular merry-go-round is Mari Törőcsik – the fresh face of wonder who’s pursued and courted by her farm-boy lover, losing herself in the birth and exhilaration of freedom. The camera captures these emotions as it rotates with her, charting the rise and fall of the chairs as if it was also a rider at the fair (which, thanks to a repurposed door and a set of stabilising chains, it was). This is the image that has passed into legend, into something definitive and familiar-yet-distant, just as it was for Francois Mitterrand forty odd years later.
Make no mistake, this is still a beautiful film (perhaps more expansively so now than ever before), and in parts it’s as fresh as the day as it was made.
But what remains of Fabri’s Merry-Go-Round? Is it simply a tale of collective farming and almost unrequited love, or can we discover more in the world outside of the fairground?
Modern-day Hungary is, of course, not the country it was in 1956 when it was newly-released from the iron grip of the twin “grey blurs” – Stalinism and strict social realism. The country seemed to be on the brink of new freedoms in life and art, concepts that were somehow crystallised in Merry-Go-Round. Sadly things turned out to be not so simple or optimistic, and these days Viktor Orban exerts his own pervasive, perverse and corrosive influence at all levels of Hungarian culture and society. Merry-Go-Round however, remains resolutely situated in national top tens, even after Miklós Jancsó, Istvan Szabó and Béla Tárr rose to fame – possibly due to the emergence of a distinctive Hungarian national cinema on the international stage which helped us to see Fábri’s work better.
We can now understand that beyond what Cocteau called the “resounding of love”, there’s a melding of pure melody with a sometimes portentous and heavily symbolic sombreness, and a toughness borne of mud-drowned winter fields and backbreaking graft. We recognise it also from the work of those auteurs as it’s the product of a peculiar peasant poetry – as tender as it is merciless, holding fire beneath its frigid mask. We realise that in 1956 we returned to the terrain of the great silent melodramas, that the rural merry-go-round was already there in Jean Epstein’s Coeur Fidele in the early twenties, as was the prospect of an unhappy enforced marriage. The rhythms of lower-class life are offered without sentimentalism, but with an otherwise unbridled expressionism – a stylistic adventurousness born of a belief that the cinema could externalise and hold forever the fleeting feelings and rushes of altered perception.
We discover that Fabri was in that tradition of Alexander Dovzhenko and, particularly, Boris Barnet, and was just as capable of submerging the enforced politicism within emotion. Perhaps it’s an attempt at rediscovering that most primitive and complex aspect of humanity – our endless yearning – encapsulating it within the system and adapting it to the conditions of the day, until the political and the personal re-emerged each as natural and mutually-dependent as the other, always present and never as absent as often thought.
Make no mistake, this is still a beautiful film (perhaps more expansively so now than ever before), and in parts it’s as fresh as the day as it was made – bearing in mind at times the simple and unabashed lyricism that’s all the more child-like and moving because it’s so obviously come from adults who have known disillusionment. Merry-Go-Round isn’t so much about love’s ability to conquer even the most unpromising and resolute of obstacles (as is often assumed), but is instead a reminder that even in the uncontrollable, overwhelming whirl of the world, even when quenched and thwarted, longing for paradise survives. When Mari picks up the ladybird on the picnic table and watches it fly away, she knows that she is as blessed as she is doomed from then on, and that tantalisation lingers – refreshed and deepened.
Merry-Go-Round is out now on Second Run Blu-Ray
