Forgács Shows Human Side of Violent History

For Péter Forgács, both history and filmmaking are about attention to detail. Using clips from home movies, Forgács has sought to represent the history of East-Central Europe. After screening several of his films last weekend at the Harvard Film Archive (HFA), the Hungarian filmmaker discussed his relationship to his movies and how the audience reacts to the questions raised by his films.

Personal experience has been vital in driving Forgács to make his movies. He spent 39 years living behind the Iron Curtain and, in the 1990s, was deeply affected by the massacres that took place in the former Yugoslavia, just 200 miles south of his home in Budapest. His experiences with violence and persecution made Forgács reflect on the historical precedents of these events.

One of the most noticeable features of Forgács’ films is how they show the human side of people who have committed seemingly inhuman crimes. “The Maelstrom” (1997) shows footage from the home movies of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the German commander of Holland during World War II, who was responsible for shipping nearly 100,000 Jews to their deaths in concentration camps. This acceptance of the humanity of war criminals is of vital importance to Forgács.

“We can’t understand those who kill their neighbors if we don’t look at them,” he said. “Otherwise we would never see why these disasters are repeated in human history.”

Although much of his interest in genocide was sparked by the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Forgács decided not to be a contemporary documentarian and to focus instead on past events that shed light on the present.

“I wouldn’t go to Bosnia,” he said. “There are more devoted documentarians who would do it.”

Forgács’s method of telling history is very different from traditional historical narratives. He shows clips of ordinary people continuing with their regular lives while traumatic events like the Holocaust go on around them.

“Most grownups know the statistics, they know history,” he said. “It’s not my role to tell you again. It’s my role to dive in behind the facts, to imagine, ‘How was it?’”

This reliance on imagination is part of Forgács’ desire not to preach to his audience but rather to let them think for themselves.

“I don’t know what is true and what is a lie,” he said. “I don’t know why we think one thing is a true narrative. I’m providing you with one narrative which will provoke your own associations.”

The footage used in Forgács’ movies is designed to call attention to this ambiguity of interpretation. Recordings from amateur home movies that Forgács discovered in archives across Europe are pieced together and juxtaposed with clips of Nazi brutality. Many of the scenes chosen are strikingly simple in the actions that they portray.

“These banal everyday film recordings have something special to me,” he said. “They always ask a lot of questions: who, why, what, where?...Amateur film, to me, uses the language of ancient film, of Eisenstein, Griffith, of the great American avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s and 30s.”

The filmmaker is fascinated not just by history but also by this sense of how film and images communicate meaning to an audience. “Wittgenstein Tractatus,” Forgács’s tribute to Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is a particularly meditative piece about the ways perception and communication affect our world.

Forgács clearly enjoys questioning his audience and provoking thoughts and reactions through his documentaries. Despite his clear admiration for film history, however, he is not an elitist when it comes to genre.

“I don’t see a big difference between a good documentary and good fiction,” he said. “There is one basic value—that is cinematic value.”