Albert Wulffers, August 15, 1997

As in previous years, a video by Gusztáv Hámos will be part of the World Wide Video Festival programme in 1997. In this short production, entitled Berlin retour, a girl goes searching for the Berlin of Walter Ruttman (1887-1941) as recorded by that avant garde film maker in Berlin, Symphonie einer Großstadt. Hámos' main character ends up in the maelstrom of German history with which Ruttman's work is inextricably linked. Ruttman is not only known as the maker of the above mentioned classic master work of experimental cinema, but also for being closely involved in creating Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, the controversial picturization of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

In fact, Berlin retour is only the top of an iceberg for Hámos and his partner Katja Pratschke. There is already the project Berlin viewfinder that will be extended into Das begehbare Kino in which Ruttman's recordings are placed in images of present day Berlin. Furthermore, as well as this holographic installation, there is also a long production planned about this cinematographer whose career began in abstract films in 1918 and ended with war reports in 1941.

On their way from some 'forced labour' in Cologne for the producer Carl-Ludwig Rettinger, to their home, in the ever profoundly changing Berlin, Hámos and Pratschke dropped into Amsterdam for a quick interview. At first it inevitably involved Ruttman of whom many film historical works speak with reference to his unbridled ingenuity which he used for the wrong cause, not because he himself was an adherent of such ideology, but because he considered the actual content of his work to be inferior to its external appearance.

"It is not easy to get the money together for our project. The past is problematical and our proposal is seen as being uncomfortable. The tone, however, has already been set by Siegfried Kracauer in his book From Caligari to Hitler. People in Germany want to keep the lid firmly on the past and if Ruttman was half artist half Nazi, then they find everything that he did unacceptable and they fail to recognize any differences any more in his work. In fact, he was always a hypnotist with images, especially in his abstract films. What's more, there is a difference between a true propagandist and someone who, more or less by chance, makes a career within a certain political constellation. Look, someone like Arno Breker who you just mentioned, who was so immensely popular with the Nazis, to me he is first and foremost an artist. The culpability of Nazism is unquestioned, that's why it is interesting to look at it now as an industry that had ideology as its product. That lid has to be taken off the past whether people want to or not, otherwise it will open by itself and what will happen then, we saw in the fires at the centres for asylum seekers some years ago. And yet, I didn't leave Germany then; I felt paralysed and began to understand why so many Jews didn't turn their backs on Germany in the thirties either.

As a voluntary German - I got my papers as such at the end of the eighties - I have perhaps an even greater feeling of responsibility than my fellow countrymen who were born there, and that's why I want to start work on Ruttman. An earlier project that involved Germany's past also never got off the ground. In it, an unborn foetus was constantly bombarded with a Richard Wagner opera, which ultimately meant that his life would run synchronously with the opera's libretto. That was not acceptable to the financiers, but the fact that my humour is not always accurately assessed could also have played a role. One tangible result of this plan was that the Wagner music video Luck Smith (1987) came into being, in which the city of Berlin is pictured as a human body with the factories as organs and human beings as viruses, which fits well with the organic Berlin ŕ la Ruttman."

Without dwelling on the comparison organ/city and microcosms/macrocosms (with Berlin/Germany/Europe/et cetera in between) and without lingering on the question as to whether-or-not-Wagner-was-right-or-wrong, the three of us - before starting chronologically - philosophized about the relationship between art and revolution. The conclusion we reached was so logical that it has to be true: art 'in the service of' a revolution is art as long as the revolution is revolutionary; when the second part is no longer true - and thus there is no longer a revolution - art becomes propaganda and begins to lie. Now art most certainly may lie to its heart's content, as Jean Cocteau knew all too well, but it may never do that with the sole purpose of maintaining a syvoice.

Gusztáv Hámos was born in Budapest in 1955 within a syvoice that, by grossly misusing power, managed to survive the Hungarian Uprising of the following year. In the seventies, his interests turned towards artists like Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys and to philosophy and sociology; he worked as a photographer, was involved in amateur film groups and was renowned as a skilful and creative lighting technician. The 'culture houses' (communist as well) in the Hungarian capital had by then developed into breeding grounds for the Budapest 'scene'; key figures of those days were Miklos Erdély and Gábor Bódy. And yet Hámos still decided to leave Budapest in 1979, an example that many followed.

"I looked around for a new spot to settle. In the course of this I heard from the DFFB, the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. I decided to go there. That met with much incomprehension, particularly from my mother who could not understand why I wanted to hang around in the head quarters of the historical arch-enemy Germany. I had only become aware of our Jewish ancestry during my teens; that wasn't an important issue at home: Germany was just the enemy. I went anyway, knowing that it would be impossible to go back, and via East Berlin, I ended up in West Berlin. I landed among a generation that was fiercely opposed to its predecessors and regarded punks as neo-fascists. What struck me was that Berlin was a lot rosier in a social sense that communist Budapest. Capitalism seemed to compete with communism in order to surpass it in social benefits. Now, after the death of communism, none of that is necessary any more; the winner can now show its true face and commerce is now met with higher esteem than art."

This conclusion led to another philosophically coloured discussion, this time about the question as to the best way for art to flourish. Is suffering - in whatever form - a necessary requirement for good art, like birth is accompanied by pain? In any case, art of quality is absolutely essential for renewal of the spirit and thus it is the artist's task to hold up a mirror to society, Hámos finds. Morandi does that too with his nigh on unending series of still-lifes, I find, and Hámos does not disagree. To my concluding question, Hámos replied: "It is not wrong for an artist to be politically aware and then to act upon that; no, that is not wrong." I forgot to ask whether he wanted to point an accusing finger towards Ruttman with that comment, because then the waiter came to take our orders.

In his first year in Berlin, Hámos made Seins Fiction, a piece for two monitors with a major role for Berlin, then split into two: the same news in East and West, but two different interpretations. With this debut he landed via Video Roma in the festival circuit. A year after Hámos, Gábor Bódy arrived in Berlin and this realized Josef Robakowski's idea: an international magazine in the field of video supplemented with (fragments of) recent films and videos by artists. Hámos was only obliquely connected with the magazine christened Infermental, but he heartily applauded the initiative.

"A few years after Body died, Infermental folded. The idea has been imitated often enough, but the quality had never even been approached, let alone surpassed. No-one had such a feeling for the spirit of the age as he did. But to go back to DFFB. I was annoyed about the study package. Why did I have to learn all those technical things, which I already knew in any case? I thought it was much more important to look at films and discuss them. That's why I organized a two month seminar with fellow student Christoph Dreher. Our subject was: how can I make something work? Our aim was to make commercially successful films without them being commercial in nature. We chose films by Antonioni, Godard, Hitchcock, Melville, Polanski and Powell, as well as work from Russ Meyer and John Waters. We knew what sort of result we wanted: we had an idea of forty compositions of one minute from The Residents and forty equally short stories which we put together from hours of material recorded from the television. Commercial together with a 'treatment', formed part of the first World Wide Video Festival in 1982. With that research into how you tell something, we discovered en passant the possibilities of television for cinematographic experiments, like for example the reuse of existing footage."

Berlin of 1982 saw the dawn of the golden age of video; the Hungarian input was large because as well as Hámos, Ed Cantu, Mari Cantym Marian Kiss and Katalin Pazmandy also made their voices heard out from their new home town. After having done something similar with Superman, at that time forbidden in Hungary, Hámos identified himself with the 'camp' hero Flash Gordon in Seins Fiction II (1982/83) whose adventures were visualized in two ways: objectively (video) exclusively with close-ups of Hámos who experienced the events as Gordon, and subjectively (Super-8) by looking at the incidents through the eyes of this saviour from evil. Despite the prominent presence of a choir of old men, Der Unbesiegbare (1984/85) can not be considered conventional either: for the compelling adventures of the unsurpassed Lotti Huber and the ditto Udo Kier, Hámos did not consult Aristotle, but with Notes on ‘camp’ by SUSAn Sontag within reach, he tried to see how far he could get in 'eloquence with the wrong words'. Der Unbesiegbare was released both on video and on film, but within the work itself, both media are applied to combine two genres: video/television is linked to the cool world of science fiction while the more emotional world of the thriller is embraced by film.

After recalling memories of the above mentioned productions and of the stormy visit of Udo Kier to the video festival, then in The Hague, our conversation in Amsterdam had to turn to the relationship between film and video. As a preface I formulated several thoughts based on Godard's comparison of the two media to Cain and Abel; I went into Vito Acconci's point of view where he links video with close-up/portrait and film with total shot/landscape; finally I digressed into virtual as opposed to real and into the relationship between drawing and painting, or that of poetry with the novel. Then it was Hámos' turn.

"The difference for me is purely formal and does not involve content. Things change as far as reproducibility goes but electronics have no influence at all on film language. Significance precedes feeling and that's why a hired killer is film and Superman is video. And because the content weighs more heavily than the form, I am just as happy with a picture postcard of a painting as with the original in a museum. In the same way that beautiful words are subject to eloquence, so is form subject to meaning. What's more, the more meanings there are, the better; double meaning or even ambiguous meaning; meanings that the maker did not include but which the public manages to discover!"

I reconsidered and realized that that summed Ruttman up and I decided to send Hámos a thank you card with a picture of White square on white background by Malewich.

In the second half of the eighties, the 'video scene' in Berlin began slightly to fall apart. The same thing happened with the love between Hámos and Astrid Heibach, cynically enough after completion of their joint video about love, A tale of love (1988). In their own words, they followed in the footsteps of Ulay & Abramoviş. Before the Wall fell, there was another fundamental event in Hámos' life.

"In 1989 I was finally allowed back into Hungary after 10 years. When I watched Hungarian television, I saw by chance images of the Square of Heavenly Peace. I considered that as an incongruity because before then, it would have been impossible to broadcast such shots in Hungary. This was a vanguard of the enormous changes that were on their way. I realized that immediately and so I called ZDF to offer them a new production. That was the German/Hungarian video The real power of tv (1991), With my grandmother in the role of presenter. Later on I went with her to Los Angeles where she was reunited with her sister after a separation of 80 years. Golda & Roza (1995) shows well how telecommunication took off with no trouble at all but that the sisters could not really communicate with each other in the absence of a common language. It is important that family news was able to make it into world news. Based on that, Vilém Flusser came with the plan for History of mankind seen as a tv-drama. His death, which I see as the greatest loss in my life, meant that nothing came of that."

By now, night had fallen in Amsterdam, although much remained to be said about pseudo heroes who die a pseudo death, while real heroes prove their immortality precisely by dying. And also about the changes to which analogue is constantly subject, while digital, according to Hámos, is indestructible and therefore immortal (and as far as I'm concerned, perhaps even stillborn). About digital code as a more 'digitalized through' form of the alphabetic code, we could well hear more of that within the foreseeable future when the work is finished for which Hámos will once more work together for a while with his old study-mate at DFFB Christoph Dreher. Because of that project, Hámos will not be gracing the World Wide Video Festival 1997 with his presence. That's why he left a few thoughts behind.

"The possibility for identification is indispensable and that's why every good work of art is in itself a mirror. Curiosity encourages inspiration. Take good care of your dreams, don't waste them!"