THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PRESENTS FIRST U.S. RETROSPECTIVE OF RENOWNED HUNGARIAN DIRECTOR MÁRTA MÉSZÁROS
Eleven-Film Tribute Honors Eastern Europe’s
Most Acclaimed Woman Filmmaker
Márta Mészáros: A Retrospective
July 22–August 3, 1999
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
To pay tribute to Márta Mészáros, a singular figure in European cinema, The Museum of Modern Art will present the first U.S. survey of her films in Márta Mészáros: A Retrospective, running from July 22 to August 3. Mészáros began making documentaries in the 1950s before turning to feature films in 1968. Over the course of the last thirty years she has established herself as one of Eastern Europe’s leading filmmakers, becoming one of the only women directors from that region whose films boast an international audience. Her work is especially noted for its skillful blending of autobiographical and fictional elements, as well as its complex and insightful depictions of women’s lives. The series will screen eleven of Mészáros’s features, including the U.S. premiere of her latest film, Cory scescie (Daughters of Luck, 1999).
Born in 1931, Márta Mészáros is the daughter of the sculptor Laszló Mészáros, who emigrated with his family to the Soviet Union in 1936. She returned to her native Hungary in 1946, but a few years later went back to the USSR to study film direction in Moscow at the famed VGIK academy from 1951 to 1956. She subsequently worked in Romania as a director of documentary films, and then in Budapest from 1959 to 1968, where she made close to thirty documentaries, popular science films, and educational shorts before directing her first feature film, Eltávozott nap(The Girl, 1968). Mészáros currently lives in Budapest and Warsaw and is married to the Polish actor Jan Nowicki, who has appeared in all of her films since Kilenc hónap (Nine Months, 1976).
“From her first film to her latest, the subversive Daughters of Luck, Mészáros’s strength is linking the personal and the political in order to depict individual human beings and how they shape history, and vice versa,” notes Jytte Jensen, Associate Curator, who organized the retrospective. “Her fiction films are grounded in a deeply felt sense of authenticity, whether in their unsentimental re-creations of working-class environments, in the insightful delineation of details that stitch together complex psychological portraits, or in their dissection of the anatomy of relationships between women or between women and men. Her style is a distillation of emotions and places that depicts on an intimate level the impact of social issues and political changes on women in Eastern Europe.”
The series includes Mészáros’s celebrated autobiographical trilogy, Napló gyermekeimnek (Diary for My Children, 1982), Napló szerelmeimnek (Diary for My Loves, 1987), and Napló apámnak, anyámnak (Diary for My Father and Mother, 1990). Other films in the retrospective are The Girl, Örökbefogaddas (Adoption, 1975), Olyan, mint otthon (Just Like at Home, 1978), Nine Months, Piroska és a farkas (Bye Bye Red Riding Hood, 1989), Ök ketten (The Two of Them/Women, 1977), and Szabad lélegzet (Riddance, 1973).
Márta Mészáros: A Retrospective was initiated by the late Stephen Harvey, Associate Curator, Department of Film and Video, and organized in his memory by Jytte Jensen. Grateful thanks for the generous and kind collaboration of Magyar Filmunió and Katalin Vajda, Budapest. The exhibition is supported in part by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
