Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1979. január-június (33. évfolyam, 1-26. szám)
1979-05-24 / 21. szám
Thursday, May 24. 1979. AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZŐ,, 7 SCIENCE FROM HUNGARY TO THE WORLD A REVIEW OF ART; LITERATURE AND HISTORY - A SUPPLEMENT OF THE MAGYAR SZ6 f r 9 AN INTERVIEW WITH MARTA MÉSZÁROS LEO SZILARD 1898-1964 “...Of all the aspects affecting the intellectual ascent and culture of a nation, the cultivation of the natural sciences, being most indispensable today..is also most beneficial for society through its permanent consequences. ’’ Louis Kossuth, Hungarian patriot in exile, Italy, 1876. General acclamation greeted the latest film by Márta Mészáros: “Just Like at Home” on its New York premiere recently. “The latest effort by Márta Mészáros is filmed with a lovely precision and filled with radiant scenery and appealing actors. Even its elusive moments command attention”- commented the N.Y.Times- filmcritic James Masli. A similarly glowing review of the film appeared in the N.Y. Daily News not usually given to praising Hungarian films. ^ French journalist, Michele Levieux interviewed the film director Márta Mészáros at the 31st Locarno Film Festival, for the women’s magazine, Antoinette. We reprint here an abridged version of the interview with the director. “As a small child I lived with my parents and my younger sister in the Soviet Union and when we returned home to Hungary in 1946,1 could speak no Hungarian. After that I attended several schools, but even when I finished secondary schools, I still spoke broken Hungarian. It was about then that I decided to become a film director, rather a strange choice for a 17-year old girl. But my parents had the chance to send me to the Soviet Union, so I didn’t even apply for a Hungarian college. I returned to the Soviet Union, where I met with a rather strange reception, because at the age of 17,1 scarcely looked 12. Whatever can they have thought of such a babe, who’d come to study film and who was a girl into the bargain? " So that’s how Márta Mészáros came to attend the Soviet film school. “What had the most impact on me was Soviet film of the 1920’s, for at that time, about 1950, the Russians were making very few films. There were obstacles to getting practice, as we had neither cameras nor equipment. But still I was enthusiastic, because I was extremely fond of Russian literature, which influenced me at least as much as the films of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov.” With her film director’s diploma from Moscow, she returned to Budapest where she was actually able to shoot her first films- documentaries. “I made documentaries at that time because it would, I think, have been difficult for me to make feature films. It also brought me nearer to my own country. “I got married, and my marriage took me to Bucharest. Mv husband was Hungarian, but from Transylvania. I worked at the Bucharest documentary studios, where T made five films.” In 1958 she returned to Hungary, and began making science and documentary films, 25 in all. “I made films about trees, about medicines, and it all gave me marvelous practice. I was able to travel all over Hungary, meeting people and discovering a society.” It also made her interested in writing a screenplay of her own. The Girl, released in 1968, was her first feature film. Hungarian cinema had been flourishing for some years. It was the time of Miklós Jancsó’s The Round Up and Silence and Cry, that dealt with the battles of collective history, and even where there was an “individualist” element, as in István Szabó’s Father, the child dreaming of his father’s past life through events of recent history. Márta Mészáros in The Girl tells of the spheres of individuals. Her sober, sensual films, in which an individual, usually a woman, seeks her place in the community, are in sharp contrast to the broad, sweeping depictions of the destiny of the people. “I made The Girl in the way mv heart desired, but everyone came asking why I’d made such a messy film. If I could do such lovely documentaries and if I had such a genius for a husband /my husband at the time was Miklós Jancsb/, why had I done a film like that? “People also said Tancsó was giving me a hand, which was in a sense true- we both helped each other a great deal. But he had an entirely different world. I felt that compared with Jancso’s work my film was timid and small.” But Márta Mészáros has carried on presenting persons and faces in her films. “I’m passionately interested in all that lives and breathes - men, women, children, movement, human relations, love and hatred.” (cont. on p. 10.) Leo Szilard was a scientist who, not content to remain in the laboratory, went beyond its walls to attend to the larger causes of humanity. External crises several times interrupted his scientific career, as would be expected for anyone of central European ancestry bom in Budapest in 1898. But even after he came to the relative security of the United States in 1938, his career was often interrupted, by his own will: he pressed the Americans to make nuclear weapons before Nazi Germany did; he was then among the first to fight against the actual use of the bombs he had done much to create; he switched from nuclear physics to biology in order to keep abreast of the moving edge where scientific discovery vitally affects mankind. Until his sudden death in California in 1964 he threw himself time and time again into schemes to advance world peace. Beneath this turbulent movement he held confidently and with absolute consistency to his single goal - what he called “a more livable world.” At various times Szilárd considered writing his autobiography, but his interest was always captured by the present and the future. Therefore he was not inclined to spend much time on the past and never wrote more than fragments. He had a sense of history, however, and carefully preserved correspondence and other documents which he considered historically significant. In 1951, he contemplated writing a history of the Manhattan Project and organized pertinent documents and drafted some notes, among which we found the following anecdote. While talking to a colleague about some disturbing things that had happened during tire project, Szilárd said that he was going to write down the facts, not for publication, just for the information of God. When his colleague remarked that God might know the facts, Szilard replied that this might be so, but “not this version of the facts.” /To be continued./ “FAR OUT OF PROPORTION” Dr. Szilard’s posthumus work was reviewed by Henry S. Rowen in the May 16. issue of the Wall Street Journal. This is the way the review begins: The Hungarians, at least those born during the Empire, are a special breed. Their contributions to science and technology, especially nuclear physics and nuclear energy, are far out of proportion to their numbers. Among the central figures in the development of nuclear chain-reactions have been Leo Szilárd...
