FATELESS

Hungary, 2005, 140 minutes, Colour.
Marcel Nagy.
Directed by Lajos Koltai.

Another perspective on the war is found in Fateless, this time from Hungary. It is based on the autobiography of the 2002 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Imre Kertesz who has written the screenplay. It has been directed by Lajos Koltai who has worked as cinematographer on many American films.

Here he has opted for very muted colour, almost black and white until the final scenes of the liberation of the camps. He has also opted for a vignette style of film narrative. This quite long film is composed of a series of incidents where the audience has to make the links. There are measured fadeouts for all these vignettes which creates an impression that we are watching a photograph album, an album of moving photographs.

The drama relies almost solely on the performance of the young actor, Marcel Nagy as Gyuri. A teenager in Budapest 1944, he sees his family rounded up by the Nazis and finds himself arrested on a bus and soon aboard a train for a brutal, waterless journey to Poland. He is chosen for hard labour and moves to several camps. We assume that he is going to be some kind of hero-survivor. In fact, a compatriot who has been imprisoned in the Ukraine for several years tries to instil in him the will to live and to self-esteem. But he is a boy. The work is gruelling. He is perpetually hungry. The Nazi guards torment the prisoners, especially with long periods of standing in rows. Black marketeers are ready to profit from the constant hunger. He does not see himself as a hero. It is a miracle that the boy survives, only to return to a city without his family and where life has resumed with seeming indifference to the victims.

This is no easy entertainment and audiences have become familiar with Holocaust suffering through documentaries, testimonies and fictions like Sophie’s Choice and Schindler’s List with which this film has much in common. But this is an unvarnished Hungarian witness to human cruelty and suffering.

1. A Hungarian film examining the Hungarian past? The Jews and the prisoners in the concentration camps? The perspective of sixty years? The continual need for this kind of film? For Europeans, Hungarians, Germans?

2. The Hungarian production, the perspective, the truth of the story, the Jorgy story? The novel by Imre Kertesz, the screenplay and adaptation? A portrait of the Jews in Hungary in the 1940s?

3. The use of the wide screen, the drained colour, the light, the true colour returning at the end with liberation? The pathos of the ending? The musical score, the songs?

4. The tradition of Holocaust films, Shoah, Schindler’s List, Sophie’s Choice …?

5. The title, the Jews and their fate, their despair and lacking a sense of fate?

6. The focus on Jorgy, entering the film with him, identifying with him, sharing his experience, learning? The shock of what happened to him? His journey, the camp and life in the camp, his friend, suffering, work, hungry, his illness, the end and his liberation?

7. The aftermath, the freeing of the camps, the prisoners freed, the trucks, Dresden and revenge, Budapest in ruins? The sacking of the house, his friend? On the tram, people’s reaction, petty difficulties? The hurt after such experiences in the camps?

8. Jorgy’s family, the father and the sales, getting the jewels, wearing the star, at school, the authorities, the relatives, the meal, the neighbours, Jorgy’s mother and grief?

9. Jorgy, taken from the family, put in the group, the train, the long experience of the days without water, at the border, the guards? Desperation for water?

10. The arrival in the camp, his age at sixteen, his having to make choices, going to the camp?

11. The picture of hard labour, the rocks, carrying the rocks, the exhaustion, the physical toll?

12. The punishments in the camp, having to stand, being slapped, the humiliations?

13. The meagre food, the soup, bits of meat, the importance of the black market and the deals, the supplies, people and their being forced into using the black market?

14. Solidarity in the camp, help, the building of morale, the ethos, the goals, the group carrying Jorgy?

15. Jorgy’s friend, the background of the Ukraine, the songs, the memories, the assistance, the importance of self-esteem?

16. The boy, the rope, food, the knee, the collapse, the doctor, the dead boy, the infirmary?

17. The religious aspects of the film? The Jewish background? How important in the camps?

18. The screenplay and the succession of vignettes, the cumulative effect, the use of fade-ins and fade-outs? As if the audience was watching a moving photo album?

19. The portrait of the Germans, the guards, the brutality, the food, the chimney labour, the SS and the end of the camps, the liberation, the SS members hiding? The Americans, the liberation – and the future?