This is the short film that won the Oscar the other other day. I found either mindlessly praising or bitterly critical reviews about it.
I find this film not about what it shows. It is easier to talk in an abstract manner in many other art forms: poetry and literature, dance and 3D art, but even strictly 2D visual arts like painting and photography can achieve abstraction easier than a moving picture. Abstract communication needs to leave space to the viewer not only to generalise but then make connections with memories, situation with a very personal real life in which the discovered general statement makes a subjective sense. This is a complex, demanding process for the viewer to understand an other person’s thoughts, step out from the scale of one human life and the step back into your own life. It’s a magic journey that reaches through the eternal lonliness and limits of this world.
To me this kind of art is the one meaningful reason to create. (To me everything else is crafts, studies, practice, fiddles). As I try my hand on it in my poems and paintings I try to breath and soak it the spirit of the thinkers who had the greatest influence in my life. It is easy to remember who they are, because the complex process of meaningful abstraction pierces through one’s heart.
So after this self-centrist yammering back to the short film. What I see is that the film uses characters, objects and situatons as tools, tools that are finely chizelled for abstraction and lifts out of a narrow world of the schoolchildren into a timeless dissection of the structure of any biomass. I’ll go farther, to analize the rules of this universe. Not only mathematics can do it, we can analize with an inner instinctive inbuild sense where the information comes from the structure of our bodies and minds and not from a fragile structure of inert sounds and symbols of cognitive understanding.
This short movie lifts me up and connects me with all bits of our reality. It does it with the power of Kurt Vonnegut, Sophocles, Bohumil Hrabal, The Americal Beauty, Baudelaire. I’ve been free again and to be honest I haven’t landed yet. What IS the morals here?
The point is beyond good communication, acceptance and respect. It’s beyond understanding structure and finding tools to change it. I still haven’t landed though to see the point.
Yes, the setting of this abstract piece of art is my life. My ten-year old self, my primary, my friends, my teachers, my Erika nénis (I had two, lucky me), my toys, my games, my clothes. But no, this is not how it worked. I sense the americanised, westernised non-verbal signs and looks. The euphoric, post-socialistic, baby-democratic, traumatized, drained phoenix-like adulthood of those years didn’t quite communicate like this. There was either absolute empathy, which we soaked in with blind confusion, or there was harsh cruelty (schoolchildren beaten with keyrings, sticks or hands), which we accepted gratefully as an offering of solidity that a child cannot produce for themselves. Yes, there were weak teachers, whom we had no malice towards, gently ridiculed them then we went and did what we felt like – we did not intentionally harm them. The movie is not correct depicting the relationships of children or teachers of that era that I knew and that’s fine because this is not a costume-movie but an abstract piece of art. Exactly these inconsistencies are that point toward the message, the “mistaken” bits are the milestones on the alternative route of thinking which leads us to the real point.
I feel that starting to talk about how Erika néni was wrong and how this is the one big problem with our self-esteem and how the education is going to pieces – this is all angling off on a tangent that doesn’t end up any further than wishing that MY kid would have a good teacher. No. EVERYONE is good. The question is if I can see it and how I can remain good in myself respecting everyone else. As I see it this movie hasn’t a happy ending. There is no resolution. The kids who wish to sing are not offered extra tuition, the teacher who does all she can to achieve something is not appreciated. How would it be OK to humiliate someone even if that someone is different who we first thought would be humiliated? The teacher was right. The kids were right. The system is not an educational system, its the workings of nature so essentially it is right. So where to go from here? What do you do to cheer up the children, make Erika néni happy and offer a sense of achievement not only to the teacher and the children but to all choirs?
Right, so I can tell you a few links where you can legally view the short film in Hungarian. One of these doesn’t seem to work for me, presumably because I am in NZ but maybe I am wrong and it is a configuration thing, check it on your comuter. I have no idea where it could be seen in English even though I’d be happy to pay for it, please let me know in a comment on fb if you do.
This is the high resolution one online until the 5th of March:
http://www.mediaklikk.hu/2017/02/18/mindenki/
This is a low resolution one that I can actually play:
https://www.facebook.com/100005046287895/videos/722685264576343/