css Zen Garden

            Tímár Péter’s 1996 film Csinibaba (Dollybirds) begins on an average Hungarian day of late summer in 1992.  Except that the film’s Hungary is still ruled by a communist regime and everything is, at first glance, utterly 1960’s, from music, to fashion, to technology. [1]   For a “Western” viewer, this is further complicated by another temporal “problem:” Fashion lag.  The clothing and other styles of the time that may have been thoroughly modern in the communist era, may appear to an outsider as representative of an earlier time.   It is an image of the carefree ‘60’s that never was—or the “apparent” reality that was imposed by the ideology of communism.  The film follows Attila’s lighthearted, but earnest attempt at winning the community talent show, which offers the winners a coveted trip to Helsinki.  The film is a musical with the characters shooting off into song at the drop of the hat.  However, even the music is ironic.  The entire soundtrack is composed of Hungarian pop songs from the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, covered by contemporary artists from various musical genres.  The film was enormously popular with the public, though it left many critics uncertain how to approach this mishmash of styles and pop culture.   

            The image on the CD (above), which was as successful as the film, clearly contains elements of nostalgia for the past as well as comments on contemporary (and therefore, future) society.  Past and present merge in the costume of the city worker pasting up the poster of La Dolce Vita.  The blue coat, which was emblematic of the city’s proletariat worker, remains the uniform of Hungarian cleaning crews and transportation employees.  His longing, unrequited leer/stare at the fashionable woman seems to suggest an imminent “eternal” catcall still made to all women on streets the world over.  Finally, the woman’s use of the portable transistor radio is perfectly nostalgic for the “new” technology of a previous age.   At the same time, her posture and holding of the device hints at the highly modern usage of a cell phone. [2]     

            The director seems to be allowing the viewer to decide if this is an nostalgic vision of the Hungarian 1960’s where citizens were attempting to lead happy lives in the face of all difficulties, or if it is the 1990’s as they would have been if the changes had never occurred.  In either case, it is a world rife with irony.  The reaction and interest of the Hungarian audience added another aspect to the nostalgia in the film itself.  There is most certainly an identification with the characters trying to enjoy life in a post-1956 world, but I believe it was the juxta-positioning of the past and the present that resonated so strongly with audiences.  It was possible to re-examine the past in the context of the present only using the distinctive Central-Eastern European playful and ironic humor that Bohumil Hrabal also utilized.  It made a joyous, “normalizing” grieving possible and even enjoyable.