woman of
discontent
by Douglas Messerli
Gyula Hernádi (writer, based on a
play by László Gyurkó), Miklós Jancsó (director) Szerelmem,
Electra (aka Elektreia) (Electra, My Love) / 1974
Miklós Jancsó’s Electra, My Love (also titled Elektreia)
is a film that could never be made in Hollywood—or for that matter imagined by
most Western European countries. A political musical, based on the story of
Orestes plays, and centering on Electra might possibly be imagined as a kind of
theatrical joke, but to actually present an entire scenario, presented in 12
long photographic shots is almost inconceivable. As Electra (Mari Töröcsik)
intrudes upon King Aegisthus’ József Madaras) celebratory day—held every year
for the now for the fifteen years since her father, Agamemnon’s
murder—wandering in a kind of stumbling pattern through the crowds of dancing
peasants, nubile nude virgins, singers, comic dwarves, and a column of
stridently brutal flagellators, she speaks her long monologue of sentences such
as: “I, Electra, who does not forget. While one person lives who doesn’t
forget, no one can forget.” Despite everyone’s attempt to ameliorate and calm
the “mad” woman in their midst, Electra remains, as Aegisthus describes her,
“the woman of discontent.”
We recognize, in these theatrical cries, the roots of a fable of serious
political significance, in which Electra rails again and again against all
tyrants, which people such as her deter in their very statements of the
tyrant’s lies. We cannot help but wonder at times, however, whether or not
Jancsó is also intentionally satirizing his own metaphors; only in the most
grand of epic presentations of royal ceremony, such as the operatic-like
marches of the masses of The Ten
Commandments or Verdi’s Aida,
have we encountered such over-the-top obsequious demonstrations, as the
peasants, like an amateur folk-dance group, run back and forth across the
Hungarian putzla amidst the posed scenes of nude women and young boys. And, in
a sense, we side with Electra all the more because of our recognition of the
absolute silliness of Aegisthus’ celebrations, and his bread-and-circus
solutions to his culture’s woes. Even if we didn’t know that Aegisthus is a
tyrant, we have to recognize him through these often meaningless song and dance
routines that he is a grand impresario in the manner of someone like Cecil De
Mille or Busby Berkeley, carefully managing the masses by parading them in
patterns so grand that even they cannot recognize their own beginnings and
ends. When the peasants are no longer asked to perform they fall to the ground,
as if drained of any energy they may once have represented.
Electra awaits only for her vengeance in the appearance of her brother
Orestes, who she predicts will destroy the killer of Agamemnon; but when he
does suddenly appear, out of nowhere, she no longer recognizes him and kills
her brother because, as he has bragged, he has killed Orestes. Taking advantage
of
the situation, Aegisthus declares
that Electra now be punished by death. But Orestes—who stands throughout
Jancsó’s mythologically-grounded fable, as an eternal force—comes alive,
capturing the King and his associates, and killing his beloved aide before
turning his attentions to Aegisthus himself. By this time, the very presence of
such a savior has fomented a rebellion within the people themselves as they
turn away from their stylized dances to the murder of their former tyrant-king.
In Jancsó’s version of the myth, Orestes is not visited by the furies,
but by his own sister who destroys him as he destroys her, each arising the
next morning to repeat the acts. So, suggests the director, their familial
self-destruction is necessary for regeneration, needed in order to destroy the
tyrants of each generation. Jancsó uses a metaphor of the firebird (which the
film comically portrays in the image of a small, red, airplane upon which
Electra and Orestes decamp and return), who dies each night to be renewed each
morning to reinfuse the population that they will arise with new purpose.
Filmed originally in 1974, an era that vibrantly led up to the
overthrowing of Soviet power in Hungary in 1989, Jancsó’s film represents
numerous issues of that country’s politics during the period. But the somewhat
Mao-like revolutionary philosophy seems to me to lie far too close to the
generations of tribal warfare in the Balkans—particularly given his association
of his thinking with generational battles of family vengeance. One generation’s
tyrant may be the next generations savior, while each destroys the worlds (and
individuals) surrounding. Caught up in these endless cycles, so we can observe,
neighbors and neighboring cultures equally terrorized until there is no end of
human suffering, the firebird itself becoming the tyrant of its own good
intentions. Jancsó’s curious fiction hints at but never answers the obvious
question: “Are people better off in living in a spiritual death under the
tyrant or better off existing in a perceived free world of eternal death?”
Neither world seems to me provide a solution to the survival of the individual
or the species.
Los Angeles, May 30, 2014
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2014).
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