Why Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy)?
Film historical background: first Hungarian full-length colour feature
The participants of this conference on restoration probably saw digitally coloured tests from Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy) in March of 2001. The works of the few sequences projected by Focus Fox Studio were done by using a Spirit scanner, while colours were intensified and image defects were corrected by using an Inferno workstation. All that had served testing purposes only, at the time we simply had been unable to pool the funds together for restoring the entire film.
In August of 2003, the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage awarded the essential support needed for the work. This sum was below market prices, yet every participant considered the job as an exciting technical challenge, a reference assignment and a most worthy testing of its equipment.
The Hungarian National Film Archive invited the Hungarian Film Laboratory to scan the original nitrate negative of the film in 2K resolution, to intensify colours contained in the negative in 2 to 3 percent, to colour the film accordingly and to carry out post production; the Image Processing Laboratory of the University of Veszprém to correct scratches, flashes and other image defects digitally; and the Computer Science Basic Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science to restore the original soundtrack digitally. The Hungarian National Film Archive has been working together with the latter two for many years within the scope of a Széchenyi Scheme project aimed at the development of a fully-digital film-saving system. Restoration at the same time served the testing of the system under development. The presentations will be offered by the parties concerned in the order of work-phases. The 20-minute segment presented here is a working copy shown with huge success at the Film Review in February of 2004. As of today, 50 minutes are coloured and 40 corrected.
1. Why Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy)?
Subsidised renewal of films has been conducted systematically at the Hungarian National Film Archive since 1989, following a film by Félix Máriássy, Csempészek (Smugglers, 1958) at the film review, which was in a state of complete waste. Then, with the combined efforts of the entire film trade, we set up the Foundation for the Past and Present of Hungarian Film to save our national film heritage. The efforts are subsidised by the state, within the framework of grants from the National Cultural Core Programme, the Hungarian Motion Picture Trust, the Historical Film Foundation, and the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage totalling to 30 to 32 million Hungarian forints (120 thousand euro) per annum. The silent film portfolio of the archive increased from 14 to 40 over the past 15 years, while 30 fragments were managed to be acquired subject to ongoing restoration. 102 pre-1945 and 292 post-1945 sound films, 40 volumes of newsreels and nearly 100 shorts and documentaries were managed to be restored or renewed with the production of a sufficient number of safety accessories. Each and every nitrate-based film of the post-1945 period has been saved and renewed. This of course does not mean that restoration can be regarded as accomplished since when the fullest copy of the first film shot after 1945, A tanítónő (The School-Mistress) was recovered from the US, we naturally compiled the most complete and technologically most suitable version of the film.
In 1990, when the first Hungarian full-length colour feature, Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy) was about to be restored, fading tests had shown only 2 to 3-percent traces of colour in the film produced on Gevacolor raw stock. The then current conventional lab technologies were not capable of producing a colour version. We still have two films produced on Gevaert raw stock in similar conditions, Különös házasság (A Strange Marriage) based on the same novel by the great Hungarian writer, Kálmán Mikszáth and Civil a pályán (Try and Win), both directed by Márton Keleti in 1951.
2. Film historical background: first Hungarian full-length colour feature
Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy) had not been without any precedents. Colour technology was already experimented with on Agfacolor stock in three sequences in Géza Radványi’s A beszélő köntös (The Talking Robe, 1942) based on the same novel by Kálmán Mikszáth. According to contemporary press, it was a truly pioneering undertaking from a film technological point-of-view in Europe. Colour laboratory works were done in Berlin./1/ (The digital restoration of the film was performed by Focus Fox Studio by 2003.) Barnabás Hegyi, the cinematographer of Mattie, the Goose-boy got acquainted with colour cinematography on these sequences. Antal Volkmayer, the director of Szivárvány Filmlabor (Rainbow Film Lab) recalled the extreme shortage in raw stock after WW2 in his memoirs. Another precedent to Mattie, the Goose-boy, the 1200-metre colour Agfacolor negative of the news footage capturing May 1st, 1949 and its corresponding 3000-metre positive smuggled in from Romania. The female smuggler was caught and the treasures were handed over to Rainbow Film Lab. The contraband goods were of rather diverse colour-characters, to balance negative colour-characters, Volkmayer embarked on the production of filters of different tones and colours. Although he found „the results rather poor”/2/, consideration of colour laboratory works was introduced in Hungary. We now have the chance to restore this stock digitally.
Mattie, the Goose-boy produced in 1949 was a benchmark in freshly-nationalised film production. The film hallmarked the year of changes (1948 – socialist takeover, commencement of dictatorship). In the interpretation of the Communist Party, film studios, as „factories of ideology” were responsible for creating new, positive heroes representing the „people’s” justice in a heart-reaching manner comprehensible by all, and thus to appear in a grandiose colour film before the world. The most suitable character to achieve this was Mattie, the Goose-boy, the Hungarian Nasreddin Hoggia or Till Eulenspiegel, the crafty youngster, the first peasant figure of Hungarian literature taking just vengeance in his own hands for his humiliations: beating up his master forthwith and thrice (Imre Soós). The verse prose of Mihály Fazekas written in 1805 was thoroughly adapted for the screen by scriptwriter Szinetár György in line with the demands of the period. By the end of the film, the reluctant, greasy Döbrögi (György Solthy) does not evolve but falls victim to being laughed at by the crowd in his utter cruelty and sluggishness after Mattie, the Goose-boy beating him with a stick for the third time as a leader of his people – in front of a huge folk crowd. One of the criticisms even mentioned that the „peasant Falstaff with frogs” was no rival to Mattie, the Goose-boy./3/ The first positive here of post-1945 Hungarian film history was not lonely as that of Fazekas, but assisted by several „attached” figures in his revolution, such as his love, Piros the maid (Teri Horváth), or Döbrögi’s hussar sympathising with Mattie (János Görbe), the poor organising themselves in the marshes, the line of vaudeville actors or the professor from Debrecen (Artúr Somlay), as a scholar supporting the exploited; contrasted with the picky, silly Gyöngyi Döbrögi (Éva Ruttkai), the canny beau, the torturer of the people (István Bozóky), the merciless bailiff (Miklós Szakáts) and the frightened, fainting French companion (Manyi Kiss)believing to recognise a fearsome hero of the French Revolution in Mattie.
The victory of the just cause of the poor was entrusted by the Film-political Committee – the top hat of the party in film matters – to a most experienced director, Kálmán Nádasdy, an apprentice of Zoltán Kodály, composer, opera and stage director with strong routine, insight into character and literacy. (He began working as film director in 1940, he is also known for one of the most grandiose productions of the era, Gül Baba). He gathered a proven crew and the most enthusiastic young ones around himself, with László Ranódy as his assistant, who later adapted Kosztolányi’s and Móricz’s pieces for the screen [Pacsirta (Skylark), Légy jó mindhalálig (Be Good Till Death), Aranysárkány (Golden Dragon) or Árvácska (Nobody's Daughter)] and one of the best actor-leading director. Cinematographer Barnabás Hegyi was the biggest name in the trade [A beszélő köntös (The Talking Robe), Valahol Európában (Somewhere in Europe), Ének a búzamezőkről (Song of the Cornfields)]. Assisted among others by György Illés, Ferenc Szécsényi, Richárd Ihász and a name by his own right, chief lighting specialist Béla Bolykovszky. And old great actors such as Arthur Somlay (the musician from Somewhere in Europe), György Solthy, Manyi Kiss, Samu Balázs. Audiences might have been familiar with the harsh organ, naturalness and strong character of the twenty-year-old Imre Soós from the bridesman role of Talpalatnyi föld (The Soil Under Your Feet). He and Teri Horváth might have felt themselves in their natural environment, both coming from poor farmer families with several kids. Éva Ruttkai’s funny grimaces, special intonation and vivid mimic already showed the signs of the future actress queen.
Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy) is also unique in the sense that it was an undertaking of an unrivalled scale with 600 extras. The shooting began on August 20th, 1949. Dabas was the site of the Market In Döbrög. The house of Mattie, the Goose-boy – which was also burned up - was erected in the Village of Sári, electricity posts were dug out, roof tiles were replaced by shingles. Upon his second beating, Döbrögi was hugging a giant button-wood of the City of Gödöllő, his house was furnished with Biedermeier furniture rented from museums of the Fishermen’s Castle near Gyón, a pipe-rack from contemporary pipes was added and the weapons of the heyducks was selected by arms experts of the War History Museum. Tivadar Márk insisted on boots sewn on the side in line with contemporary styles, the making of which survived only in Mezőkövesd. All this was a great sensation to Hungarian films used to haphazard production inside studios. A headline in contemporary press read „Horsing of people-torturing Esterházys displayed in the first Hungarian colour feature”./4/ A 12-course contemporary meal due upon proposing was cooked on site, including „cockscomb with sour cream”.
The film was a huge success, including its upgrade in 1961; the total number of tickets sold was in excess of five million. It was only surpassed by the operetta caricature by the Latabár family parodying the high class, Mágnás Miska (Mickey Magnate, 1948). Nádasdy was awarded the Kossuth Prize; the content references of the film were appraised by members of the Political Committee. The colour and sound problems of the film were attributed by the party to the „absence of collective working methodologies, as individualist phenomena”, which was expressed in a party activity./5
Notes
1 Balogh, Gyöngyi: Az első magyar színes film születése. Filmkultúra online 2003. http://www.filmkultura.hu/regi/2003/articles/essays/beszelokontos.hu.html
2 Volkmayer, Antal: Adalékok a magyar filmtechnológia történetéhez. Noted down by László Gaál. 1962. MNFA kézirattár Ké 167/8. 29.
3 Magyar Nemzet, 1950.03.01.
4 Fehérvári Napló, 1949. 11.15.
5 Szilágyi, Gábor Tűzkeresztség. Magyar Filmintézet, Bp.1992. 166.
3. On colour technology
Still, the entire staff dealing with colours had to solve unbelievable tasks. This experimental raw stock was the first appearance of the Belgian Gevaert company. Its features had not been experimented with before. The pouring, light and colour sensitivity of the stock were rather fluctuating, Antal Volkmayer and his associated, two engineers from Chinoin Pharmaceuticals, Géza Dobrányi and László Fári took a great leap into uncharted territory with the chemicals and the development. Costume designer Zoltán Fülöp was often surprised to encounter the „turning of poppy-red dolmans turning purple in the footage”. This may also explain why he and Barnabás Hegyi kept a „colour diary” to maintain a proper level of colour-harmony in the film between make-up, sets and costumes. The colour diary was a sequence of fabric templates pinned on a wall-rod with the colour templates used in the particular scene. Every halftone of fabrics was consulted in test shootings in advance. As Antal Volkmayer recalls Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy): „Gevaert has attached every instruction and colour filter for the Lab. They offered a three-month guarantee on photography and a year on colour stableness. This is why Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy) was impossible to copy after a year because the colours faded from the negative. Had we done a film in Agfacolor, we would have had to send the film for development and finishing to Berlin, because Agfa never gave the formula, besides they never sold stock to us at all. We used Agfacolor chemicals in the work. These chemicals had already been in an oxidised state, which were then regenerated by Géza Dobrányi and László Fári at the Chinoin.” The experiences of Dobrányi – who not only was a chemical engineer and a photo chemist, but also an amateur photographer in colour – were needed because older specialists with no chemical background were unable to solve strict colour-switching, fading and pH constraints. Upon completion of Mattie, the Goose-boy, Dobrányi set up an experimental workshop in the film lab in Gyarmat Street, and elaborated the foundations of Hungarian sensitometry, the colour technology based on exact gamma-values.
Assistant cinematographer Ferenc Szécsényi – who began his career in the second half of the 1930s as a lab assistant – recalls that there were two types of nitrate negatives, a so-called inner negative (at 3200 Kelvin) and an outer negative (at 5000 Kelvin). These parameters did not match the characteristics of Agfa. Enormous carbon lamps were used for lighting, the candles for the feast melted totally under so much heat. They were used at 3 to 5 times lux values even in strong daylight in order to allow for the correction of colour and light fluctuation. This negative was still unmasked, non-colour-accurate, resembling a brown-print at best, with heavily missing yellows in the inner negatives. That is why sixty different filters were required, multiplied by 72 combinations for development of the stock, i.e. nearly 5000 halftones could be achieved on the positive. Thus colours were not really possible to balance. The stock behaved in a manner impossible to correct mainly in the shades. Another particular feature was the flashing due to heterogeneous pouring. György Illés, the other assistant recalls Gevaert stock as: „Still insensitive stock with wider contrast effects, colours exaggerated in the image field to the top. If we tried to reduce this slightly, it impaired colour-accuracy. Therefore we had to settle for what the raw stock could offer.” One of the biggest issues in colouring and digital image-restoration is the extent to which such problems should be reduced along with stabilisation.
4, Restoration considerations
The colour nitrate negative of Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy) was uniform content-wise, with a few missing frames and heavily damaged but not truncated sprocket holes. This was the basis for restoration. In 1982, a null-copy was produced in our institute by using conventional laboratory technology, this contained colours in about 3 percent. The film laboratory used this stock for scanning where the negative was deficient.
A Da Vinci colour-corrector intensified colour traces, but they displayed an anachronistic, crossed state: a face being purple, the one next to it mould green.
The two types of negatives mentioned above showed two heavily differing worlds of colours.
What colours should colourless parts be given? In such instances it was an ethical-methodological issue to decide what to restore. Today, nobody knows exactly what this Gevaert was like when it was lifted from the developer solution. Cinematographer Ferenc Szécsényi is assisting this work. Specialists of the film lab viewed the most beautiful renewal typical of the colours of the period, Károly Makk’s Liliomfi, which also approximates Ludas Matyi (Mattie, the Goose-boy) in the period depicted and in the motifs thereof.
According to Szécsényi, the most beautiful and balanced colours have to be achieved within the warm, pastel shade colours of the period, since the original colours cannot be achieved anyway. The original ideal of Barna Hegyi must be approximated, as if he was looking down from above.
When Mokép re-released the film in 1961, attempts were made for renewing the film with then available means. The objective was to „replace faded colours with brownish or bluish tones familiar to audiences from old import films”. This transaction was unsuccessful, so the black-and-white version remained. The original soundtrack of the film was so overdriven that it was re-dubbed with the original roles under the direction of sound engineer Miklós Császár at the Pannónia Film Studio. Gábor Csíkos borrowed his voice to Imre Soós, who died well before his time. This version was more sterile, tiny folkloristic micro-motifs, details, noises and crackles describing characters disappeared. Especially the live background noise recorded on-site became poorer. The 12 years past had their mark on the voices and vividness of the other characters as well. An essential demand toward digital restoration was to return to the original Soós-version.
