GK4: "It's Just Fashion" & "Candide"

Gyorgy Kovasznai, still from the animated tv series It’s Just Fashion, 1975-76, © Estate of Gyorgy Kavasznai, mixed technique on paper, synthetic material — Gyorgy Kovasznai, still from the animated tv series It’s Just Fashion, *1975-76*, © Estate of Gyorgy Kavasznai, mixed technique on paper, synthetic material

December-January 2019/20

The scarcity and conservatism of fashion options during the Communist era in Hungary made it difficult to express oneself sartorially. The pervasive “don’t step outta line” attitude that was fostered and nurtured by the dictatorship extended to fashion too. Excessive individuality in any part of life was discouraged and considered a hallmark of the decadent, ideologically dead West. People who did want to be alternative and express themselves through what they wore were rather limited in their choices. Flea markets in Budapest such as Ecseri were a favourite haunt of would-be fashionistas, as vintage clothing was readily and cheaply available. Pre-war/pre-Communist pieces were especially popular, as were more folksy things like sheepskin vests and wide-brimmed hats. Being an intellectual and aesthete of wide-ranging tastes, Kovásznai understood the significance of fashion, not just as a means of individual expression, but also as a key to understanding our anthropological evolution.

In 1976 GK made a six-part television series called “It’s Just Fashion: A Musical and Dancing Picturebook of the Fashions of Yesteryears”. This mouthful of a title is both descriptive and flippant, and belies the seriousness of his aim which was characteristically ambitious. With this series GK aimed to present a broad survey of the history of fashion in the West for his audience. Furthermore he interpreted fashion in the broadest sense possible, referencing a sprawling range of styles and key historical events which he links together in ingenious and often humorous ways. “It’s Just Fashion” is above all an animated, social documentary that pushes the boundaries of the genre, as it did the tolerance of the censors. It builds on the documentary elements of earlier films such as “From Dawn to Dusk/Something Different” from 1967 https://www.nicolewaldner.com/poetic-boost/2019/6/25/gk2-creative-fury, and “The City Through My Eyes” from 1971 (https://www.nicolewaldner.com/poetic-boost/2019/9/21/gk3-budapesht-mon-amour). A few years after “It’s Just Fashion”, GK would make his most ambitious animated social documentary, the 1980 feature film “Bubblebath: A Musical Special Effects Film to the Rhythm of a Heartbeat”. In “It’s Just Fashion” the social documentary aspect is most strongly realised through vox pops which recur throughout the series. Not only do these provide a portal through which to view prevailing opinions about fashion and style in GK’s day, but it also beautifully combines the social documentary with the animated drawing. By rendering the real-life interviewees into animated versions of themselves, GK creates idiosyncratic archetypes that brim with life, truth and humour.

“It’s Just Fashion” does indeed include a lot of music and dancing, often raucous, almost always joyous. The music referenced will almost certainly be known to you, but back in 1976 much of it would have been a revelation to Magyar audiences. The series took more than a year to shoot and was comprised of nearly 100,000 drawings handmade by GK and his team. He also used material from an enormous archival collection of music, newspaper articles and most importantly photographs. Some of us might still remember arcane places such as the NY Public Library’s Picture Collection, a veritable treasure trove of images painstakingly cut and pasted onto cardboard sheets, alphabetically and three-dimensionally revealing our world to us. I hope you’ll enjoy watching “It’s Just Fashion”. Psychedelic times await you!

Part One

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10nR_kzBNDw

Early on GK poses the question, “What is style?” By the end of Part 6 we are no closer to understanding this conundrum, which is the point. It’s personal, but it’s also political, and it’s a question of economics and history too. Recurring throughout the series are the “advertising ladies”. Decorative, cardboard cut-outs who apply perfume and deodorant with the seriousness of surgeons, as they intone bite-sized catchphrases that drip with solemnity and sex:

Style is eternal.

Style is always new.

The host of the show, who always begins with a homely, “Dear Viewers”, is a metrosexual dandy who sits in a Carl Saganesque “ship of the imagination”, taking us back and forth in fashiontime. In this free-ranging survey we begin in the Garden of Eden with fig leaves, the first fashion innovation, and onwards and upwards through time to the Venus de Milo, explaining that concealing and revealing a woman’s body is a game that we’ve been playing for 2,000 years. To which one of his co-hosts and dancing partners quips:

Something that miraculous never gets boring.

GK draws connections between seemingly disparate things, sometimes with an eye to entertain, other times to inform. You decide. In Part One he reaches through millennia drawing a line from the ancient Roman centurion’s uniform to a vox pop on mini-skirts, neatly bringing the narrative into the 20th century which is his main focus. Part One ends in 1900, more or less, as a pair of bigs promenade on a street in one direction, obligatory top hat and cigars in place. In the opposite direction on the same street a pair of filthy chimney sweeps in bowler hats with ciggy butts dangling from their lips, make their way home. GK concludes that for Esterházys and street workers alike hats (and smokes) were compulsory. It’s all very breathless and fast-paced, jam full of fun facts about fashion and edited in a way that feels familiar to us today.

Part Two

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9plYdziX8v8

GK begins with smoking and its changing fashions through time, from rollies to pre- rolled, and all of its alluring paraphernalia. After the 1929 Wall Street Crash homeless people abound as does the habit of collecting cigarette buts from the street. “Gloomy Sunday” makes an appearance, as does some material on WW1 that GK recycles from “Monologue” his first film from 1963. Part Two brings the series into the post-WW2 era and for its remainder GK’s focus travels forward in time from 1945 to 1976. Before this episode ends he lingers on the misery of 1945 with lines like this:

After eating our horses, we had to pull our own carts.

Now, what are the chances of hearing anything like that these days in a tv show about fashion? These days fashion seems to have been reduced to a nauseating display of sycophantism and mind-deadening red carpet glamma.

Part Three

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnMlEWKfHnc

Here GK starts with a history of the smile through fashiontime. His advertising ladies tell us:

A smile conquers.

We await our tired husbands with a smile.

The Western advertising machine is being sent up. But the next thing you know GK is whisking you through the alphabet with A-line coats and B-eehive hats, and then, to the sporting prowess of the Magyars, with G for the Golden Team and those adorable little soccer shorts, and F for fencing with those futuristic white suits, and S for swimming, and then we’re off on yet another tangent about swimwear and we watch with amusement/dismay as those cossies shrink, and keep on shrinking. “Advertising informs”, we’re told, with just a hint of sarcasm, as the French and the Soviets eye each other with interest, and Lester Young blows his sax in Harlem. It’s just this kind of hopscotching between the worlds of music, fashion and even film (Gina and Sofia make an appearance too), that gives this series such a contemporary feel. GK’s eclecticism, the way he moves from satire, to documentary, to musical, to exquisitely painted images, all of this has always made him difficult to define. Is he predominantly a painter? Or an animation artist? Or an auteur? Even today, in our post-modern era, his work continues to confound and present curatorial challenges.*

Part Four

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGieIQzB_Ew

GK’s synapses are really firing in this episode as he leaps from “Jailhouse Rock” (why that particular Elvis song one must ask?), to the “Locomotion”, which we hear in French, to an interview with Ronnie Biggs, suntanned and relaxed in Brazil, telling us how he and the boys listened to that very song throughout the Great Train Robbery, to Che chic and the modern Western, whereupon GK posits that the greatest modern Western of all time was in fact the Kennedy assassination.

Part Five

“In the West, so-called pop culture was created. A kind of glittery, motley fairyland, a huge amusement park where music always played… Pop culture land tried everything out. It made Jesus Christ a superstar.” Sound like a fair description? GK’s depictions of the mass street protests of 1968 would have been heavily censored from the news of the day in Hungary, as were images from the Magyars very own uprising against the regime in 1956. The (false) dichotomy between folk music being for the people in the countryside versus beat music for the urban dwellers is quickly reduced to rubble by a beautifully conjured Bob Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone”.

N.B. Apologies but I wasn’t able to upload Part 5 as it was blocked by You Tube due to copyright issues with the estates of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, whose music appears in this series. Here are a couple of pictures of Mick and Bob instead.

Part Six

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0il1lDhZ2s

GK begins with how beat music repressed sentimentality, and how the latter then hit back with a vengeance when “Love Story” was published in 1970. I was intrigued to learn that Erich Segal’s ultra tear jerker “Love Story”, with the unforgettably bad line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” (it does?), was actually written as a parody of sentimentality which audiences the world over bought hook, line & sinker. Mind you, I couldn’t find any evidence for this online, which makes me think that GK was having a bit of a laugh about the whole thing, while in the background the Magyar version of “Where do I Begin?” gurgles and gushes through earnest vox pops about the true meaning of love. GK reprises his question from the start of the series, once more asking:

What is fashion?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind. “It’s Just Fashion” concludes not with an answer but a Charleston, and also with the certainty that this question was, and always will be, unanswerable.◊

*In conversation with Brigitta Iványi-Bitter on 20/11/19.

I’d like to conclude my 2019 series on the amazing György Kovásznai by bringing the great man firmly into our present where he belongs. To that end I’ve written a coda about his final film project “Candide”, then and now. Also, in 2020 I’ll be picking up where I’ve left off, so to speak, with February Poetic Boost keeping the focus on fashion when I write about the utterly unique Tamás Király.

CODA: “Candide” 1982-83 & 2014-

Gyorgy Kovasznai, still for the unfinished animated film, Candide, circa 1982, © Estate of Gyorgy Kavasznai, mixed media on paper — Gyorgy Kovasznai, still for the unfinished animated film, *Candide*, circa *1982*, © Estate of Gyorgy Kavasznai, mixed media on paper

In 1980 Kovásznai was diagnosed with leukaemia but he refused treatment and kept his diagnosis a secret. Legend has it that he actually bolted from the hospital in his pyjamas and went home to work. He continued to work until his last day on earth. His final animation project was to be a feature length film of “Candide”. This wasn’t GK’s first foray into French history and culture. In 1973 he made the animated film “Ça Ira: The Song of the French Revolution”, which included an entire cycle of paintings. In 1981, GK received funding from the French Cultural Ministry as the film was to have been a Franco-Magyar co-production, however he died on June 28, 1983 in the middle of production. He left behind a screenplay, detailed working notes and dozens of drawings, key frames and paintings of the film’s most important scenes. All of these taken together would surely have been enough for a new director to complete “Candide”, but at the time nobody stepped forward to take up GK’s mantle. The completion of “Candide” would have to wait for another 35 years.

It was Brigitta Iványi-Bitter - the art historian and curator responsible for the large-scale Kovásznai exhibition in Budapest in 2010, and the encyclopaedic catalogue that accompanied it – who also resurrected “Candide”. To do so she enlisted the up and coming new talents of Hungarian animation: Zsuzsanna Kreif , Balázs Turai & Nándor Bera. GK’s work was a revelation to all of them, as they knew little to nothing about his ground-breaking animated films. Nevertheless, GK’s mercurial spirit permeates “Candide”, as does his love of satire and rapid-fire editing, only it does so with the full arsenal of 21st century technology.

https://qubit.hu/2019/04/02/igy-keszult-a-legbetiltottabb-magyar-animacio-a-candide

A sad parallel exists between the “Candide” conceived but never completed in GK’s lifetime and its 21st century flowering. Kovásznai’s career was dogged by censorship and repression at every turn. (https://www.nicolewaldner.com/poetic-boost/2019/3/27/gk1-kovsznai-did-not-exist) He was forbidden from exhibiting and selling his paintings, and so he eventually turned his significant energies to animation through which he found new ways to paint. Present-day Hungary, which has been a member of the E.U. since May 2004, is ruled with a near stranglehold by Viktor Orbán. Orbán has continuously been in power since 2010, but he was around in the late ‘80s and was first in power in the late ‘90s . He is a right-wing demagogue and kleptocrat who treats the country like his own personal fiefdom, to be plundered at will by him and his cronies. Orbán has been instrumental in dismantling the hard-won pillars of democracy that were instituted after the fall of Communism in 1989. Here are a few recent articles:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/20/viktor-orban-democracy-hungary-eu-funding

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/world/europe/viktor-orban-soccer-health-care.html

https://hungarianspectrum.org/2019/11/11/miklos-haraszti-how-the-spirit-of-1989-sustains-the-hungarian-oppositions-fight-against-viktor-orban/

So what may you ask is the connection to “Candide”? Here it is. Completion funding for “Candide” was withheld until certain scenes had been cut. Among them was a scene in which a mafioso tattooed with a Virgin Mary appears. Orbán prides himself on having built a Christian, “illiberal democracy” (his exact words) in a Europe that has betrayed its Christian roots (according to him and his propaganda machine). Another offending scene was of a little Thomas-like train scuttling between two huge soccer stadiums situated in neighbouring villages, carrying the soccer players from one glittering, empty stadium to another. In his native Felcsút, Pasha Orbán, who is mad about soccer and little trains, has had a train line built, just like the one in “Candide”, in order to take his adoring subjects on inspirational tours of his hometown. It is currently under investigation by the EU’s anti-fraud office:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1l_Valley_Light_Railway

This toing and froing with the National Media and Communications Authority Media Council (ugh, what a mouthful!) went on for an entire year before the film could be completed. It was shown once, just once, on a private television channel (i.e. one that receives no state funding), after Christmas on December 27th, 2018 at 2:30am.

Happily, the story does not end there. “Candide’s” producer, Iványi-Bitter, is at work on an English language version of the film and its international distribution. It continues to be shown at film festivals all over the world, most recently at the 2019 Kaboom Film Festival in Holland. You can watch the English language trailer here: https://vimeo.com/183955917