Flowers in the Dirt

Márta Mészáros’ films are tinged with autobiography, transposing things like her orphaned childhood single adulthood into fictive reflections, like the solo sculptor in Adoption taking in a street girl. But even Binding Sentiments may as well be comedic (and does briefly and exuberantly shift genre at the end) compared to Mészáros’ most specifically about-herself films that she made towards the end of communist Hungary: Diary for My Children, Diary for My Lovers, and Diary for My Mother and Father.

The Diary series follows Juli (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi), a fictionalized version of Mészáros, from her adoption as a teenager in the post-war years by a powerful apparatchik (Magda, played by Anna Polony) within the ruling communist party all the way to the chaos of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The first film, Diary for My Children, is shot in Mészáros’ gorgeous black-and-white, where faces are softly illuminated by daylight windows or, in Juli’s case, often by the reflections coming off of cinema screens. The thrifty teenager steals her guardian’s movie pass and regularly sneaks off to the theater, moved by the films coming predominantly from Hungary’s paternalistic neighbor, the Soviet Union.

Juli is moved enough that in Diary for My Lovers, she goes to Moscow to study at VGIK. Whereas the memories of Hungarian youth in Children was captured in black-and-white, the promise of the USSR is rendered in rich golds and reds while Juli defends her decision to go abroad to the capital of the communist world to study filmmaking rather than staying at home: she wants to be under the wing of greats like Dovzhenko and Kuleshov. Juli’s life is one of routine and remembrance—her only escapes from the doldrums of hyper-organized teenage life are either glimpses of childhood memories or the memories of light found dancing across the screen. For Juli, happiness is the exuberance of defeating the Nazis at the end of The Fall of Berlin, or thinking about walking through the woods with her long-lost parents.

The Diary films are Mészáros driving a knife into the open wound of loss deeper than ever before; it’s a trilogy of impossibility. Juli’s father, like Mészáros’, was killed in the purges of 1938, although Juli doesn’t find this out until the end of Loves, holding out hope that he’s off in some prison waiting to be reunited with her. By then, she’s stuck in Moscow as her home is tearing itself apart, like a personal crisis that suddenly has transformed into a national one, every contradiction in her life suddenly forced to reckon with each other.

In Mother and Father, Juli finds her way back to Hungary, now ravaged by a new Soviet occupation which seeks to restore order to its latest Eastern Bloc problem child. It’s one of Mészáros’ most devastating films because it forces the issue—Juli’s spent her life escaping, to memory, to movies, to her privilege as an adoptee from a powerful Party woman, and now her artistic exploits only get her in trouble. Juli gets arrested by the police during a curfew for taking photographs, an exercise of documentation that she considers not political agitation despite people on either side of the revolution thinking it is. She’s ultimately let go because of her connections to Moscow, but now Mészáros has ripped away the veil of passivity that Juli has lived her life by up to that point. History’s something that has happened to her, to Hungary, and there’s no excuse for her to exist merely as an artist if all she can offer is reflection. The people Juli loves live and die for liberation, and so too must her work.