Dragon

THE SPECTRAL BODY
THE SPECTRAL BODY

ASPECTS OF THE CINEMATIC OEUVRE OF
ISTVÁN SZABÓ
By
Zoltán Dragon
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

THE SPECTRAL BODY: ASPECTS OF THE CINEMATIC OEUVRE OF ISTVÁN SZABÓ,
by Zoltán Dragon
This book first published 2006 by
Cambridge Scholars Press
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2006 by Zoltan Dragon
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN 1904303757
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ...............................................................................................vii
INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 1
Concepts and aims in the narrative analysis of István Szabó’s
oeuvre........................................................................................................ 2
Concepts and aims in the analysis of visual representation in the
oeuvre........................................................................................................ 7
Film and the phantom ................................................................................. 10
Names and the phantom ............................................................................. 16
Body and the phantom: the concept of the spectral body ........................... 19
The outline of the book............................................................................... 23
CHAPTER ONE
FATHER (APA, 1966): THE GHOST OF THE FATHER,
AND THE ORIGIN OF HAUNTING ........................................................................... 25
The hidden past of the father ...................................................................... 26
Levels of narration in Father....................................................................... 32
The secret of Jewish origin ......................................................................... 34
CHAPTER TWO
LOVE FILM (SZERELMESFILM, 1970): THE HAUNTING SECRETS
OF INCEST AND JEWISHNESS, AND THE OVER-INTENSE LIGHT .......................... 40
Memory, fantasy and narrative reconstruction in Love Film...................... 42
The secret of incest in Love Film ............................................................... 46
The strange over-intense white light of the final scene of the
film.......................................................................................................... 49
CHAPTER THREE
MEPHISTO (MEPHISTO, 1981): THE HAUNTING SECRET OF JEWISHNESS
AND THE UNBEARABLE OVER-INTENSE LIGHT ................................................... 53
The phantomatic symptom of Hendrik Höfgen .......................................... 55
Höfgen’s “proper” name............................................................................. 60
The over-intense white light of the final scene of the film, and the
spectral body ........................................................................................... 63
Sound and the spectators’ “collective interrogation” of themselves........... 68
vi Table of Contents
CHAPTER FOUR
SUNSHINE (A NAPFÉNY ÍZE, 1999): THE MAP OF THE SZABÓ OEUVRE .............. 72
The secret of the name................................................................................ 74
The patterning role of the music and the secret of incest............................ 79
The phantomatic logic and mechanism of bodily representation: the
birth of the spectral body ........................................................................ 85
CONCLUSION......................................................................................................... 89
BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................... 93
INDEX .................................................................................................................... 97
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would have never been completed without the help of several people.
First of all, I would like to thank the generous support of the Central European
University and the help I got from the Department of Gender Studies, both the
faculty and the head, Susan Zimmermann, and the office staff, Natália Versegi and
Mária Szécsényi. I am also indebted to Parveen Adams, one of my supervisors,
whose personality and theoretical guidance changed my whole way of thinking. I
also wish to express my thanks to two longstanding mentors. Jasmina Lukiü has
been supervising my work for years by now, but she has also presented me with
her wonderful ability of caring friendship. Our talks over coffee have always been
a great spiritual fuel for me. Réka M. Cristian was first an admired instructor and
has become an invaluable colleague and friend throughout the years. Her keen and
indefatigable critical readings of my essays helped me develop many of the
thoughts I nourish today. She is also the first person to call in times of trouble and
happiness. Finally, I wish to thank my small family, Kriszta and my son Máté, for
their love, patience and understanding which provided the indispensable
background for my work.
INTRODUCTION
There are two very special moments in István Szabó’s oeuvre that call attention
to the role of the body in cinematic representation. In the first example, at the end
of Szabó’s Love Film (Szerelmesfilm, 1970), a blinding light “draws” the contours
of a female face looking into the camera, at the audience. The character recounts
her past some months and, significantly, the trauma of losing her baby. Then her
face dissolves into the blinding white light again. The other example is from the
Academy Award winner film, Mephisto (Mephisto, 1981), where—again at the end
of the film—the focal character is chased around on an empty stage and is finally
caught by the spotlights. He turns to face the camera and addresses the audience in
his despair. Then his body starts to dissolve into the light apparently emitting from
within his own body, and gets petrified by the end as an X-ray of his own body,
with fading contours.
These two scenes call attention to the representation and the role of the body in
the feature films of István Szabó. The foregrounding of the appearance and
disappearance of the two characters’ bodies suggests that the filmic and narrative
contexts which they appear in are more problematic than they might seem at first
glance. In film, the body connects what is seen with what is told, in other words it
is the knot between the scene and its story. Since the characters’ bodies are
signifiers, and containers or carriers of the stories that make up the plot of the
films, the strange moments of their extraction from the visual homogeneity of the
filmic representations in Love Film and in Mephisto also signal breaks in the
specific narrative contexts. The two strange moments therefore imply an uncanny
operation both at the level of visual representation and at that of the narrative.
These two examples are not the only strange ones in the oeuvre. Several bodies
in the focus of the filmic representation return from film to film to continue their
narration. What is strange in these returns is that the characters appear in largely
similar family histories and seem to lead a linear narrative life, yet they are
signified by different names. One such example is the character Bence in Father
(Apa, 1966), whose life we can follow until his university years. Then we meet the
very same character with the very same family background and painful trauma (the
loss of his father) in The Age of Daydreamings (Álmodozások kora, 1964) and in
Love Film as an engineer, appearing as Jancsi. Along with the character and his
family history, some specific objects and memorable sentences also recur, as if to
strengthen the idea of a contiguity beyond the specific filmic texts they appear in.
Even though the films are self-contained and complete in themselves, the
strange visual effects and the uncanny returns of some characters, names, objects
and specific sentences point beyond the contexts they are parts of. They are, in a
2 Introduction
sense, heterogeneous to their visual and narrative environments, and thus may
reveal the logic of representation in the Szabó oeuvre.
Methodologically the analysis will proceed on two separate, yet closely related
lines. The first is a narrative analysis, which lists the tropes of narration in the films
and then establishes a “map” of the diegeses: an intertext. This narrative analysis
will focus on the most important recurring motifs of the films in a way that their
interrelatedness sheds light on a specific, hidden or covert line of intertextual
narrative. I will also refer to a few specific effects in the films that resist fitting into
this intertext. These mainly visual effects cannot be explained in their relation
either to the film’s diegesis, or to the intertext. They point beyond both, yet they
exert strange effects on the entire oeuvre. This gives the second line for the
analysis: by tracing the recurrence and possible roles of these effects, I embark on
the examination of the visual aspect of the oeuvre. These two lines of analysis are
only seemingly separate: by the end of the analysis one should underscore the
other. I wish to emphasise here that although my analysis tends to present the films
as parts of an intertext or map, they are unique film texts with narrative and visual
unity, comprehensible without the support of clues from different diegeses and
especially without the clues from the biography of István Szabó, the auteur. By the
juxtaposition of these texts I want to point out, however, that these films present
certain features that point beyond themselves, and that the investigation of these
features enlarges the scope of the interpretation of the Szabó oeuvre.
Concepts and aims in the narrative analysis of István Szabó’s

oeuvre
The narrative analysis takes the films as constituting a specific line of
intertextual narrative. This narrative is composed of a coherent story of the central
characters, on the one hand, and common stylistic elements, on the other. The two
aspects—central bodies and stylistic features—are in an ostensible relation to each
other: the common stylistic elements can be recognised by their relationship to the
recurrent bodies in the films. Szabó’s feature films can be grouped into two well-
distinguishable parts: the films made before Mephisto (Mephisto, 1981), and the
films from Mephisto onwards. While the earlier films pay tribute to the French
New Wave,1 the later films can be classified as classical film narratives.2 In the
1
Cf. Bordwell and Thompson 1994, 548; 657-8.
The Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó 3
earlier films the central character is embodied (without exception) by András

Bálint, whereas with Mephisto the casting policy changes: Klaus Maria Brandauer
embodies the central characters of the “grand trilogy” (Mephisto, Colonel Redl
[Redl ezredes, 1984], and Hanussen [Hanussen, 1989]), and then it is only
Sunshine (A napfény íze, 1999) that takes up—quite explicitly—the issue of
recurring bodies in the focus.
The narrative intertext that I talk about is a web of filmic references. These
include recurrent names, bodies, objects, sentences, places, and situations. To list
these correspondences, to “inventory” them, means to establish a structure that
maps the entire oeuvre in a potentially meaningful, i.e. interpretive manner. This
intertext becomes a “fusion” of several narratives. Primarily, it includes the family
histories of the particular central or focal bodies of the films. I refer to the
protagonists of the films as “central bodies”, “central characters,” or “focal bodies”
almost interchangeably. However, with the different terms I imply different aspects
in my discussion. “Central body” refers to the corporeal emphasis of the
protagonist. The term “central character” is used when the emphasis is placed on
the functional aspect of the character. I use the term “focal body” when I intend to
emphasise the essentially or purely visual aspect of the character, and its relation to
the scopic field.
I restore the family history of the central characters as much as possible within
the context of a particular diegesis, and then fill in the gaps of this story whenever
there is any reference or information fitting into it in other films. For instance,
Jancsi Oláh’s family history—he is the central character of Father, and the same
body takes up the same central role in The Age of Daydreamings, Love Film, 25
Firemen’s Street (T zoltó utca 25., 1973), and Budapest Tales (Budapesti mesék,
1976)—can only be reconstructed partially from the film in which he appears.
However, due to the recurrence of the same body surrounded by the same
characters and functions, the gaps in the family history can be filled in to an almost
full extent. The same can be done in the case of the family history of the central
bodies of the grand trilogy, although with much care, since they do not seem to
have any familial correspondences. The recurrent motifs, situations, names, family
members, relationships and characters provide a stable ground for such an
argument, nevertheless.
The central characters until Confidence (Bizalom, 1979) are intradiegetic (and
also homodiegetic) narrators in the films, i.e., they tell their own stories, while
2
Classical film narratives are characterised by a clear narrative structure
(order/disorder/restored order), a plot set in motion by a character, seamless editing, and a
narrative closure. (See: Hayward 2000, 64-68.)
4 Introduction
simultaneously they participate in them. Their personal narratives can be

channelled into a quite coherent narrative spanning beyond the actual narrative
context. This special intertextual narrative is underscored, on the one hand, by a
stable family background and, on the other hand, by the very same historical
circumstances – thus the frames of this narrative secure the stability of the
narrating “I.” Furthermore, this family narrative is also dependent on the specific
intertext that the films make up based on the recurrent motifs and situations. But
what is this intertext?
Originally, the term “intertextuality” is a translation of the Bakhtinian
“dialogism,” introduced by Julia Kristeva in La Révolution du Langage Poétique.
According to Bakhtin, the term denotes “the necessary relation of any utterance to
other utterances.”3 Furthermore, any verbal (or non-verbal, for that matter)
performance “inevitably orients itself with respect to previous performances in the
same sphere, both those by the same author and those by other authors.”4 I will not
elaborate on the potential extra-oeuvre implications of Szabó’s films here, but
focus on merely the intra-oeuvre references that dialogically make up a cinematic
intertext.5
There is, however, an even more relevant aspect of dialogism to the present
analysis than the importance of “intertextuality”: “Dialogism refers to the relation
between the text and its others not only in the relatively crude and obvious forms
of argument … but also in much more diffuse and subtle forms that have to do with
… what is left unsaid or is to be inferred,” as Robert Stam argues.6 This is a
definition that is missing from the most often quoted uses of “intertextuality,” and
a definition that I wish to retain in my use of that term. This way, the cinematic
intertext does not only reveal the references of one film to the other within the
Szabó oeuvre, but will also be seen to hide several other potential references.
In Gerard Genette’s phrasing, intertextuality is basically “the effective co-
presence of two texts.”7 Kristeva’s reformulating of the term has further relevance
to the present project. She designates two sides of (inter)textuality: the “pheno-
text” and the “geno-text.” The former is the visible surface of the text, the
“remainder” of the play of signification of the latter, which is productivity par
3
Stam 1992, 203.
4
Voloshinov (Bakhtin) 1986, 95.
5
Most extra-oeuvre intertextual references are listed in Marx 2002.
6
Stam 1989, 14.
7
Stam 1992, 206.
excellence.8 That is, there is a mechanism, a “process,” behind or beyond the given
text, and this process is what creates avenues to other texts as well.
What I wish to explore in this book is this very process. In Szabó’s oeuvre the
operation of the geno-text creates an eerie, haunting effect in the pheno-text. It
means that the very production of the text is beyond the dimension of mere
production: it is a controlled and directed production that creates a pattern in the
form of compulsive returns of certain features, objects, bodies and sentences from
film to film. Some of these returns can be accounted for on the basis of a narrative
analysis of the films, some of them are simply inexplicable in their own context.
One such inexplicable return is that of the narrator in some subsequent films
(notably Father, The Age of Daydreamings, Love Film, 25 Firemen’s Street, and to
a certain extent Budapest Tales). According to Peter Brooks, “[n]arratives both tell
of desire–typically present some story of desire–and arouse and make use of desire
as dynamic of signification.”9 It is the ambition arising from this desire to tell the
story that “constitutes the very ‘readability’ of the narrative text,”10 the ambition
that is rooted in the body and identity of the narrator. The question that insists in all
narrative acts is the “why”. Why does the narrator tell the particular story? Why
does the narrator have to tell that story, and why in the particular way and form?
And, finally, why does the narrator return in subsequent films to continue his
story?
Narration is a question of desire, then. According to Jacques Lacan, desire is
born out of a lack and it is always a desire for something else (i.e., other than what
is the immediate satisfactory object). Providing an analysis in which he discusses
the working of the unconscious in terms of the Jakobsonian tropes, Lacan defines
the mechanism of desire in similar terms as the operation of metonymy.11 The
continuity provided by metonymy is the basis of all narratives. Working with this
Lacanian notion of desire as a basis for narration, Brooks argues that what lends
coherence to a narrative in the continuous slipping from metonymy to metonymy is
repetition, which may result in a compulsion to repeat. According to him, a
narrative is always already a repetition: something that happened is told as a
story.12 As to the inception of this repetition, he conceptualises repetition as a
“form of remembering, brought into play when recollection properly speaking is
8
Kristeva 1986, 120-1.
9
Brooks 1992, 37.
10
Op. cit., 39.
11
Lacan 1992a, 167.
12
Brooks 1992, 97.
6 Introduction
blocked by resistance.”13 This resistance is the unconscious repressed, that is, a

lack initiated by some repression, by some traumatic experience.
Whatever recurs within the frame of the narrative (which is already repetition
itself) should be seen as a representation stemming from the very same trauma of
the subject of narration. That is to say, the objects in the narrative that are
repetitively present (from film to film in terms of the Szabó oeuvre) have an
organising function in the diegeses. These recurrences underpin the intertext of the
oeuvre, since they are the manifest evidence of the repetition at work in the film
texts. This also implies that the specific objects that recur have a special tie to some
initial lack, and thus to the desire that propels narration.
In the Szabó oeuvre the act of narration is performed by recurring bodies in
several cases. As I have mentioned, in Father, The Age of Daydreamings and Love
Film it is Bence (the same character with the same family background under
different name in the two latter films, where he is called Jancsi) returns to continue
his story. In the so-called “grand trilogy” it is Höfgen/Mephisto/Redl/
Schneider/Hanussen (three films, five names, one focal body) who seem to return.
Finally, in Sunshine it is the three generations of the Sonnenscheins (one film,
three names and characters, one focal body) that repeat the pattern of compulsive
returns. In all cases the desire to tell the story on and on fails to be satisfied within
the frame of the diegesis (except for Sunshine, but there the three parts of the
narrative may be seen as corresponding to three films, as it were, and the ending
implies a/the beginning). It means that the enigma posed at the beginning—or the
lack that propels the narration—could not be resolved by the end, even if the
surface story provides a closure. For me it implies that there must be something
that compels the narrator to appear again and continue the telling of the story of his
life. This makes the whole act of narration uncanny.
The uncanny effect of the Szabó films, from a narratological point of view,14 is
the compulsion to perform the narrative act from film to film. According to Freud,
there is a kind of “daemonic power” compelling the repetition and this power is
what he thinks is uncanny, since it is unexplainable.15 The realisation that a
narration is “daemonic” or uncanny is necessarily retrospective. It is in the light of
the narrative contiguity of the family history that I claim that there is something
outside the diegeses that drives the narrators to tell their stories. Outside the
diegeses, since were it within them, it could be revealed, resolved, or simply
13
Op. cit., 98.
14
I will discuss the visual aspect of the uncanny later on, elaborating on the concept of the
phantom.
15
Rashkin 1992, 31.
exorcised. The “daemonic possession” underlying the compulsion to repeat is thus

foreign to the particular narrative framework in which it produces the uncanny
effects. As I will argue, the uncanny effects cannot be restrained to the narrative
part of the oeuvre, they are manifest (even more uncannily) in the visual field of
the films, too.
Objects, names, sentences are repeated in the Szabó oeuvre, and they not only
refer to the traumatic lack that gives birth to the desire to narrate, but they also hide
or conceal that trauma. This mechanism of referring to something while effectively
hiding it at the same time, on the one hand, constitutes an uncanny effect. On the
other hand, however, it has further implications, as well. These recurrent tropes, as
I have already argued, make up an intertext, the gist of the Szabó oeuvre, so to
speak. This intertext reveals the web of references that creates a meaning for
otherwise inexplicable motifs in given films. However, taking the above discussion
into consideration, I claim that the explanatory power of this intertext may be
misleading. Since the intertext is made up of the tropes that refer to and hide the
inception or cause of the narratives, they cannot be adequately used to explicate
unclear motifs in the films. The intertext, therefore, only obscures and further
conceals my access to the kernel of the films, and of the oeuvre.
My aim here with the setting up or mapping of the filmic intertext of the Szabó
oeuvre is to assess the recurrent features and motifs that seem to explain everything
and that seem to underlie the oeuvre. I will reveal that this intertext, while giving
possible meanings to the films, hides another potential interpretation, and that the
core of this interpretation cannot be accessed from the particular diegeses
themselves. This core or kernel is foreign or heterogeneous to the narratives. That
is the reason why I introduce an analysis of the visual aspect of the oeuvre
separately. At the end of my analysis, the two aspects will reinforce one another,
allowing to see the reason and inception for the filmic narratives.
Concepts and aims in the analysis of visual representation in the

oeuvre
The second line of the analysis of the Szabó oeuvre consists of looking at
those—primarily—visual effects that simply do not fit the narrative of the intertext
that the films constitute. In other words, it is an analysis that takes into account all
the effects that seem to be out of place in the particular context they appear. These
effects form blocks to understanding, therefore, must be regarded separately. They
point beyond the narrative intertext and threaten it with disruption. What are these
effects? Where do they come from? How do they haunt the oeuvre?
8 Introduction
To account for these effects I will use the concept of the phantom first defined
by Nicolas Abraham. Abraham uses the concept of the phantom in a
transgenerational sense: it is an entity that carries unspeakable and undisclosed
secrets from generation to generation. “The phantom is a formation of the
unconscious that has never been conscious – for good reason. It passes … from the
parent’s unconscious into the child’s.”16 While passing from one generation to the
next, it carries secrets that are the results of repressions from previous generations.
Thus, in certain cases, the unspeakable secrets of a generation dwell in the
unconscious of another generation without the latter’s knowing about it.
What manifests itself in the effect of the so-called haunting is therefore not the
repression itself (as in a Freudian sense of the return of the repressed), but the
carrier’s effect. This carrier is the phantom. In Abraham’s theory the phantom
carries out its task by “travelling” in language. The child learns the language from
the parents, but it is not merely the language that the child receives: the
undisclosed and unspeakable secrets are transferred into the unconscious of the
child, too.17 This way, the first repression of the child is already a repression of
something that has previously been repressed. As the phantom operates through
language, the effects of this operation (i.e., the mechanism of symptom-formation)
surface in the use of the language. As Abraham notes, the phantom “works like a
ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography.”18 The
phantom is, therefore, a “foreign body lodged within the subject.”19
The phantom, or ventriloquist, governs the speech acts of the subject from
within his/her unconscious. Since the subject does not know and notice that a
stranger is speaking through him/her, it also remains concealed from him/her that
his/her behaviour becomes incongruous. This is actually the case in most of István
Szabó’s films. Central characters occasionally utter sentences in one film that are
the sentences of other characters’ in another film in a way that they entirely absent
their feelings during the act. That is, the original libidinal content of the sentence is
emptied out. That becomes clear only in the light of the original character’s
utterance, where the very same sentence referred to some painful experience.
This part narrative line of analysis, however, does not take account of the
strange visual effects in some of the films. For instance, what explains that in Love
Film and in Mephisto the final frame is blinded by a harsh white light? This is a
common feature in both, but it resists integration into the intertextual matrix of the
16
Abraham and Torok 1994, 172.
17
Op. cit., 140.
18
Ibid.
19
Op. cit., 174.
narratives and is completely heterogeneous to the visual aspect of either film. What
is the source of that strange light? Why does it appear there and how? What
motivates its reappearance? These questions are only a few that indicate a gap in
the understanding of Szabó’s film narratives.
Effects like this blinding light necessitate a redefinition of the phantom. While
keeping the definition provided by Abraham, the concept needs to open up towards
a visual type of haunting, too. The basis of a more complex redefinition is the
etymological root of the word “phantom.” The Greek word μ translates as
“vision,” “spectre,” which is the synonym of “phantom.” When looking further, it
becomes apparent that the word means, “to display.” This etymological
trace discloses that the very word “phantom” encrypts in itself the condition of
visuality, of being a ghost-like medium, and also the potential to show and to
present. Using the word “phantom,” therefore, implies a possibility to identify a
complex theory of cinematic re-presentation in the Szabó oeuvre: the phantom
shows something only to hide something else even more effectively.
The phantom effects, therefore, point to the gaps in the understanding of the
narrative genealogy in a way that they hide these gaps with the very same gesture.
Showing in order to hide: this is the logic of the phantom. This “visual” definition
of the concept of the phantom opens the way for the analysis of the uncanny visual
effects of the Szabó films. This definition connects the undisclosed secrets of the
narratives and the secrets that are beyond the genealogy – or it reveals that the
secrets discovered in the genealogy derive from previous ones. This implies a
“text” beyond the established intertext, which is also beyond the visible surface of
the films. Referring to Elizabeth Bronfen’s application of Abraham’s theory, I
designate this text as “phantom text.”20 This text is the narrative of the silenced
secrets that became encrypted at one point and that occasionally cause blockages in
the comprehension of the specific film narratives of the oeuvre. The blockages are
formed by the returns of the phantom (and not by the returns of the secrets or the
crypts by themselves).
The phantom, therefore, is an agent of the phantom text. The phantom text is
then an intertext governed by the phantom. Referring back to my initial proposition
of a tripartite interrelation of the film, the name and the body, it can now be argued
that these three entities find their common knot in the “bizarre foreign body”21 of
the oeuvre: the body on display, whose appearance is triggered by the phantom. In
20
Bronfen 1998, 157.
21
10 Introduction
what follows I outline step by step how the concept of the phantom relates to each
of the three terms.
Film and the phantom

Film is a display. It is an illusion inasmuch as it presents something that is
absent. It puts forth a show, which also means that it conceals something: if
something is projected, the source of it is always concealed. In the present analysis
I am not trying to tackle the technical aspects of projection, rather, I allude to a
rhetorics simultaneously of showing and hiding at work in the cinema. The
moment an image appears on the screen, something is repressed behind it. It may
be useful to refer to Lacan’s theorisation of the screen here. In the field of vision
the subject and the object of vision are not in a direct relationship with each other.
There is a kind of mediation between them that on the one hand makes sight
possible, while on the other hand it detaches them on the axis of the look.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis Lacan illustrates the
moment of looking at an object by two lines coming from the side of the subject,
forming an apex at the object. This figure corresponds to the description of the
perspective of the eye.22 What this eye sees, however, is not the object, but an
image of the object that Lacan posits between the object and the subject of vision.
Then he introduces the reverse of this triangle: what was originally the object
becomes now the point of light emitting the lines that form the sides of the triangle
meeting in the apex, which is now the subject. In this second scene it is the subject
who thus becomes the picture. The mediation between subject and object is not the
image any longer, but the screen.23 What Lacan describes here is that the subject is
always already included in the field of vision, which is to say, there is something
that includes the subject in the vision before the moment s/he looks at an object.
Lacan designates this entity as the gaze. The gaze is “unapprehensible,”24
something that escapes the subject’s look that disappears the moment it would
appear: it is always present through its very absence.
The two polar points of the field of vision, the gaze and the look, are mediated
to each other through the screen. As Jacqueline Rose explains,
an object veiled from sight by an over-intense light can be discerned only if a screen
is interposed which partially obscures that light and/or the observing subject; the
22
Lacan 1998, 91.
23
Ibid.
24
Op. cit., 83.
screen thus blocks the subject from the light in order to expose its object, and the
‘look’ of that object is seen to emerge only in this moment of partial elision…25
It is the veil that, by hiding, reveals the image. Similarly, in the cinema, things
on the screen appear as images, not as objects. In other words, what the spectator
sees are images of things, not the things themselves. The way the screen operates,
furthermore, is very similar to the mechanism of haunting. In haunting something
comes to the fore that hides something else, but as it comes forth, it lends itself to
investigation. The display (shell) always contains something of its source (kernel).
According to Abraham, “the shell itself is marked by what it shelters; what it
encloses is disclosed within it.”26 In other words, the screen on the one hand hides
something from the spectator’s view, and on the other hand this something is also
“contained” in the scene. Since in the Szabó oeuvre the haunting is produced by
certain traumatic secrets, as I will argue in the analysis of the films, something of
these secrets are manifest on the screen. This is possible through the work of the
phantom, as the messenger of these secrets.
I have to specify here what is meant by secrets and what their relation is to the
phantom and the display. The secrets Abraham and Torok talk about are not the
everyday secrets of gossip, confidential information or something that has to be
covered up. Rather, these secrets are so painful or shameful that they cannot be
articulated by the subject, which means that they cannot be consciously passed on
to another subject. These secrets are thus silent, unable to surface by themselves.
The repression which they are the results of is then different from the repression
Freud talks about. As Nicholas T. Rand summarises, for Abraham and Torok,
“Secret” is not synonymous with “hidden,” “unknown,” or “latent,” even in the

Freudian sense of a person’s unconscious or repressed desires, apt to reappear only
in opaque, symptomatic compromise-formations. In Abraham and Torok’s sense, the
secret is a trauma whose very occurrence and devastating emotional consequences
are entombed and thereby consigned to internal silence, albeit unwittingly, by the
sufferers themselves.27
The form of repression Abraham and Torok talk about in such cases is called
“preservative repression.” This type of repression causes a split in the psyche of the
25
Rose 1986, 192. Note that Rose employs the term “look” to refer to the “gaze.” I stick to
Sheridan’s translation (gaze), as in Lacan 1998.
26
27
Rand in Abraham and Torok 1994, 100.
12 Introduction
unwitting subject, a rupture in the psychic topography. Secrets of this type are
entombed: the walls of the crypt arise around them to keep them intact. That is why
these secrets cannot surface by themselves. But since they haunt, they are not
completely absent. This is possible because of a formation that objectifies that
rupture28 while it carries from one subject to another through the very silence
within speech. This is true for the visual type of haunting in Szabó’s oeuvre: it is
the phantom that carries the secrets, the crypts, from one film to another. Thus, the
displays that are generated by the phantom, i.e., the films under the name of Szabó
are surfaces through which the crypts shine forth. This shining forth is precisely the
haunting effect.
The phantom’s role is in one sense very similar to, in another, very different
from the screen. Their role is similar in that they both sustain a certain relationship
between something visible and something hidden. In Lacan, the screen simply
hides in order to show, which is true for the phantom, although in reverse: the
phantom shows in order to hide. Moreover, the phantom, by presenting a display to
conceal inevitably lets the crypts shine through it. These secrets are nesciences
(i.e., unknown knowledges), heterogeneous to the display itself – hence their
haunting effect. While the screen is drawn up to dim the over-intense light to make
vision possible, the phantom brings in the over-intense light to obscure vision.29
The images in Szabó’s films, thus, occasionally carry haunting secrets in the
form of crypts shining through as over-intense light. In this respect, the screen
itself can be reconceived as a crypt screen - as an overt reference to Freud’s screen
memory. The screen memory is usually an insignificant event preserved as a
childhood memory. According to Freud, however, this event of minor significance
is but a displacement of a significant one, which thus becomes repressed.30 The
screen memory is, in Freud, a memory that screens another one. The contrast
between this concept and Abraham and Torok’s concept of the crypt screen lies in
the origin of the screen. Whereas in Freud’s elaboration the screen stems from the
subject’s own experience and displaces an experience related to it somehow, in
Abraham and Torok’s analysis the crypt screen is generated by a specific encrypted
28
29
This over-intense light will be the basis for an analysis of haunting effects as it literally
appears in Love Film and Mephisto (most enigmatically in the last of these films).
30
Freud 1995b, 303. I have to note here that Freud’s concept of the screen differs from
Lacan’s formulation. In the application of the crypt screen in this analysis I wish to retain
the function of hiding apparent in Freud’s definition, and Lacan’s idea of the screen as
mediating the invisible to the visible.
secret, which might not even be the subject’s own secret or repression. Therefore,
the references to the displaced event are under multiple distortion.31
The crypt screen, furthermore, is not merely a displacement. Although
Abraham and Torok discover a rather complex mechanism of a series of
displacements (through allosemes, homonyms, etc.), I would go beyond that, since
I find this concept highly relevant to the analysis of Szabó’s cinema. Relating to
the above discussion on the concept of the screen and its role in the present
analysis, I wish to emphasise the work of the phantom behind or beyond this
screen. This means that the crypt screen is not merely a complex of distortions of
an encrypted secret, but the secret is heterogeneous to its screen just as it is to its
origin. It is primarily a nescience (an unknown knowledge) that is unknown or
dissociated right from the beginning. In other words, while Freud’s memory screen
covers another scene through dynamic repression, the crypt screen covers a scene
that is a “non-scene”: it covers something that derives from somewhere else. It is,
then, a concealment of something that has already been concealed from the very
beginning.
This elaboration is necessary to underscore the effect of haunting so ostensible
in some visual phenomena in Szabó’s films. But how does the crypt become
manifest visually? How does it carry out its work as a haunting? What haunts and
how, in other words? I refer to the haunting effects as uncanny. Indeed, the work of
the phantom is uncanny, so the effects produced as a result of this work are
uncanny, too.32 Abraham, again, extends or modifies Freud’s concept elaborated in
the case study of the Sandman.33 The original German term, unheimlich, has a
capacity to refer to two antagonistic meanings at the very same time, and it is also
capable of signifying a development whereby a generally heimlich (that is, known,
familiar) object becomes unheimlich (that is, unfamiliar, strange, bizarre). In an
Abrahamian vein, the object or effect becomes uncanny not because it is in a direct
relation to the subject, but precisely because it is an unknown knowledge
(unheimlich – “unhomely” as “not in the home or family”) in one generation, while
31
Abraham and Torok coin the term in Abraham and Torok 1986, 47. According to them,
the crypt screen is essentially an “image screen” operated by a logic similar to the dream-
work described by Freud.
32
I would like to note that in Hungarian the two words, the uncanny and the phantom, have
a common etymological root. The uncanny in Hungarian is “kísérteties,” which also means
“ghostly.” The phantom is a “kísértet,” that is, a “ghost.” In Hungarian, that is, the uncanny
is the effect of the phantom, even simply on the basis of the words themselves.
33
Freud 1995c.
14 Introduction
it may be known (heimlich – “homely” as “in the home or family”) in a previous

one.34
What haunts, therefore, are primarily familiar objects, but the effects they
produce make them and—as a corollary to this—and their appearance and
recurrence uncanny or, in other words, “phantomogenic,” i.e. phantom-like. This
uncanny effect in the field of vision is closely related to the Lacanian concept of
the gaze, according to Slavoj Žižek.35 The gaze is a point in the object that puts the
subject into the field of vision before s/he would look at that object. It is what
Lacan identifies as the blurred spot in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which
from another point of observing it becomes decipherable as a skull. As Žižek
explains through a Hitchcockian procedure of shooting a mysterious scene, it is
precisely the gaze that makes the entire scene uncanny, since the vision in which
the looking subject is included comes from an unidentifiable point in the object of
the look. Therefore, it is precisely the “unapprehensible” gaze that creates the
uncanny effect.36 But how does it become uncanny – which implies heimlich and
unheimlich at the very same time?
According to Parveen Adams, Lacan’s analysis of the Holbein painting
describes “two moments of viewing.”37 What is more, the coming into focus of the
strange floating spot in the picture as a skull “shows up a gap between those two
moments.”38 The two moments under discussion correspond to the two sides of the
uncanny. The first moment finds the subject in contemplating the picture in a
“learned” way, standing in the vanishing point of the perspective.39 By contrast,
when the skull becomes visible out of the spot, the scene in the field of vision turns
inside out, so to speak. Nothing is what it was before: everything becomes
ambiguous in relation to the second moment. The gap that the second moment of
viewing initiates, as Adams explains, “reveals the structure of the illusion of the
34
Esther Rashkin’s elaboration, who adds that the word heimlich can also be understood as
“within the family or house,” alluding to the possibility of a transgenerational aspect.
Rashkin 1992, 30.
35
Žižek 1992b, 126.
36
Ibid.
37
Adams 1996, 141.
38
Ibid.
39
Contrary to the belief that the so-called Renaissance perspective is the most perfect
rendition of human vision, several studies in art history and visual culture prove that the
quattrocento invention is purely artificial. This way the realistic proportions of space in the
paintings of this technique provide the observer with a “naturalised” point of view that the
observer must learn in order to become a “knowing” spectator, or to occupy the position of
the look in the Lacanian scheme.
image and the subject’s wishes in respect to it.”40 It is this revealing that I intend to
do in Szabó’s strange visual effects: to look beyond the “over-intense light.”
However, even if I succeed in screening that light, all I will uncover is the crypt
that has shone forth before obscuring my sight. Even though I reveal the haunting
mechanism generated by the phantom, I have to tear open the walls of the crypt
that had originally sent the phantom to haunt. In other words, the gap that opens up
in the two moments of viewing the strange and haunting images in Szabó is a gap
that should be opened up to another gap. It is at that point when the phantomatic
mechanism at work in the visual register of the films in the Szabó oeuvre can join
the other, narrative line of the analysis in order to bring to light the undisclosed
secrets.
At that crucial juncture of the two lines of my analysis another concept will be
of use: André Gaudreault’s theorisation of monstration. Monstration works in the
mimetic register, as opposed to (or as a corollary to narration which is
characteristically a feature of the diegesis). According to Gaudreault, monstration
precedes narration, that is to say, the image comes before editing. As he explains,
film operates on two separate, yet interwoven levels: one is the showing of an
image (mimesis), which is then refigured through the process of editing (diegesis).
It is the editing process that determines and finally shapes the point of view of the
narrator of the film.41 According to Gaudreault, monstration is an “act of ‘showing
forth,’ of presenting events in present time.”42 In this system, then, film is
constructed by the superimposition of two layers, a mimetic and a non-mimetic,
that is the “lamination of monstration and narration.”43
Gaudreault’s definition of monstration implies a connection with the concept of
haunting: similarly to the crypt, it is also an act of “showing forth.” In other words,
the mechanism of monstration underscores the mechanism of haunting: it is the
way the haunting effect is transmitted towards the spectator. It can even be
formulated that the act of monstration is nothing else but the work of haunting
performed by the phantom in the Szabó oeuvre. This is then refigured through
editing to form a coherent narrative. Although editing masks this “shining forth,” it
cannot erase the effect of it completely. It obscures the “light” but it only
reinforces it by rendering an uncanny “aura” of “over-intense light” to it.
40
Ibid.
41
Stam 1992, 115.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
16 Introduction
Names and the phantom

Names are particularly significant in the Szabó oeuvre. Not only do the names
of the central characters form a special intertextual web (which underscores other
aspects of the intertext of the oeuvre) but some specific names also return in
successive films – sometimes in the same function or role, and sometimes in
peripheral ones. For example, the name “Sonnenschein” appears first in a slightly
different Hungarian version as “Fényes” (“shiny”) the name of the central
character in Budapest Tales. The central character is embodied by András Bálint,
who had provided the focal bodies of The Age of Daydreamings, Father, and Love
Film. Later the same focal body appears as Dr. Sonnenschein in Colonel Redl.
Then in 1999 Szabó produced Sunshine, which word is a literal translation of the
name of the family, the Sonnenscheins.
Szabó himself confesses in a recent interview that it often happens to him
during the writing of a script that he is thinking of placing an earlier character or
the name of that character in the new context, simply because he believes that there
is more to talk about concerning the particular character, or his/her story.44 Szabó
describes this process as an experience when writing the script of Sunshine:
I was thinking, I made an inventory of my resources, and I saw that I had a couple of
characters from Colonel Redl and from Hanussen who were not yet elaborated, who
had already been sitting here in this room when I started to write Sunshine. I had
nothing else to do but to let them into the space where the film was to take place.
And they brought their characters, which they had already known, only they did not
have the chance to elaborate in the films where they appeared.45
In recalling the role of Dr. Sonnenschein in Hanussen, Szabó remembers that

he started to know so much about the character that he wanted to continue his
story, to craft a family history and a context around him. It is thus clear that the
names constitute a special kind of genealogy in the oeuvre, as they form a history,
a story on its own right. Nonetheless, these stories are embedded in the family
stories articulated in the plot of the films, too. To follow the reappearance of the
names is also a way to map the intertext. That the names are closely related to the
family histories has further implications as well.
I have already referred to the secrets encrypted in the families of the oeuvre,
and now I have to extend this to include the names in the process of transmitting
44
Halász 2002, 28.
45
Ibid.
these painful nesciences (unknown or unrecognised knowledges). Names are given

by the parents, and thus appropriated as a signifier for the subject. It means that
names—like the inherited gaps and silences in the speech of the parents—refer to
the undisclosed secret in the family history. It is important to emphasise this, since
the names in the Szabó oeuvre come to be detached from the bodies occasionally,
to signify other subjects, and different bodies. By so doing, names transmit these
gaps to the new subject or body, and conversely, whenever a body appears
signified by a different name, the new name takes over the secret, and transmits it
forward according to the logic of displacement. My aim in the analysis of the
intertext is to reveal this process in discussing particular examples.
In the Szabó oeuvre, names have further signifying potentials. Many of the
titles of the films are names of certain characters. Obvious examples are Mephisto,
Colonel Redl, Hanussen, Meeting Venus (1990), Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe (1991),
but some of the less explicit references can also be in this inventory: Father and
Sunshine. These names signify the bodies and the film texts at the very same time.
To refer to the tripartite structure of film, name, and body I set out to explore in
this section, it seems that names are the knot between the films and the bodies, they
perform the transmission between the narrative and the visual aspects of the crypts
in the oeuvre.
According to Ned Lukacher, “[t]o name is always to mask, to conceal, and in
concealing, to reveal.”46 What the name masks and conceals is the body par
excellence. The basis for such a claim is provided by the films in the Szabó oeuvre,
since here several names are given to signify (i.e., cover, hide, and conceal) the
very same body. Jancsi, Bence, then Höfgen, Mephisto, Schneider, Hanussen,
Redl, and finally Sunshine qua Sonnenschein are all covers for the same body (the
three groups of names designate the three central bodies each film). They displace
each other metonymically, just as they displace the bodies themselves. As I have
implied, this concealment is not a mere veiling over of the bodies, though. It is also
a concealment of haunting secrets inherited from the family sagas through the
parents. These names are thus names that hide, and names that lie. They hide, as
they stand in for and conceal the body. They lie, since none of them can be seen as
the “proper” name for the body: they are only displacements of one another, like
the masks of Mephisto/Höfgen. Therefore, these names are cryptonyms and
pseudonyms.
First, they are cryptonyms because they hide and incorporate the secrets that
haunt the individual unwittingly. They are means of transmitting nescience. The
46
Lukacher 1986, 95.
18 Introduction
parent gives the name to the child, thus passing on with it the silenced secrets as
well. It should come as no surprise then that “[n]ames sometimes have
incorporated meanings that can determine our idiom without our ever noticing
it.”47 An illustration of this statement is the story of the name of the Sonnenscheins.
To facilitate integration into society, the young Sonnenscheins decide to change
their name to avoid negative discrimination because of the overt Jewish
connotation. They change it to “Sors,” that is “fate.” The “grimace” of fate is that
the new name reveals their Jewish identity precisely by way of concealing it:
everybody knows that Sors is but a displacement of something else. The new name
becomes thus a name that lies, just as is the case with the names of many other
central characters in the oeuvre.
These names are pseudonyms because they are chosen to displace the “proper”
name, thus construing a possible family story for support. This is what happens
with the Sonnenscheins, but it is the case with Hanussen, too. His “proper” name is
Schneider, which is changed for a more Nordic sounding name in the Weimar
Republic. Hanussen thus becomes a pseudonym – and also a cryptonym.
“Schneider” is the German for “taylor,” that is, “szabó” in Hungarian. Thus, the
name of the author can be heard as an echo in the Hanussen cryptonym.
As it is presented in Nicholas T. Rand’s cryptonymic analysis of Stendhal’s The
Red and the Black, the name as a pseudonym can be understood as a cryptonym,
since that word conceals certain connections between the body of the texts (in the
case of the Szabó oeuvre, the films) and the bodies in the texts.48 A pseudonym qua
cryptonym hides and conceals these connections, but with the very same gesture it
foregrounds them, too. This is the haunting effect of the names in the oeuvre, and
this is how the phantom can make use of them. However, the signifying moment of
the names is always already preceded by the signification of something else. As
Jacques Derrida explains in his foreword to Abraham and Torok’s analysis of the
Wolf Man, “The body always signs even before any ‘proper’ name.”49 The name,
therefore, comes after the body, it is a derivative of the body in this respect: it is
the message of the phantom, the message of a body that is present through its very
absence. To decipher the haunting effect in the oeuvre and to draw the contours of
the phantom at work in (behind or beyond) the films I have to turn to the
discussion of the body, and more particularly to the investigation of one body: the
spectral body behind the names.
47
Op. cit., 94.
48
Rand 1986, lxi.
49
Derrida 1986, xxviii.
Body and the phantom: the concept of the spectral body

Hendrik Höfgen (alias Mephisto) in a moment of hysterical outburst, in Szabó’s
Mephisto shouts to his black lover in her Hamburg apartment after a scene of
violent lovemaking: “My eye is not my eye; my leg is not my leg; my face is not
my face; my name, even my name isn’t mine! Because I’m an actor. You know
what it means to be an actor? The actor is … a mask … among people.” By the
end, Höfgen reduces himself to a bodiless and nameless entity: precisely a non-
entity, a mask that comes alive only if attached to a body and a name. That is, it is
not the body that lends itself to the role on stage, but vice versa, the role lends itself
to the body and the name. But what body and what name is Höfgen talking about
here? Whose body and name, if not his? Moreover, what does it mean that he is
nothing, that is to say non-thing?
Höfgen’s body, which is not even his own body, can be seen in a Lacanian
framework as an object a. It becomes clear by the end of the film, when this body
starts to disappear, or fade. Although its fading freezes into a white source of light,
it is clear that Höfgen’s body is not the same as before. It is a disappearing body, a
strange, uncanny corpus that seems to underlie the filmic representation in its very
disappearance. Significantly, when at the end of Mephisto, he is caught on the
stage by the lights as Höfgen (i.e., without the roles that would provide him with
the bodies), his body becomes the surplus (or leftover) of the scene: he encounters
the Real, that is, he diminishes with the eruption of jouissance: the over-intense (or
excessive) light that outdoes all other sources of light in the diegesis.
Without his roles, he is really nothing on the stage. It is precisely his body that
is lacking. It is in this light that I designate his body as a strange, even bizarre
foreign body, as a spectral body. When I mention spectral body, I refer to the
concept of the phantom coming from Abraham, only I add a corporeal aspect that
is essentially visual in the cinema. Indeed, it is the visual aspect that makes the
body “phantomogenic” and thus spectral. In this sense, the adjective “spectral” is
to encode the visual and also the uncanny aspects of that body. The spectral body is
a body whose origin cannot be located in the diegetic realm it appears in. It is a
strange, bizarre, and foreign body that nonetheless secures the coherence of the
narrative, and of the oeuvre.
This role of the body in the diegesis is very similar at first to the way Roland
Barthes defines the significance of the body in narratives. According to him, “the
‘symbolic field’ … is occupied by a sole object, from which it derives its unity. …
20 Introduction
This object is the human body.”50 In his discussion of the body, Peter Brooks
argues that the body Barthes talks about is a “narrative body,” that is to say a
semioticised body that brings along the “somaticization of story: a claim that the
body must be a source and locus of meanings, and that stories cannot be told
without making the body a prime vehicle of narrative significations.”51 Any
meaning of the narrative, that is, must derive from the body in view. This is, as
Brooks goes on to argue, “a narrative aesthetics of embodiment, where meaning
and truth are made carnal.”52 In the Szabó oeuvre, everything seems to depend on
this carnal meaning: hence the recurrence of certain focal bodies in the subsequent
films. However, the recurrence of these bodies alludes to another possibility, too,
notably that these bodies are used so as to screen meaning and truth (whatever
these two concepts cover at this point of the analysis).
The more so, since these bodies are never ever in full view. The look of the
spectator is allowed to see only fragments of these bodies, by which those parts in
view come to be privileged objects. These objects simply conceal the unity of the
body, in other words, body parts are used to cover the body. Thus they become
metonymies of the body. The body parts in the scopic field become screens for the
whole body, and also for the psychic processes of the character the body
represents. As I have already argued, the body itself becomes a kind of screen, that
is, it becomes a “shell” for a “kernel” to use the Abrahamian terminology.53 What
is important in this is that “the shell itself is marked by what it shelters; what it
encloses is disclosed within it.”54 This brings me back to the Lacanian definition of
the screen as the entity that conceals to make vision possible.
When in Lacan, the two moments of viewing the picture bring about the
opening up of the image onto the Real, in Abraham the same reveals a secondary
kernel, which does not allow a further opening. It is at this point that the uncanny
effect gives way to the phantomogenic haunting. That is why I talk of a foreign
body: it is foreign not merely to the particular diegesis in which it appears, but it is
also such a foreign body in the intertext made up of these diegeses. It is thus that
the “beyond” of a phantom text can be theorised. The working of this phantom text
is channelled through the phantom that provides the films with visible bodies.
Since the phantom in itself cannot appear, it forms characters (the very word
meaning “form” itself), in other words, sends spectralised bodies to carry on the
50
Barthes 1974, 214-5.
51
Brooks 1993, xii.
52
Op. cit., 21.
53
Abraham and Torok 1994, 79-98.
54
Op. cit., 80.
secrets. These bodies make utterances that make up the narratives. However, these
utterances are driven by the phantom, thus they become ventriloquisms. That is to
say, the bodies in the films are shells for the kernel. Through a multiple
metonymical transposition the invisible phantom finally lodges in the diegetic
realm via the spectral body.55
The way the haunting effect is created by the phantom is, thus, a simultaneous
work of hiding and showing in what is hidden also comes forth in uncanny
apparitions. To account for these apparitions, I refer to the concept of the uncanny
once again, with the aim of introducing a spatial aspect of the term: to describe the
relationship of interiority and exteriority. The discussion of this aspect is crucial
when I arrive at the point in the analysis where the eruption of the strange, over-
intense light blurs the boundary of inside and outside. This way the body in sight
will merge with its exterior, i.e., with the scene in which it appears. To underscore
my argumentation I turn to a Lacanian rereading of Freud’s concept, upon which I
further enlarge to introduce the Abrahamian notion of the phantom.
The haunting effect of the mise-en-scène is uncanny, as I have already argued
before. The uncanny quality of this showing and hiding is perhaps best expressed
in Lacan’s rendering of Freud’s German term, Unheimlich, to the French: extimitè,
which has been appropriated in English as the extimate or extimacy. The term
refers to a blurring of the boundary between inside and outside, between the kernel
and the shell. As Elizabeth Bronfen argues, the concept is essentially useful, since
it can “designate the phantomatic, encrypted presence of kernels of the real
traumatic knowledge in the Symbolic,” where this encrypted nescience “returns not
only as a hallucination but as an embodiment with both psychic and somatic
55
This is similar to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasmus. The chiasmus is a
trope of reversibility, it is that “unique space which separates and reunites, which sustains
every cohesion.” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 155.) This is the logic behind the claim that “every
visible is invisible” and that “it is the visibility itself that involves a non-visibility.” (Op. cit.,
247.) In other words, the invisible insists (“in-sists” and “ex-ists” at the same time) in the
visible. Similarly, perception is possible only when there is imperception, and showing is
possible only if there is a simultaneous act of hiding. In Abraham’s terminology—which
grounds itself to a certain extent in the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology—the model
of the chiasmus can be seen to underlie the depiction of the shell and the kernel in the
formation of the self. What is hidden (the kernel) is also in what is shown (the shell). This is
a phantomogenic logic: the phantom shows in order to hide, but what it strives to hide is
always within the scene. This way the scene is invaded by an unknown knowledge, a
nescience, that haunts the visible. That is to say, this nescience is put into the scene by the
phantom, by which the mise-en-scène is formed.
22 Introduction
reality.”56 At the moment when extimacy reaches the subject, the material from the
real floods the symbolic space.57 I argue that this is the moment when the over-
intense light floods the diegesis at the end of both Love Film and Mephisto in the
Szabó oeuvre.
The body has always been in the centre of representation, or perhaps it is better
to say that forms of representation have always been preoccupied with rendering
the body. As Barthes says, it is the human body that not only occupies the
symbolic field (i.e., the field of vision in terms of the cinema), but also it lends
coherence and unity to this field.58 Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer
traces the history of modes and mechanisms of visuality from its earliest
appearance to the modern age. In discussing the structure and role of the camera
obscura and its relation to the human body, he argues that “[t]he body … is a
problem the camera could never solve except by marginalizing it into a
phantom.”59 Crary does not use the notion of the phantom developed by Abraham.
However, my redefinition of the phantom in visual terms may make use of this
insight in the relationship of the body, the camera, and the orchestration of the field
of vision in the mechanism of cinematic representation. Therefore, although Crary
does not talk about secrets or crypts, his usage of the term “phantom” fits into the
spectral scenarios that I attempt to elaborate on in this book.
The bodies of some of the central characters of the Szabó oeuvre become
bizarre, foreign and haunting bodies in visual representation, as they take shape as
spectral bodies. But the way a particular body attains its spectral status in the
Szabó oeuvre is a bit more complicated. The spectral body of the Szabó films is a
messenger of the encrypted secret of the oeuvre, the carrier of the crypt, the
transmitter of the nescience that is guarded by the phantom. The spectral body is a
visual phenomenon that is sent forth into monstration by the phantom in order to
screen the unspeakable secrets of the narrative part of the oeuvre. It is precisely
this spectral body that acts as a knot between the two registers of the cinematic
representation, and also as a screen for the phantom of the entire oeuvre.
56
Bronfen 1998, 385.
57
Op. cit., 390.
58
Barthes 1974, 214-5.
59
Crary 1991, 41. Crary does not use the notion of the phantom developed by Abraham.
However, my redefinition of the phantom in visual terms may make use of this insight in the
relationship of the body, the camera, and the orchestration of the field of vision in the
mechanism of cinematic representation. Therefore, although Crary does not talk about
secrets or crypts, his usage of the term “phantom” fits into the spectral scenarios that I
attempt to elaborate on in this book.
The outline of the book

To provide a detailed analysis of all the aspects outlined above, I chose four
films to elaborate on: Father, Love Film, Mephisto, and Sunshine. The rest of the
films in the oeuvre will be used as references to underscore or illustrate my
arguments, or to illuminate the implications of certain minute details in those four
films. Father is chosen as the first film to be analysed, since the story it presents is
genealogically prior to all the others (including The Age of Daydreamings,
produced two years before Father). This is the film that foregrounds the enigmas in
the narrative of the family history, and hints at potential traumas or buried secrets.
The film is significant for introducing the first crypt screen as well, which connects
it very closely to Love Film, since the same crypt screen appears in the latter film,
too, albeit with a slight modification.
Love Film thus takes on the discussion of the secrets and crypts in terms of the
visual register par excellence. First, it modifies the aforementioned crypt screen of
Father. Second, at the end of the film the central character’s lover, Kata, appears
facing the spectator to read out loud her letter to Jancsi. She recounts the parts of
the story that are elliptically left out of the film and talks about her trauma: her
baby died after birth. When she finishes this testimony, the screen turns into
complete, blinding white, as if her face and body were transformed into the
intensive light radiating toward the spectator. This technique is rather uncanny, and
it becomes even more uncanny when used again in another film: Mephisto.
In Mephisto, the same over-intense light finishes the film, only in this case the
transformation of the visible into the blinding whiteness petrifies the body in sight.
Höfgen’s face petrifies right at the moment when the sources of the light are off-
screen, and his eyes “disappear” in his face. He is transformed into the source of
light, but at that moment he does not simply disappear: rather, he insists (and ex-
ists at the same time) in the frame facing the spectator directly. These two endings,
in Love Film and in Mephisto, will be discussed in terms of the visual register, but
a propos of them I will also address the question of the “interrogative film,” which
Szabó confesses to produce. The term “interrogative” derives from Catherine
Belsey’s notion of the “interrogative text,” which is a text that, by breaking the
reader/spectator’s tie with the subject of enunciation in the text, “invite[s] the
reader to produce answers to the questions it implicitly or explicitly raises.”60 The
work of the phantom (i.e., the transmission of the secrets) will be examined in this
process of interrogation as related to the visual effects that facilitate it.
60
Belsey 1980, 91.
24 Introduction
The fourth film of my analysis will be a kind of synthesis of the investigation of

both the essentially narrative and the essentially visual investigations. Sunshine
offers the possibility of assessing the encrypted secrets and the haunting effect that
embrace the entire oeuvre. The role of the family history will be discussed in very
close relation to the role of the uncanny visual features and these will finally be
connected in a discussion of the recurring body in the film. The focal body will
constitute the anchor that merges the two initially separate routes my analysis takes
at the onset. Finally, the superimposition of focal bodies, of the haunting, uncanny
visual effects connected to them, and the traumatic family sagas will give the
opportunity to understand the role of the spectral body in the Szabó oeuvre.
CHAPTER ONE
FATHER (APA, 1966): THE GHOST OF THE

FATHER, AND THE ORIGIN OF HAUNTING
Discussing Father, critics never fail to mention that the film is Szabó’s most
personal confession about his origins, about his family, and about himself. This
argument is usually underscored by biographical data, presented as if they could be
explanations of or reasons for a particular sentence, shot, or situation in the film.
However, Szabó, shortly after the premier of the film, declared that “a film,
however subjective a confession it is, is a creation of at least five persons.
Therefore, I can say that Father is the childhood of more people.”61
As the “amalgam” nature of the film and consequently of the central character
suggests in Father, the narrative is the merging of several narratives. Szabó’s
Father and almost all of his films recapture the cohesive force of the war and post-
war experience. In this case this cohesive force is a traumatic one, since Szabó’s
generation is characterised in Hungary as the “fatherless” generation: for instance
more than half of Szabó’s college classmates lived in a family where the father
died in World War II. As Kai Erikson argues, “trauma can create a community,” as
the “traumatic wounds inflicted on the individuals can combine to create a mood,
an ethos—a group culture, almost—that is different from (and more than) the sum
of the private wounds that make it up.”62
In Father the cause for the remembering of the trauma of the lack or loss of the
father is another, contemporary trauma: the revolution of 1956. In the film the
traumatic events of the October of 1956 not only bring back memories of World
War II, but also give opportunity for the “fatherless” generation to make peace
with their past. The film focuses on one particular character, and widens the scope
only at the end of the film (which is a usual strategy in his films), thus including a
community perspective on the originally personal traumas.
Father tells the story of a young man’s attempt to construct his identity through
reconstituting the identity and life of his father. In the film, during the turbulent
events of the 1956 revolution, the university student Bence Takó recalls his
61
Sándor 1966, 15.
62
Erikson 1995, 185.
26 Chapter One
childhood when he struggled hard to be distinguished and to have himself accepted

by making up heroic stories about his dead father. This way he became the most
cherished member of his school class. However, now he realises that he has lived
in mendacity: he deceived his friends and himself, as well.
As a university student, he participates in a film shooting, where he has to play
first a Jew being herded into the ghetto during World War II, and then a Nazi
archer soldier as well. Following the scene, his girlfriend, Anni, tells him the story
of her family, their Jewish origin, and the horror of Auschwitz. She presents a firm
awareness and love of her origin, which later on helps Bence to break the flow of
lies about his origin: about his father. He confesses that he knows basically nothing
about his father, it is merely his personal belongings that help and urge him to
fantasise (about) him and his origin.
During a trip with his friends, Bence accidentally spots a sign on which his
father’s birthplace can be read. This urges him to find the “referent” of his
fantasies, so he visits the village. Upon his arriving it turns out that everybody
remembers Dr. Takó, but nobody can tell him what happened to him, or who he
actually was. The visit is, however, not without a result: Bence finds the house
where his (presumed) father lived. Having retraced the geographical origin, Bence
decides to get rid of the haunting memory of the father, and to be himself. To
achieve this, he swims across the river Danube to prove that he can do it alone
(without the help of his father’s heroic image). He succeeds and in fact takes up the
role of a kind of “father”, i.e. a leading person, a role model, as more and more
people appear behind him swimming.
On All Soul’s Day he visits the tomb of his father to finally face him, and to
relieve himself of all the ambiguities and lies that have controlled his life so far.
The cinema verité shot sequence alludes to a carefree atmosphere that the whole
city suddenly acquired (already post-1956).
The hidden past of the father

The films made by Szabó between 1964 and the late 1970s present the
considerably coherent story of one focal body, which is signified by several names
in the particular films. Although Szabó’s debut film was The Age of Daydreamings
(1964), its story is the continuation of the story of his second film, Father. I wish
to analyse Father not merely because the story of the focal body begins here, but
also because many of the further references to the family history and the secrets
hidden behind this screen that appear in subsequent films can be explained in the
light of a discussion of this particular film. This is the film that foregrounds the
effect of the encrypted and silenced secrets on the characters and on the narrative
as well. Therefore, the narrative aspect of the analysis will be based on features and
examples discussed in this chapter: that is, I intend to explore the roots of the
effects that manifest themselves as haunting in the entire Szabó oeuvre.
First, I will focus on the recurrent features (objects, bodies, situations) that form
a kind of intertext nurtured by the films in the oeuvre. Then I will relate these to
the narrative itself. More precisely, I will use these features to account for the
fragmentation that becomes manifest in the central character’s act of narration.
Finally, I will identify the first crypt screen in the oeuvre that will in turn provide
an entry into the narrative of Love Film, the next film to be analysed in the book.
Although the analysis of Father will proceed as I designate in the introduction, i.e.,
on two lines (a narrative and a visual), I will emphasise the interrelatedness of
them, and argue for the complexity of filmic representation in the oeuvre.
Early on in the film there is a birthday scene, where Bence’s mother (who,
quite significantly, has no name) allows him to wear Father’s63 unwound watch,
and they go to see Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). Before the film there is a
newsreel sequence, titled “Getting Even,” which presents the execution of the
Hungarian Nazi archers. Bence is horrified by the scenes, but Mother calms him
down by saying, “Those are evils. They made the war happen. Once they took
father away, too. But he escaped; he jumped off a tram.” At that moment the
images of the newsreel are displaced by Bence’s fantasy sequence in which Father
is taken away by archers, and then he jumps off a yellow tram (a recurring trope in
the oeuvre), thus initiating a heroic chase scene in which he miraculously escapes.
With a cut, we see Mother taking Father’s watch off Bence’s wrist, putting it back
among the carefully assembled collection of Father’s relics.
In Father, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is displaced by the dictator’s “hand” in
Hungary (the archers) being executed. Their death is justified by their misdeed
against Father, who is thus the anti-dictator. This image of the anti-dictator is then
bound to the referent in the movie theatre: the wristwatch (again, a frequent trope
in the oeuvre that signifies the missing fathers). This watch—the sign of the anti-
dictator—will be used (wound up) in 1956, when—as more documentary footages
63
In the discussion of Father, I will use “Father” to designate the man presented in the
fantasy scenarios, whereas “father” will refer to the biological father (although at this stage
the difference between the two categories is not illuminated). “Mother” will also be
occasionally used only to name her (as “Wife of Father”) as separate from “mother” (as
“Bence’s mother”), since she does not have a name or at least never explicitly mentioned.
Nonetheless, Mother and Bence’s mother are the same. The only reference to the name of
the Mother—Klári/Claire—occurs on the back of a mysterious photograph that I discuss
later on.
28 Chapter One
testify—Hungary is fighting another dictator: Stalin. Bence, equipped with the

watch, could now be the embodiment of Father, of the prototype of the anti-
dictator, however, the watch-glass gets broken while he obtains a flag during the
fights in the city.64
This “scar,” break, or rupture of the watch-glass may be seen as an irretrievable
gap. It may signify a complete break with the past Father means to Bence, which
would thus tinge the “perfect,” heroic image of Father. Nonetheless, it can also be
a sign of a genealogical break, as the watch had been passed on from generation to
generation, from father to son (this will be emphatic in Sunshine). I think this gap
in the line of genealogy is not merely a signifier of the lack of the father inscribed
in the text(ure) of the narrative (commemorating a traumatic moment in the life of
the narrator) but it implies a complex system of hiding and concealing. I claim this
on the basis of the unclear identity of the father, and on the basis of Mother’s
anxious reactions toward Bence’s attempts to get to know the past. The lies and
faked memories that Bence entertains are but covers for a shameful secret that
haunts him unwittingly: he carries a nescience that concerns the Father’s past.
Thus, all the relics and all the fantasy scenarios generated by them lead Bence
away from Father, instead of pushing him toward the knowledge of his past. They
all lead him astray, as there is no referent to anchor the constant slipping of the
signifiers in order to generate some meaning: to establish the name of the father,
literally. This failure is only amplified by Mother’s prohibitions: Bence can never
touch the relics of the deceased Father. They are kept as if they were in a silent, or
rather in a silenced museum. What could lie behind these prohibitions? Why
cannot he discuss Father’s life narrative, and why are all the attempted
(re)constructions of it fake? And, in terms of narrative construction, why cannot
the grown-up intradiegetic narrator speak of himself in the first person singular?
These questions haunt and thwart the comprehension of the film.
64
Here the issue of dictator vs. anti-dictator and Father’s role in it becomes quite
complicated, as Father fought the dictator (Hitler) on Stalin’s side. He thus becomes the
heroic Father in Bence’s fantasy who plays a similar role in political terms for the entire
nation (see the marches on Socialist occasions where he is celebrated as one of the Fathers
of the nation). In 1956, however, Bence fights the ideology and the image (i.e. statue) of the
“anti-dictator”, who is now the dictator, Stalin (I am referring here to the documentary
footage Szabó inserts here visualizing the tearing down of Stalin’s statue in 1956, not to
Stalin, who died in 1953). In other words, he fights against the political father for whom
Father died. When he realises this, he will also decide to do away with his fantasies of the
heroic Father, and ceases to identify with him.
Following the turbulent events of the 1956 revolution, Bence and Mother bury
Father once again. They take the coffin out of the courtyard of the hospital he used
to work at (and where he was first buried in an unmarked grave following his
death), and take it to a cemetery. Father is now buried in a double-coffin. This
means that the secret is now doubly buried with Father, and that this secret may
have something to do with the hospital he used to work at. This hypothesis is
underscored by the following sequences, which direct the grown-up Bence to a
place that repetitively appears in his dreams and fantasies, and that is explicitly
pictured in his memory about Father: the hospital in the middle of a village.
The burial scene is followed by Bence and his friends’ excursion during the
summer holiday. The train glides past a sign that reads “Adorjánpuszta.” As the
narrator recognises it, he remembers that this is where Father was born. “I did not
even know where this village was. It is by accident that I noticed this station,” says
the narrating voice – now in the first person singular for the first time in the film.
This is significant, since previously he could only talk about himself in the third
person singular, which I interpret as a manifestation of a certain blockage: an
inclusion of a crypt that thwarts the subject in experiencing a unity of the self. With
the appearance of the birthplace of Father, this blockage seems to ease up, and
starts to disappear. It implies that the blockage was generated by the intrusion of an
encrypted secret that ventriloquised the subject’s speech – hence the third person
singular address. It was the carrier of this undisclosed secret that formulated
Bence’s speech acts, not he himself. The phantom and the secret are thus
connected to Father’s birthplace, that is to say to his identity and origin. Perhaps
this is why Bence finds a haunted place where his Father should be: silence and
emptiness awaits him when he enters the cellar where Father was said to be hiding
during the battle of Budapest in 1944. It is precisely then that he realises that
Father could not have been there.
To return to the first scene of the excursion sequence in the film, as the sign
next to the railway station comes into view, the three memory sequences presented
at the beginning of the film are immediately played again: (1) Father – chasing a
hen in the courtyard of a never-seen house; (2) Father – dressed up for an operation
on the corridor of the hospital (his mouth covered)65; (3) Father – in the leather
coat, lifting the camera-eye (Bence as a child) up, outside the never-seen house,
next to the fence.
These memory flashbacks urge Bence to “find” his father. He travels back to
the village, and starts to track down the name Takó. Shortly, and to his greatest
65
Quite significantly, Father never speaks, he is always silent.
30 Chapter One
surprise, he learns that there were two Takós, both of them doctors at the very same
hospital. This is the first uncertainty about Father. It appears, furthermore, that
everybody knew “Dr. Takó”; the problem is that no one can be sure which Dr.
Takó. Also, no one knows where he was and what happened to him during the war.
When Bence talks to a nurse, she blushes at the mentioning of the name Takó, and
at the sight of the leather coat. She confesses in her embarrassment that he was
nice, charming, and handsome, and used to call her by the nickname “Bimbócska”
(which translates either as “Little Bud” or as “Little Nipple”). Her sudden
emotional response can be surprising in the light of the perfect family romance
Bence entertains in his memory.66 Nevertheless, he seems to be blind to this
embarrassment.
However, this emotional outburst is the first tangible sign of some secret that is
doubly buried with Father by that point in the film. Since no one ever produces
such a response before the nurse, nor afterwards, her behaviour should be seen as
enigmatic. Another enigmatic point is the period in Father’s life when he was not
with his family, and—as the colleagues testify—was not in the hospital either. No
one knows where he was. All that is known is that he did not die during the war.
So, he was not with his family, he was not sent to the front line, and he did not
leave the country – he could have been somewhere near his family; only they did
not know about it.
Further uncertainties arise when it turns out that Mother is courted by a man
who had courted her before. At that time—although the film does not give any
palpable reference in this regard—she chose to marry the handsome Takó, but it
seems she has not forgotten this man, neither has he forgotten her. This man is
László Wieber, who was—as it turns out during Bence’s visit to the hospital—one
of Father’s colleagues. Wieber and Father worked together and saved many lives.
Bence learns at one point that Mother also was saved by Father. One of the old
colleagues reveals it, and then he adds hesitatingly, “Or was it Wieber? It was such
a long time ago.” When Bence arranges some old photographs at home, following
his visit to the hospital, he comes across a picture of an operation theatre in which
doctors and nurses, all dressed in white, perform an operation. On the back of the
66
Bence’s family romance is built on a false consciousness: “My father never cheated on
my mother, and my mother never cheats on him.” However, moments before this utterance
he witnessed his mother arriving home with a stranger with whom she spent the whole
evening. This stranger is László Wieber, whose character will shortly complicate Father’s
identity further.
photograph it reads, “My dear Klári, I have just found this photograph. I think your
poor husband is operating. But perhaps it Laci Wieber?...”67
By now the image of Father seems to dissolve into three possible characters:
the two Dr. Takós, and László Wieber. Also, the role of the father gets divided into
the position occupied in the family, and the person who begot the child.
Furthermore, the film hints at an act of “saving” Mother, which remains concealed
in the narrative. All that the spectator knows is that Father (one of the three
doctors) “saved” Mother once. I suggest that Wieber cannot fulfil the role of the
family father, as the picture divides “husband” and Wieber. Moreover, Bence’s
surname is Takó. It means that one of the Takós saved Mother. Curiously, the word
“save” in the web of phrases repeatedly used in Father connotes not a medical
context, but rather the saving of the Jews. It might be explained by the fact that
Father is never shown in action as a doctor, but only as a hero fighting the Nazis.
When he appears in the hospital it is only to bring and hide more and more people
in the cellar, and not to perform operation. As the building of the hospital conceals
the cellar where people are hiding, the medical context of “saving” conceals the
saving of Jewish people from being herded into the ghetto.
Later on, even Bence himself creates a fantasy of Father as “the saviour of the
Jews”. In this light then it can be pictured that Mother (and her child, and probably
the biological father) comes from a Jewish background, and she needed to be saved
during the setting up of the Budapest ghettos. The reason for Wieber’s post-war
reappearance may be due to the supposition that he actually is the father, but had to
hide during the dangerous years. Mother and child were saved by a Catholic
marriage, which was rather hastily held, with one of the Dr. Takós. The
unconscious knowledge of this haunting secret might be one possible explanation
of Bence’s incongruous behaviour (his lies, his third person singular narration).
Childhood fantasies further cover reality when Bence visits the cellar of the
hospital where, allegedly, his father worked during the war, saving hundreds of
people, mostly of Jewish origin. When Bence enters the now empty cellar, he says,
“Here is where Father was hiding. No, no. I made it up. Or was he hiding here,
still?” The answer should be clear (for the spectator and for Bence, too) if one
takes the fragments of information about Father into account: he could not have
67
The question mark on the bask of the photograph assumes an ambiguity concerning the
identity of the represented: it questions the referentiality of the visual document. It is here
that we meet “Klári” as a possible name for the mother, but as the referentiality of the photo
is questioned, the name is also but a hint, and not certainty (although the English version of
the name, “Claire,” connotes “care,” i.e., the motherly). (The first name “Laci” is a
diminutive for “László.”)
32 Chapter One
been hiding here, since all the doctors and nurses (who were actually there) would
have known about it. The secret remains hidden, buried with Father. Moreover, the
walls of the “crypt” hiding this secret (or secrets) get strengthened when Father is
buried for the second time: the coffin is doubled visually and physically, and
psychically as well.
In order to escape the haunting secret, and the haunting figure of the father
(who seems to propel and control Bence’s life), Bence decides to do away with all
the lies (read: fantasies about Father), to be himself without the shadow of his
father. When he decides to swim across the river Danube, it can be seen as an act
of “exorcism,” as an attempt to chase the phantom out of his mental topography.
Levels of narration in Father

In what follows, I wish to focus entirely on the narrative aspect of the film. I
will identify the cause of the fragmentation of Bence’s narrative as the effect of the
encrypted secret that he is unaware of. The phantom that guides and transmits this
secret from generation to generation and from character to character in fact
ventriloquises Bence’s narration, which is the reason why silences can intrude into
the otherwise coherent story. As I will argue, the silences that govern the speech of
the intradiegetic characters affect the level of the film narrative, as well. By
identifying the frames of the narrative and then the kernel that generates these
frames I intend to reveal what remains hidden in the film. This way I can show
how the veil of the narrative hides its own cause, and that this cause is a primarily
traumatic one for the narrator.
István Szabó, in an interview following the premier of Father, argued that in
the film “the problem presents itself on the level of the ability to narrate.”68 The
frames of this problematic narration in the film are presented not only on the level
of the verbal narration, but also on the level of the visible. The film begins with the
image of a coffin, and ends with it as well: more precisely, it ends with the
doubling of the walls of the coffin. The coffin frames the voice-over narration of
the grown-up Bence Takó, who narrates his own story in the third person singular,
occasionally appearing facing the camera. This narrative detachment from his own
self implies, as I have already shown, the possibility of a traumatic experience that
impedes the perception of the “I” in the (hi)story of the enunciator. The image of
the coffin and the voice of the third person narration relate the trauma with a secret
that is hidden and buried.
68
Marx 2002, 129.
This way the trauma is not merely in the family history, but it is also present as
a symptom in the narrative itself. The inexpressible or undiscussible forms a
blockage in the flow of narration. This visually encrypted blockage or gap may be
covered by the flux of images and sounds, but it nonetheless constitutes a crypt that
generates the crypt screen. This is the way the coffin becomes the kernel and the
shell of the narrative at the very same time.69 The coffin thus becomes an uncanny
object in the scopic regime: it foregrounds its very function as hiding or encrypting
something. The visual narrative it generates is then the display that is intended to
hide the core of representation.
The next frame (or shell, for that matter) in the narration is the life of the child
Bence: his schooldays, friendships, and his attempts to cope with the lack of the
father. This is followed by the frame constituted by the numerous fantasy
sequences and dream scenarios mostly concerned with the heroisation of a (made-
up) father. These sequences are often juxtaposed to or projected onto documentary
footages. Szabó always uses documentary fragments, but Father clearly shows the
following strategy: through the eyes of the perceiver the “real” (i.e., the referent)
comes to be filtered into fantasy. This is how documentary scenes of parading are
inserted into Bence’s school parading rehearsals, where he displaces in his fantasy
the pictures of the political leaders on the boards with the portrait of his father.70
The last frame is constituted by the three memory sequences Bence has about
his father. Two of these originate from the same place, and one is from the hospital
Father used to work at. The role of the hospital has already been discussed, but that
of the house has not yet been elaborated. Following his visit to the hospital, Bence
is walking disappointedly in the street, and finds the house that is supposed to be
the house in his memory. He talks to the couple living in the house now, who—like
the nurses and the doctors—do not know much about the doctor who lived there
before them. What they know, however, finally demolishes the walls of certainty:
the doctor emigrated to the USA. This doctor (Takó) could as well be the “other”
Dr. Takó, but how is it possible then that this house appears in Bence’s memory?
It gets stranger when he realises that this is the house in his memory: upon
leaving the house he suddenly spots the metal ring on the pillar of the gate that
appears in one of his memories, and all the three memory sequences come back to
69
The phrases “kernel” and “shell” are intended as explicit references to Nicolas Abraham’s
programmatic essay “The Shell and the Kernel,” in Abraham and Torok 1994, 79-98.
70
As Elizabeth Cowie argues, fantasy is the mise-en-scène of desire, a staging of what one
does not have. (Cowie 1993, 147; 149.) Bence does not have a father, so he conjures and
projects a Father by which he mingles fantasy and reality – thus creating a ground for his
lies.
34 Chapter One
him once again. He finally recognises the site, everything falls into its place –
except for one (crucial) detail: the identity of his father. This place, then, is the
only certainty in the film, although this certainly conceals a gap, a nescience in
Bence’s narrative. The significance of this place will become clear in the
discussion of Love Film, where it will appear again: this appearance will further
complicate the line of the family history, presenting further obstacles to the
revealing of the secrets in the oeuvre.
The secret of Jewish origin

Towards the middle of the film Bence, Anni (his girlfriend), and their friends
go to play extras in a film shooting (a novel Nouvelle Vague idea, indeed). The
extras gather in a courtyard, and the property assistants distribute stars of David
among those who are to “play” the Jewish crowd to be herded through the bridge
in a scene. Upon receiving their stars, everybody starts fitting them on, and some
have already sewn them onto their coats. Only Anni is silent while she holds the
star-shaped yellow cloth in her hands: as if she were trying to make out what
message that piece of cloth might have for her. When a property assistant sews it
onto her coat, she smiles faintly, without uttering a word. Incidentally, a
sightseeing bus passes the crowd, which prompts Bence to cover the star with the
lapel of his leather coat (of Father’s leather coat). He looks ashamed and
embarrassed, the reason for which remains untold. This shame becomes more
enigmatic, since no one else shows any sign of shame or embarrassment, and – as
far as it can be made out from the fragments of the fantasy sequences – Bence’s
parents got married in a Catholic church. Then, suddenly, we can see Anni
covering the star with her scarf.
The significance of this “covering” is not played out fully in the film, therefore,
it becomes uncanny. If Bence was slightly embarrassed when he covered the star at
the gathering, he becomes startled when the director of the film chooses him (from
the huge crowd!) to take the role of a Nazi archer officer, and toss the crowd via
the bridge towards the ghettos. He feels completely uncomfortable, and becomes
helpless when, while trying to catch her glance, Anni seems to ignore him. At that
moment he does not know about Anni’s secret, however, he seems to have sensed
something of it.
After the filming the friends go to a café where they sit silently for a while.
Then one of them starts “confessing”: “We’re lucky to have been born later.”
“Interesting,” interjects another, “I have no idea what my father was doing in forty-
four.” Bence’s problem, his inability to reconstruct his family history through the
reconstruction of his father’s story, is by no means a unique phenomenon: a
generation seems to be haunted by it. 1944 was the year when Budapest was
invaded by the German army, and when the Jews were herded into the ghetto, and
a lot of them killed. This traumatic year features in almost all of Szabó’s films: for
instance, Love Film and Sunshine tackle the events elaborately and more
extensively.71
Later, Anni and Bence walk along the bank of the river (right at the spot where
Klári, an emigrant Hungarian Jew in Paris in Love Film escapes the massacre by
jumping into the river a moment before the deadly shot rings out). Anni starts to
speak about herself and her origin: her newly found Jewish identity. Her life
narrative is scattered, which suggests an identity crisis, the quandary of her
existence: to be proud or to be ashamed of being a Jew? Her monologue is one of
the very few moments in Hungarian film history when the question of Jewishness
is so directly tackled:
Anni: You know what’s horrible? For a long time I denied that my father had died in
Mauthausen. I made up something about him, only to avoid admitting that I’m a
Jew. Then once I realised that it is all in vain, and started to accept it. I even
travelled to Auschwitz with an IBUSZ72 group, and took photos of everything to
bring it all back home and show it around. But in these pictures there are only well-
dressed tourists. Should I show it around? Well-dressed tourists in every picture.
Most of the time I am ashamed of myself nowadays, and I pretend as if I did not
belong there. I’m a Hungarian, aren’t I? Simply Hungarian, I decided that hundreds
of times, and there is no past and nothing. Then something gets into me, and I want
to belong there, and I want to be seen belonging there. My father and mother
perished in it. Then I’m ashamed again, and am unable to behave. I don’t know
where I belong, or where I should belong.73
In an awkward situation—having listened to Anni’s confession on the bank of

the river during their walk—Bence tries to kiss her. She refuses, thinking that this
sudden desire results from sorrow and compassion, not from love. While he tries to
accommodate what he has just experienced (“playing” Jew, “playing” Nazi, and
listening to Holocaust experiences), Bence is fantasying again: this time Father is a
71
See my discussion of a trauma narrative or confession by an émigré in Paris in Love Film,
and also the discussion of Sunshine, where the female characters of the second generation of
the Sonnenscheins find their deaths.
72
IBUSZ = Idegenforgalmi, Beszerzési, Utazási és Szállítmányozási Rt.: “Tourism,
Procuring, Travel and Transport Inc.,” Hungary’s state owned travel agency during the
socialist era.
73
My translation.
36 Chapter One
saviour of Jews, helping them to escape from the ghettos, putting their limbs in
plaster to pretend they are seriously ill – as I have referred to this fantasy as a
display that hides the displacement of medical context in terms of “saving.” Then
he is seen as he finds a broken tram outside the city (a topic that gives the basic
idea for Budapest Tales), tries to give it a push (the watch comes into focus at this
point), people come to help him and they start to ride faster and faster towards the
city. On the way several people come out of their houses to attach little notes to the
tram with the names of their missing relatives. The names that can be deciphered in
some close-ups are all Jewish names.
This sequence attests to the immense power the silenced, undiscussible secrets
have over the subject. Notably, the sentences (not only Anni’s) are half-finished,
sometimes they are only phrases attached together without any coherence. More
precisely: their coherence lies in what they withhold. The same half-finished,
hesitating, even silent sentences characterise Bence’s narration. It is in this way
that the fragmentation unwittingly experienced in the psychic topography of the
character manifests itself in their narrations, and then these affect the narrative
register of the film as well. This implies a route for the transmission of the painful
secrets from the character’s psyche through the narrative to the spectator, which I
have alluded to in the introduction. As I will argue, this narrative haunting is
enforced by the visual type of haunting that is foregrounded in Love Film and
Mephisto.
Anni, Bence, and the others do not know where their fathers were: they
probably would not dare to ask, for the answer might prove to be even more
painful than their silence. This situation is very similar to the one presented at the
end of Sunshine: Anni’s monologue is simultaneous with Iván Sonnenschein’s
walk in the street. They could even be a couple of streets from each other
(geographically speaking, they are). Their dissimilative acts are also similar: Anni
refuses to have surgery on her nose (to hide her Jewishness bodily), and Iván
refuses to bear the result of a previous “name-surgery,” Sors, and takes back the
name of the Sonnenscheins.
The silences, the undiscussible secrets affect the dialogues, and affect the lives
and family histories of the characters. It follows from this that these encrypted
secrets haunt the diegesis74 as well. As I have referred to it, on the level of
narration there is a change from a third person singular voice to the first person at a
74
“Diegesis refers to narration, the content of the narrative, the fictional world as described
inside the story. In film it refers to all that is really going on on-screen, that is, to fictional
reality. Characters’ words and gestures, all action as enacted within the screen constitute the
diegesis.” (Hayward 2000, 84-85.)
point in the film. While speaking in the third person, Bence seems to perform an
assigned role, seems to echo the sentences of somebody else. His narration is thus
ventriloquism: the words, phrases, and sentences are phantomatic (i.e.,
mechanically and repetitively phantom driven). It means that the narrative Bence
performs contains a crypt that entombs the secret that haunts him (the more so,
since his family history is part of the diegetic realm).
What is finally encrypted in the narrative hierarchy of Father is one of the
memory scenes: when the camera-eye is lifted by Father, its hand grabs the metal
ring on the pillar of the gate, and then turns towards a rope-way on which mine
cars are going left and right. The central role of this crypt screen becomes clear in
Love Film, where the very same image turns up once again, although in a slightly
different context. That image with the mine cars is shot from the very same camera
position, with the very same framing. However, there is an obscure (out of focus)
face of a woman in the middle. She is said to be Bözsi75, Bence/Jancsi’s76 aunt,
occasionally playing the role of a nanny: for him, and for Kata, his friend and
“sister.” In Love Film no one ever utters the name of the place, but the shot
unmistakeably presents the house where Father was born.
Bözsi was a Jewish woman, who married a Jewish man. They lived in the same
house Jancsi and Kata lived in Budapest: 25 Firemen’s Street (which is the title of
a later film). She and her husband were executed in 1944 during the ghetto years of
Budapest under the nazi occupation. Bözsi’s out-of-focus figure transposed onto a
previous crypt screen brings about an anamorphotic moment, which I will enlarge
upon in the discussion of Love Film. To return to the issue taken up in Father,
Bözsi’s figure—that becomes visible for Bence/Jancsi years later in his own
memory—carries the secret Jewish line in the family Bence is ignorant of in
Father. His giving up of lies and fantasies about a potentially heroic father signals
the secret communion with Anni (since it is her life narrative that makes him do
away with all these).
In this light the sentence that one of the colleagues of Dr. Takó uttered opens
up a new dimension for the recovering and recreating of the family history in the
first generation of the Szabó oeuvre: he says, “He saved your mother.” As it has
75
“Bözsi” is a diminutive for Elizabeth in Hungarian. This name also provides an
intertextual reference within the Szabó oeuvre, since it appears in several films, perhaps
most emphatically in Meeting Venus, where Elizabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser is played by
Zoltán Szántó’s (the Hungarian conductor) love Karin Anderson (Glenn Close) in Paris.
76
I refer to Bence as Bence/Jancsi here, as the focal body now named Bence will return in
Love Film as Jancsi. To emphasise that they are in fact the same, I chose to retain both
names in this passage.
38 Chapter One
been pointed out, the act of saving does not necessarily point to a mysterious
illness Bence’s mother had. The medical context on the whole can be considered as
a veil over the type of saving Father does in the recurrent fantasy scenes: the
saving of the Jews. Therefore, saving Mother can be read as the saving of a Jewish
woman.
The dream that follows his visit to the village can lead to more painful secrets:
in the dream sequence Bence wears Father’s leather coat, and is chased by several
people who claim he had stolen it from the “doctor.” Running, he bumps into
Mother, who is having an apparently intimate tête-à-tête with a stranger: with
Wieber. Bence asks where Father is, upon which Mother hesitatingly and very
slowly points towards a closed door, “Maybe there.” He is running on, bumping
into Anni in the corridor of the seemingly empty hospital building. Anni, too,
points into another direction, where Bence finally finds a door on which the sign
reads “Dr. Takó.” He opens the door. Suddenly, it is as if he had fallen into a
bottomless pit, where the abrupt stop is Anni’s face: “We’ll have a child.” And
suddenly he wakes up.
The undiscussible is at least finally described: this dream sequence, along with
the memory sequences, might give a potential clue as to why Bence presents his
story in the third person singular, and why the shooting of the film-within-film
stirred him up emotionally. Contrary to the family romance he so harshly defended
in his childhood (“My father never cheated on my mother. And my mother never
cheats on him either.”), the fresh experiences are worked into a possibly condensed
form of his story.77 He wears Father’s leather coat, and is chased because people
think he had stolen it. Perhaps because he really “stole” that coat: it is not Father’s.
This argument is suggested by the scene where his mother is seen with an unknown
man (Wieber, presumably) in a rather intimate situation. This man is not Father;
not the father, at least, whom he is looking for based on his memory. However,
anywhere they direct him, anywhere he goes in the hope of finding Father seems to
be another “empty” place (or emptied place, which rhymes with silence, silenced
secret, and lack). At the end of this dream Anni announces that she is pregnant.
It is also revealed that Father saved Mother sometime, and I suggest it was not
a matter of illness. The only reference to the happy couple (Mother and Father)
appears only in the fantasy scene of their hasty (Catholic) marriage. It is not told or
77
Condensation is one of the forms of dreamwork, according to Sigmund Freud. A
condensed image is made up of the parts of separate images that very often do not seem to
have the slightest connection among them. Still, when assembled, they reveal hidden traits,
fears or desires that open the way to a view at some unconscious mechanisms. See: Freud
1995a; especially the first part of Chapter VI.
shown, though, whether Bence had already been born, or Mother was pregnant
with him. The viewer is also left in the dark as to the reason of the hasty marriage –
apparently with a stranger which is further suggested by the fact that the couple is
never show together, they do not even have photographs on which they appear
together. It all becomes even more obscured when Wieber (the father?) shows up
several years later during the so-called consolidation years in Hungary.
In trying to put the events into a temporally valid sequence and compare this
sequence of personal events with the historical ones it might be calculated that
Wieber disappeared around the introduction of the Jewish bills in Hungary. By this
time Bence was either born or Mother must have been pregnant with him. That is
when they (Mother and son) had to be saved. This saving must have been the
Catholic marriage, in which case Father is not the “real” father. The “real” father is
sitting with Mother in the dream a moment before the next mother, Anni,
announces that she is pregnant (announcing potentially Mother’s pregnancy,
following the logic of displacement). Also, Bence’s wake brings about two strange
sentences with a pause between them: “I dreamt we’re going to have a baby. …
What I told you about Father was not true.”
By retracing the dream-work behind images and sentences, I can finally shed
light on the undisclosed painful secret that Bence never dares to utter: “Father is
not my father.” It can be stated by now that unarguably the scattered sentences, the
fantasies of a heroic father (of Father), the awkward and sometimes incongruous
behaviour (that becomes more emphatic in The Age of Daydreaming), and the
symptomatic third person narration are all phantomatic mechanisms. These are all
governed by a shameful secret: the obscure(d) origins (regarding both the Jewish
origin and the issue of illegitimacy).
CHAPTER TWO
LOVE FILM (SZERELMESFILM, 1970): THE
HAUNTING SECRETS OF INCEST AND JEWISHNESS,
AND THE OVER-INTENSE LIGHT
István Szabó’s third feature film, Love Film, was made in 1970, and has an
explicit trace of contiguity with the previous two films. First of all, the focal male
body is once again the one that appeared in Father (played by András Bálint,
again), and the focal female body appeared in The Age of Daydreaming as Habgab
(played by Judit Halász). Secondly, the narrative strategy employed in this film
continues the narrative set-up used previously: Jancsi, occasionally facing the
camera, recounts the story of his first love. Thirdly, this story has several
connections in particular details (verbal and visual) with the preceding films, and
has further implications regarding the films to come (and most explicitly
implications for 25 Firemen’s Street and Confidence78).
I consider Love Film as one of the key films in the oeuvre, as it is in this film
that all the haunting secrets are overtly foregrounded for the first time (the other
such text is Sunshine, which provides the most complex presentation of family
history with all its secrecy). The complex web of family saga, regressive fantasies,
Jewish identity, and the interruption of historical events all present themselves to
reveal the crucial knot that connects them. Therefore, the discussion of this
particular film will concentrate on the assessment of these narrative blockages and
uncanny visual features that either reveal something concerning the past texts, or
point (as a guidance) to crucial encryptions in further films.
Some bodies reappear, as I have mentioned, in Love Film. Most significantly,
the body of the central male character is the same focal body as in the two
preceding films (in Father and in The Age of Daydreamings) and in the two films
made after Love Film (in 25 Firemen’s Street and in Budapest Tales). In each film
the focal body is signified by a different name. In Father it is Bence, in The Age of
Daydreamings and in Love Film it is Jancsi, in 25 Firemen’s Street it is Andris,
78
The references from earlier films to Confidence has been completely missed by the few
biographers of Szabó (cf.: István Karcsai Kulcsár (1977) and József Marx (2002)), who only
occasionally refer to the content of the films anyway.
and in Budapest Tales it is Fényes (which in fact means “shiny” – it may be read as
a foreshadowing of Sonnenschein). Since none of these names seem to be the
proper name for the focal body, they may be considered as pseudonyms. There
may be a question, then, that haunts the spectator: if the films present the very
same focal body, why does it need to have different names? This question becomes
more disturbing when the spectator learns that the family history of these
characters is more or less the same.
It, however, does not mean that these films are in a way one, or they cannot be
regarded as separate, authentic works. On the contrary, while they insist as unique
film texts on their own right, they share some traces that may urge the interpreter to
pursue an intertextual analysis in which the discussion may rely on the visual
contiguity of the focal bodies, the intertextual references of the names and some
specific objects, and the consistent family background and family history of the
central characters.
As I claimed in the introduction of the book, names are inherited from the
parents, similarly to the gaps and silences in their speech, that is, like the painful
secrets. Therefore, the names given to the central male characters in the Szabó
oeuvre are phantomogenic: they transmit the secrets in the family history from one
generation to the next. In the case of the focal bodies of Father and Love Film, the
family setting is the same in three subsequent films, and some minute changes
occur in this setting in two further films which, however, do not subvert or alter
that setting significantly. This means in the framework of my analysis that there is
a conspicuous mechanism of hiding and concealing at work in these films. The
tension that is caused by the discrepancy of retaining one particular focal body in
each of these diegeses and signifying it with a different name implies a rupture or
break (i.e. a secret) in the genealogy of that character which is then transmitted via
the act of narration into the narrative register of the films. This is then reinforced
by certain visual effects that seem to originate from without the particular texts and
from beyond the intertext of the oeuvre. In this section on Love Film, all the three
aspects will be tackled.
Love Film—as the title suggests—is a film on love, more precisely, on the love
of a separated couple: Kata and Jancsi. They grew up together as brother and sister,
one of them (Jancsi) being a half-orphan, for his father had died. They survived the
Battle of Budapest, the times of terror, and the expelling of the Nazis. In the 1950s
they went to school and joined the (compulsory) pioneer movement. During the
1956 revolution they were adolescents (or “adult adolescents” – only to refer to the
subtitle of The Age of Daydreaming). It is at this point that their paths diverged.
Kata left the country for France, while Jancsi stayed in Hungary.
Thenceforth, Jancsi’s life is filled with dreams and fantasies about Kata’s life in
France, picturing her as waiting for him to follow her to fulfil their love. Having
42 Chapter Two
lived ten years separated from one another, Jancsi decides to visit Kata to make his
dreams come true. During the long journey he develops fantasy scenarios about
their reunion which is embedded in the feeling of freedom and independence the
West meant for people in the Eastern, socialist block at that time. Finally, they
meet in Kata’s flat, and the dreamt-of love is fulfilled at last. However, the shadow
of the knowledge that they cannot stay together lingers over their reunion from the
very first minute.
They spend a few days together during which Jancsi meets several emigrant
Hungarians (mostly Jews). They also go to the seaside, as Jancsi has never seen the
sea before – being one of his principal wishes. By the time they arrive at the sea, it
becomes clear that they would soon bid farewell to each other. Jancsi travels to
Paris, and then home, where his lover is waiting for him. A couple of years later
Kata and her husband, George, visit Jancsi and his wife in Budapest – as we learn
from a letter read out loud by Kata facing the camera at the end of the film. We
learn that they spent wonderful days in Hungary, and she also confesses a tragedy:
their baby has died recently.
Memory, fantasy and narrative reconstruction in Love Film

The film begins with a photomontage that presents the early childhood of two
children: Kata and Jancsi. This short bricolage ends with the narrator, the grown
up Jancsi’s first sentence, “Lately, I’ve been dreaming about Kata quite a lot
again.” Ostensibly, the film continues the endless references to dreams and
fantasies that have been developed and employed in Father. Moreover, he
immediately continues the narrative with a false recollection (a fantasy) that is his
picturing of Kata announcing sneeringly that his father is dead and she knows it
very well. Here a flashback begins, in which Kata is rocking on a seesaw, sneering
into the camera, chanting that Jancsi’s father is dead, and hers is alive. A moment
later Jancsi (the narrator) announces, “Though this is not true this way… I know,
that is, I remember exactly how it all happened.” The scene then shows a small
gathering at Kata’s parents’ house, where Jancsi is eating a carrot when, suddenly,
Kata rushes in whispering “your father’s dead… they’ve just told me.”
The concluding sentence of this sequence is more than revealing in terms of the
strategy of the narrator, and revives the web of lies and fantasy scenarios employed
in Father: “I remember precisely how it happened, and I just don’t know why
fantasy reformulated reality; still, when I’m thinking of Kata, for a moment I see
her rocking on the seesaw, and as if I were hearing the sentence, ‘I know your
father’s dead, and mine is alive!’.” The narration, again, is unreliable but self-
reflexive at the very same time, which gives it a dream-like quality.79 This, in turn,
suggests that the basic mechanism of the narrative will be governed by two of the
most often-used dream techniques: displacement and condensation.80
Jancsi is on his way to Paris, to meet Kata, and his fantasy invents several
situations depicting his meeting her after ten years. The sequence starts with his
caressing Kata’s forehead and hair, then a cut to the train, with the sound of the
wheels, which persists on the audible level when the visual level already presents
Jancsi on his bicycle in 1956. The clatter of the wheels of the train this way refers
back to ten years earlier, which is only minutes before the inception of this
particular scene: the caressing. The flashback, however, does not stop here, harking
back to an even earlier memory: two green rucksacks are seen to be running
towards the old, shabby house in the twilight.
The green rucksack is a recurring motif in the film, and becomes a signifier for
Kata and Jancsi’s relationship, which unfolds from a sister-brother twosome into
adolescent love. The first appearance of the rucksack is with Jancsi: he is taken to a
hospital where the doctors and nurses hide children during the Nazi occupation of
Budapest in 1944. Mother (who is still not marked by another name) leaves him
there, and then goes away – no one knows where or for how long. This scene may
be the staging of the potential scene in one of Jancsi’s (Bence’s) major fantasies in
Father. There he fantasies about his father saving hundreds of people by faking a
diagnosis of fatal illness for each. This way they cannot be taken out of the hospital
(which is under his command), and they can wait safely until the nazis are expelled
from the city. This memorable fantasy scenario is the basis for the heroisation of
Father (partly as a saviour of the Jews).
The source of this fantasy lies in the above sequence in Love Film. Jancsi was
taken to the hospital to be in a safe place, and the doctor was quite definitely not
his father. What this scene does not reveal, however, is where his mother goes
afterwards. This remains secret(ed), just as Kata’s mother’s sudden appearance in
the hospital room a couple of shots later, who takes Jancsi to their home. Now,
Kata and Jancsi are treated as siblings, as they – figuratively speaking, at least –
share their parents. This relationship is emphasised on the symbolic level when
Kata gets her green rucksack, too.
This is where their shared past begins. Shots later a familiar picture strengthens
the already established connections with Father: we see the mine cars from the
79
For instance, Jancsi tells Kata in Paris that he remembers their first kiss: it was at a tram
stop, while it was snowing. It turns out that in fact it did not happen in reality.
80
See: Freud 1995a.
44 Chapter Two
very same point of view as in the previous film. This shot is induced by the clatter
of the wheels of the train (it was also from the train that Bence noticed this place in
Father) that is taking the adult Jancsi towards Kata in France. The train passes a
village – Adorjánpuszta in Father – which is now left unidentified. The shot
presenting the mine cars is curiously altered, however. The focus of the shot is still
on the mine cars travelling left and right on the rope track, but there is the face of
an as yet unknown woman in the middle, out of focus. This is an uncanny rewriting
or over-projecting of the very same sequence from its previous occurrence.
The woman in the picture is a blot whose origin is uncanny, as it is foreign or
heterogeneous to the framework it appears in. It recalls Lacan’s discussion of
Holbein’s The Ambassadors, where he identifies an unclear spot as “the imagined
embodiment of the minus phi [(-ĳ)] of castration,” that is the lack, the subject qua
annihilated, which centres and organises scopic desire.81 The blot anamorphically
reveals a gap in the representation, and it is this very gap around which the
scene/seen is built up. This is a turning point then, at which the space of vision gets
transformed “into the support of the hidden reality”82: through the display the crypt
shines forth, as it were. It means that the display (the shell, or the visible work of
the phantom), the part of the film I identified as monstration, reveals in itself the
hidden crypt (the kernel, or the shell of the unspeakable secrets). This gap in the
representation propels the spectator in turn to work out possible meanings in order
to restore the working of the familiar signification (however altered that may
become afterwards).
The intrusion of the spot, as I have already mentioned, does not originate from
within the diegesis, nor does it come from other film texts of the oeuvre. It cannot
be located in or formulated by the intertext that I am about to map in this analysis.
It points beyond all these and therefore it can be seen as an effect of something
hidden, concealed, in other words, encrypted. In Lacan the gap that opens up in this
scenario is the opening of the Real. This embodiment of the lack in the form of an
object a may be covered with the term extimacy and may imply a certain return of
a traumatic kernel in the subject’s life, however, it does not account for the effect
of this return that can be characterised as compulsive and coming from without the
subject. The traumatic kernel inscribed in the gap that opens up in the
representation is the subject’s own. Here, in the Szabó oeuvre, by contrast, it is not
the subject’s own, it is inherited. The effect is thus the work of the objectification
or embodiment of a previous gap: it is the result of the work of the phantom.
81
Lacan 1998, 88-89.
82
Lacan 1992b, 141.
The uncanny repetition of the scene, originally in Father, with the above
mentioned minor change in it in Love Film adds to the scene a surplus that cannot
be accounted for either by the knowledge of the original scene, or by the
knowledge of the narrative of the film in which it appears. I suggest that this is a
visual effect created as a display by the phantom as a spectral embodiment of a gap
inherited from somewhere unknown. What thus opens up is the Real of a kernel or
crypt that hides another layer of secreting. The multiplication of the crypts is
precisely the work of the phantom. The scene moreover implies the existence of a
text that cannot be merged into either the diegeses or the intertext of the oeuvre: it
is a phantom text that occasionally forms inclusions in the film texts.83 These
inclusions are the uncanny visual effects in the register of monstration in the
oeuvre, which are in turn sometimes enforced by narrative blockages, as well. The
appearance of the out-of-focus figure in the middle of the picture can be considered
as a merging of the two registers in this respect: it is a visual effect, nonetheless, it
has narrative implications.
In Father we learnt that this memory flash derives from Father’s birthplace,
only we did not know whether it was the birthplace of the “real” or the
“imaginary” father. Now, Kata and Jancsi are together, and this woman (called
Bözsi) is teaching them how to swim. To refer back to Father, this scene reveals
Jancsi’s Jewish origins. Bözsi, as is revealed a moment later, was shot to death by
the Nazis because she was Jewish. If we put the fragments together—Mother is
absent; Jancsi has to hide; Mother is saved; Bözsi is the nanny of the children,
living in Father’s house (she is probably Father’s relative)—Jancsi’s Jewish origin
comes to light without a doubt. Furthermore, Mother’s hasty marriage, the
information that the man by her side saved her from persecution (there is no talk
about love, emotions, etc.), and the absence and, later, the reappearance of the
mysterious Wieber (with whom Mother, it is suggested, has had an affair) all point
towards Jancsi’s illegitimacy.
Bözsi becomes for the children a kind of substitute mother: there is an interval
in their lives when all references point towards her character taking care of them in
the absence of either mother. Bözsi was killed during the 1944 Nazi occupation in
the courtyard of the now familiar house: 25 Firemen’s Street, the old and shabby
house. At least, this is what the children tell themselves, for they have no clear
recollection of this event. Decades later, however, many things will become clear
when they meet Hungarian Jewish emigrants in Paris.
83
The term “inclusion” is a topographical synonym for Abraham and Torok’s notion of the
preservative repression. See: Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or
Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” in Abraham and Torok 1994, 135.
46 Chapter Two
Klári, an émigré living in Paris, recalls her miraculous escape in Budapest, on

the bank of the river Danube. She says that the archers (Hungarian Nazis) herded
them to the riverbank (note the similarity between this narrative and the film
shooting scene in Father) to shoot them into the river. She remembers a woman
called Bözsi, who died a moment before her turn was to come, as she stood before
her in the line. Relying on her instincts, Klári jumped backwards into the water a
moment before the shot rang out. As it was foggy that day, the archers did not
notice that she had not been hit by the bullet. All she remembers when she retells
this traumatic event are the following: the pinkish cobble stone, Bözsi, and the bar
on the bank.
In fact, this happened at the very place where Anni in Father confesses her
Jewish origin, where Bence is silenced by the terrible secret he does not know.
This is precisely where the silent or silenced story becomes visibly part of his
story. Jancsi’s journey to Paris to reunite with Kata is thus an “archaeological”
travel into the “foggy” past of his family history. To provide an even more
complicated picture, Jancsi narrates an occasion when Kata did not let herself be
kissed, and ran away (which is already a repetition of the same scene with Anni in
Father). The bar Klári last saw of Budapest comes into view out of focus – just as
Bözsi’s face before the mine cars. The image of the bar is then displaced by the
image of the two rucksacks disappearing in the twilight. This way, the numerous
reappearance of the green rucksack metonymically refers to the foggy day in which
the substitute mother died, linked with the relationship of Kata and Jancsi.
The strange place, the stranger, and the strange story in Father in the scene
when he listens to Anni during their walk on the bank of the Danube, are nothing
else but an encrypted and painful secret of Jancsi’s life. The complexity of the
memory flashbacks that always leave the shadow of doubt are now knotted in
Klári’s narrative. The topographical simultaneity of the events can be revealed by
an imaginary superimposition that provides, in turn, the contours of a painful
memory. The phantom, as effectuated by this memory, controls the distribution of
small details concerning the complex secret: it displays different alienated
narratives to live up to its expected role: to show and to hide at the same time.
The secret of incest in Love Film

Another secret gets foregrounded in Love Film, which then recurs most
significantly in Sunshine: incest. This secret is and will be henceforth an organising
power in the narratives of the films. The motif of incestuous love appears explicitly
in Love Film, and in Sunshine, yet it remains undiscussible, and is never referred to
or even mentioned in the former of the two films. When alluded to, however, it
brings about the eruption of unspeakable pain that has been transmitted from
generation to generation: this will be the case in the family saga in Sunshine.
Although it is not repressed per se in the film texts, its role provides a link to those
secrets that are entirely silenced. This motif, moreover, introduces the possibility of
identifying a certain regressive fantasy at work in the central characters of the
oeuvre. This regressive fantasy, overtly manifested through incest—connoting the
wish to return to the motherly—is defined by Sándor Ferenczi as thalassal
regression.
Thalassal regression is an attempt made at “the reestablishment of the aquatic
mode of life in the form of an existence within the moist and nourishing interior of
the mother’s body.”84 This motif of regression is almost ever-present in the oeuvre,
although it is latent until Sunshine, where it comes to the fore as a specific
organising principle. The recurring image of the tub full of water may illustrate its
significance the best: the tub appears in almost all the films following Love Film,
and its appearance is always connected to some traumatic nescience or unclear
event in the family history.
In 25 Firemen’s Street (1973), for instance, the central character (now under
the name of Andris) enters the bathroom, and finds his lover standing naked in the
tub. He starts to approach her when Mother enters the bathroom, too. But this time,
she is not the central character’s mother: she takes up the role of the lover’s
mother. In a subsequent scene the entire house is filled by water – everybody is
floating in the rooms: mother, son and sister/lover, too. Later on the same house is
entirely empty, and a man appears, looking for his family. He walks through the
empty rooms of the house looking for his daughter (who was in fact standing in the
tub), but does not find a soul. Then a door opens, Mother looks at the man. The
man (who is a father) shows his identity card to Mother, but the place of the
picture is empty. Moreover, the entire film is in fact the fusion of the dreams of
mother and son: the floating and unclear identities of the rather ghostlike male
characters refer to similar scenes from subsequent films, as well.
This sequence shows how the secreted pieces of information (on origin, on
identity, on Father) are connected in thalassal regression: the uncanny events start
out from the tub, and arrive back to Mother (and possibly, Father). The more so,
since the water introjected into the house is clearly the metaphor of the womb. This
way, I claim that the secrets that haunt the central character throughout the oeuvre
come from without his psyche: he had not yet been born when the repression of the
secrets happened. Thalassal regression is then the manifestation of the wish to
84
Ferenczi 1989, 54. (italics in the original)
48 Chapter Two
return not merely to the maternal unity (this is but the manifest content of this
fantasy here in the oeuvre), but to the entombment of the unspeakable secrets.
Jancsi and Kata are brought up together, they do everything together, their
pleasures and sorrows are one, and they themselves define their relationship as
brother and sister, which the parents never contest or deny. The green rucksack
becomes the signifier of this relationship, which repetitively recurs in the memory
sequences, always referring to their “original” bond. This bond in the film is
ostensibly their oath over the bathtub full of water in which a fish is swimming.
The same scene is repeated during Jancsi’s visit to France, when they are watching
the fish swimming in the tub – this time as lovers. This scene, however, is about
how they failed to live up to their childhood oath.
The image of the bathtub full of water, as the above discussion suggests, also
refers to thalassal regression in the Szabó oeuvre, which is fulfilled entirely in their
trip to the sea in Love Film. Seeing the sea for the first time, Jancsi behaves as if he
were reborn. In his fantasy sequence he condenses Kata’s body, the sea, and the
picture of their house in Firemen’s Street, Budapest:
I close my eye, and open it, and the sea is here before me, so is the sand, and Kata,
dropping her hand on her thigh. I close my eye, open it. Here is the sea again, it is
mine. And now, when I close my eye again, Firemen’s Street appears again. I open
my eye, here is the sea, Kata’s hand, I close it, and it’s Firemen’s Street again …
Were I to reach my hand towards the house, I would touch Kata’s thigh, or her hand,
because it is Kata here, and the sea, and even if I close my eye, it is always the sea,
when I am not here, without me it is still the sea.85
Here the scene with the bathtub in the house in Firemen’s Street is repeated,
which is further emphasised by the colour of Kata’s room that she, driven by a
sudden decision, painted blue – thus it entails, embraces them, as it were. Notably,
a vase gets broken when they start quarrelling (having realised that they cannot
stay together), the fragments of which Kata collects – this is a motif that recurs, for
instance in Confidence and in Sunshine, as another important trope in the works of
Szabó.
To return to the issue of incest, it is by no means of minor importance that
during their first lovemaking Jancsi suddenly sees snow, which then visually brings
about images of childhood and later secondary-school sledgings, where Kata
introduces Jancsi to her classmates as her brother. While the visual layer presents
the delirious joy of sledging, on the acoustic level it is accompanied by the sounds
85
My translation.
of their making love. Thus the film itself gives the theory of this condensation
when Jancsi utters the following sentences: “So this is the connection between the
sea and 25 Firemen’s Street – only that they are both inside me, whether I open my
eyes or close them, and it seems we can’t touch everything at once what we see in
front of us.” This can be seen as a recollection of regressive fantasies that connect
to the concept of thalassal regression.
Moreover, Kata always gives milk (a visual displacement of the snow) to
Jancsi, and feeds him as his mother, which interpretation can be underscored by the
fact that she fries meat for him in a red pot, which immediately connects back to
Firemen’s Street in Jancsi’s visual flashback memory sequence in Love Film to the
scene when Jancsi’s mother gives them the same meal from the same pot after the
bombing raid. However, Kata will not be a mother, as her child dies shortly after
its birth. This tragic news is presented by Kata’s reading out (voicing) her letter to
Jancsi after she and her husband spent some time in Budapest with them. She
announces the tragic event facing the camera: symbolically taking the role of the
narrator.
The strange over-intense white light of the final scene of the film
It is her voice and her face that provide the closure to the film before the screen
fades into complete whiteness: her figure is displaced by the snow-white screen,
commemorating everything that the imagery of snow connotes in the oeuvre. Her
position is finally the “narrative image” in which the narrative “comes together”86
so to speak.87 The image of snow reconnects the line of multiple displacements
(snow – family history – childhood – Auschwitz – Jewish identity – Father) to the
fantasy Bence developed about Father. This fantasy is then in correlation with
Bence’s fake fantasy recollection of Kata rocking herself on the seesaw, shouting
out the fact of Bence’s father’s death.
The visual feature (whiteness and snow) of the last frames of the film still
remains uncanny and haunting. Even though it may give some explanation of the
secret encrypted in the narrative of the characters and of the film, the haunting
effect seems to go beyond such encryptions. The effect of the whitening frames
induces uneasiness in the spectator not merely and perhaps not primarily because it
86
De Lauretis 1984, 140.
87
This shot will be repeated at the end of Mephisto, where Höfgen faces the camera, and
after his final sentence the scene starts to fade into white, but the process stops half way,
freezing the image into a twilight zone.
50 Chapter Two
closes a monologue that contradicts any happy end. The overflowing blazing and
hot white petrifies the image, it burns the face into the screen. By the end of the
letter that Kata “reads out,” her face does not resemble the face the spectator
remembers. The over-intense light fills in the contours of Kata’s face, which makes
her skin homogeneous with the background.
The harsh light and the fading contours make it seem improbable that the voice
in fact comes from the mouth on the screen. The entire scene is like a mirage (Fata
Morgana) with a face whose volatility creates the uncanny effect. When Kata
confesses the tragedy of losing her baby (Fata Morgana, literally), she finishes the
letter with a sigh that cannot be heard, and then her face evaporates, and dissolves
into the background. This over-intense light is an uncanny effect in this particular
diegesis, as its origin cannot be located. It is precisely its sudden and blinding
appearance that creates the haunting effect. But where does this light come from?
Why does it appear then and there?
To explain features of this kind in the Szabó oeuvre, I have redefined the notion
of the phantom, introduced by Nicolas Abraham. As I have argued, the phantom
works by showing forth a display (the text of the film, e.g.) only to hide something
(a secret) from view. The secrets are entombed in a crypt, and are heterogeneous to
their medium – hence the uncanny effect. However, the mechanism does not stop
here: the nescience takes control over the display, and thus the crypt comes to be
present in its very absence. The act of taking control is the work of the phantom
that is responsible for the haunting effect.
If the last scene of Love Film is such a display, then it is clear that the blinding,
over-intense light comes from beyond the film text. As the analysis of the
intertextual matrix (a web of recurring features, names, scenes and bodies) testifies,
there is no palpable cause for the appearance (and later, in Mephisto, the
reappearance) of this light. This over-intense light, nonetheless, breaks over the
screen (in the Lacanian sense), and turns the body into a chimerical entity: it
spectralises the body. This “spectralisation” creates a rupture in the diegesis, that
is, it constitutes a lack, upon which the entire mechanism of representation turns. In
other words, the over-intense light becomes the trope of haunting erupting from the
rupture in the screen.
This scene in the film, then, begins by a completely harsh, blinding white
screen. As Szabó says in the screenplay, “the screen glows up into white-hot, it is
almost blinding, and then slowly the features of Kata’s face appear in front of
us.”88 Kata’s face is drawn by and out of the white-hot light. The intensity of the
88
Szabó 1970, 109.
light, however, does not diminish with the chimerical appearance of the face, rather
it lends a volatile texture to it by filling it in and framing it at the same time. Kata’s
face, thus, acts as the Lacanian object a: it fills in the lack by erupting from it and
covering – or screening - it as well. The face therefore creates a breach that
temporally fills the hole arising in the filmic representation.
Another aspect seems to underscore the status of the object a in this scene.
Kata, or more precisely Kata’s image (a mirage per se), is everything for Jancsi:
she means pleasure and pain, excitement and disappointment to him, which
dialectic is characteristic of the object a as Bruce Fink argues.89 As these stimuli or
effects “resist imaginarization and symbolization,” belonging to the register of the
Real, they are “related to a jouissance that defines the subject’s very being.”90 The
light that forms Kata’s face may thus emanate from the Real, but it is not simply an
effect of the Real, it is not simply an encounter (in which case the scene would
merely be uncanny). The light is made to emanate, it is phantom governed: it forms
the body, and makes it speak, in other words, it spectralises and ventriloquises it.
The “subject’s very being” is thus referred to a nescience, a rupture in the subject’s
psyche which is transmitted into the narrative and the visual registers of the film.
This way the light in the visual register of the film is nurtured by the energy
coming from the tension the encrypted secret created: it is the effect of a basic
rupture hidden from the spectator’s view and immediate comprehension.
Apart from the strangeness of the white-hot light, the way Kata appears and
delivers her speech (culminating in precisely the failure of delivery) is also an
uncanny feature of the film. She looks straight at the audience: she faces the
spectator, and addresses him/her directly. According to Žižek, such moment is a
“reflexive moment of registration,” whereby the actor or actress who embodies the
role momentarily “extracts” himself/herself “from the narrative context.”91 It
means that a somewhat subjective view is inscribed “into the very heart of
‘objective reality’.”92 This way, subjective vision, the basis for illusion compared
with so-called “objective” reality, distorts and constitutes it at the same time. It is
this subjective point upon which the representation turns so that the rendering of
reality is in support of the subject’s reality. In other words, the moment of
perturbation concerning the narrative reality of the subject-in-the-film inscribes the
opening of the gap on the Real, underscoring in tandem the eruption of the white-
hot light. This illuminates the way narration and monstration get laminated in the
89
Fink 1995, 92.
90
Ibid.
91
Žižek 2000, 77.
92
Op. cit., 78.
52 Chapter Two
formation of the film text, by way of which the crypt forms a blockage to
understanding in both the narrative and the visual registers.
The crypt that contains the secrets of the oeuvre is thus doubly inscribed in the
visual register of Love Film. The last scene constitutes one of the most complex
crypt screens of the oeuvre, the sophistication of which will only be matched by
the very last moments of Mephisto, where a similar, albeit in many respects quite
different process is visualised. Here, in Love Film, this last scene presents the first
moment of breaking down the barrier between the film text and the audience, that
is to say, the lifting up of the screen. What may mean in terms of the work of the
phantom is that this way the spectator directly experiences or witnesses the
opening up of the Real. Thus, the moment of the inscription of the subjective view
may bring about the moment of the transmission of the traumatic secrets, as well.
Indeed, the white-hot, over-intensive light literally intrudes into the space of the
audience and enwraps the spectator. Kata’s direct address, looking into the eyes of
the spectator, and the phantom’s power manifested in the light brings a moment of
spectralisation to the spectator’s body, which is now “lit up” as it were by the light
emanating from beyond the screen.
The tension and uneasiness the suddenly lit-up audience means for the spectator
(who is a spectator in the dark) is possibly the moment of receiving the encrypted
secrets. The more so, since the entire scene is the subjective reality of Jancsi
envisioned on the screen. This way the spectator occupies this subjective position,
which means that s/he adopts the source that the white-hot light emanates from and
forms the scene. The traumatic kernel, in other words, the crypt has been
transmitted from the focal character’s family history via the narrative and the
visual registers of the film text into the spectator. This inherited gap propels the
spectator to interpret the ruptured grounds of signification and to stitch it over –
like s/he is to stitch it over in himself or herself, as well. This time it is
interpellating the subject,93 but the final scene of Mephisto will rework it into
something more disturbing: it will make the text work as interrogation.
93
Interpellation is a term introduced by Louis Althusser, which is used to describe the
constitution of the subject. The subject is “hailed at” as it were by which s/he is taken as a
unit(y) or as unified, as subject to the interpellation and ideological power. The process is in
fact similar to the scenario employed by Lacan to describe the work of the gaze (taken from
Jean-Paul Sartre) whereby a subject is peeping through the keyhole of a door, and suddenly,
upon hearing the rustle of leaves, becomes aware of himself in the visual field. The hailing
of the Other (the sound) constitutes the subject as precisely an obejctified being, that is,
subjected to the Law. See: Althusser 1971, 127-186.; Lacan 1998, 84; and Žižek 1989.
CHAPTER THREE
MEPHISTO (MEPHISTO, 1981): THE HAUNTING
SECRET OF JEWISHNESS AND THE UNBEARABLE
OVER-INTENSE LIGHT
Mephisto won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1982 (among
other important professional awards) and it brought Szabó world-wide fame.
Indeed it was a breakthrough for the Hungarian film industry, too. Critics and
interpreters usually mention the film as a masterful depiction of the ambiguous
relationship between the artist and political power. However, Szabó emphasises
that the film is not about this over-mystified relationship, and not about artists and
actors in general, either. It is simply “the story of a character,”94 a “portrait of a
human, who becomes seduced by power.”95
The film is based on Klaus Mann’s novel of the same title, which tells the story
of the rise and fall of Gustav Gründgens, a talented actor under the pseudonym,
Hendrik Höfgen. Péter Dobai and István Szabó, the adapters of the novel, decided
to retain the name of the central character but not render the direct allusions to
Gründgens in order to free him from the controversies surrounding the historical
person who was “adapted” into the novel. This was necessary to avoid focussing
on the alleged literary “revenge” Mann took on Gründgens for marrying and then
breaking the heart of his sister, Erika Mann.96 As Dobai said in an interview in
1981, this characterisation of Höfgen was “unacceptable” to them. They wanted to
present the growing negative tendency in the development of the character
stemming from his career building and his abandonment to the practices of power,
instead of presenting a prejudicially determined anti-hero.97 Dobai was interested
in the character because Höfgen annihilates his own self step by step, without the
help of others, convinced that this is the only way to success. By the end, when he
has to face himself, he cannot find himself among the various roles he had played.98
94
Zsugán 1982, 9.
95
Imre 1999, 408.
96
Pók 1982, 40.
97
Baróti 1982, 20.
98
Op. cit., 21.
54 Chapter Three
In Mephisto the central character can be seen as a displacement of the focal

characters in previous films because there is an overt—although not
foregrounded—contiguity in the family background and family history. Höfgen has
only a mother, and the place of the father is empty, and the secrets that haunted the
central characters of previous films are haunting him as well. Furthermore, when
the very same focal body reappears in Hanussen (1988), Hanussen says that he in
fact grew up in the house at 25 Feuerwehrstrasse (i.e., 25 Firemen’s Street), which
is a clear allusion to the family history present in the films prior to Mephisto.
Höfgen’s focal body thus takes up the genealogical line in this implicit way, under
different pseudonyms (Heinz Höfgen, Hendrik Höfgen, Mephisto in Mephisto;
Redl in Colonel Redl; Schneider and Hanussen in Hanussen).
The film begins with an operetta performance: a lady sings to an
overwhelmingly male audience, who adore the performing star. In the meanwhile,
Höfgen is sitting in front of the mirror in his dressing room, trying to cover his ears
to silence the sound of the soprano tune, the sound of success oozing into the room.
He is hysterical, breaking glasses and props within his reach, shouting “I don’t
want to hear it!” Suddenly, he stops, puts his hand under his shirt, and poses as
Napoleon, only to burst out again when somebody enters. Having pushed the
intruder out, he goes back to the mirror, grins, and examines his teeth and his face.
In the banquet following the successful performance he elbows his way to the star
singer, complimenting her with exaggerated affability. She notes that he did not
even see the performance, but she knows, anyway, that he is a very talented artist.99
At dawn, Höfgen visits his dance instructor, Juliette, a black dancer. Their
frantic duet results in a rather aggressive sexual intercourse. Later, during the
preparations for a new premiere at the theatre, the director introduces a new female
star, who has arrived with her friend, Barbara. Hendrik seduces Barbara, and
proposes to her within a month. While working for the Hamburg theatre, he tries to
produce a play that would fulfil the requirements of the “revolutionary theatre,” the
“total theatre.”100 He is becoming more and more arrogant and hysteric, while
being calm and polite in the presence of people in power.
Being fed up with his secondary roles at the theatre, he moves to Berlin, where
he becomes more and more successful and famous: finally, he plays his dream role
on stage, Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. Meanwhile, Hitler wins the elections,
99
The very same sentence will be uttered in Meeting Venus to compliment the Hungarian
conductor, who is outraged upon hearing this label.
100
It may be of some interest to mention that one of Szabó’s favourite filmmaker, S. M.
Eizenstein was entirely devoted to the same idea, and pursued it just as vehemently as does
Höfgen in the film.
and many of Höfgen’s former colleagues emigrate. He becomes a prominent icon

of German culture. Before the turbulent events (the burning of the Reichstag,
among others, inserted in the film as a documentary footage), Höfgen gets a film
contract from Hungary. During the shooting of the film he learns that his wife and
her family have emigrated to Paris, and are waiting for him to join them there. A
friend also informs him that he is blacklisted and that many of his friends have
disappeared overnight.
Höfgen decides to return to Berlin, however, as one of his admirers (Angelika)
had lobbied the General on his behalf and who now expects him back to help
promote the “pure” German culture. So he plays Mephistopheles again. He
becomes the General’s confidant and gets new tasks in the name of the defence of
the pure German culture (he has to get rid of certain persons who do not fit the
“pure” part of German culture101). Later, he is appointed head of the Prussian State
Theatre. His influence increases, just as does the pressure on him from the leaders
of the Reich. Without noticing it, he has become the icon of the Aryan culture by
this time, something which he had wished for early in his career. But by now it has
also become a burden. During a celebration of the General’s birthday, the General
takes Höfgen to see the foundations of the new national theatre (a stadium or
arena), where he forces the actor to face the spotlights that chase him round the
empty stage.
The phantomatic symptom of Hendrik Höfgen

I will investigate a scene in which Höfgen’s fiancée, Barbara Bruckner
(Krystyna Janda), introduces him to her parents at their engagement party. During
the lunch, something gets stuck in his throat and he has to retreat into his bedroom.
Later, he tells Barbara his recurring nightmare, which is the haunting repetition of
a traumatic childhood experience. As a child, Höfgen used to sing the soprano part
in a boys’ choir. One day they performed at a wedding ceremony and he felt
carried away by the glamour of the event and started to sing an octave above
everybody else. The conductor looked at him, and hissed silently with hatred in his
voice, “Stay silent!”
This event constitutes a trauma in Höfgen’s life. He had striven to reach the top
of the theatrical ladder is an attempt to cope with this experience. By “speaking
101
Interestingly, while he gets rid of “unfit” colleagues, he helps for his former colleagues
from Hamburg to hide. That is, he hides Jews in his flat – evoking the fantasy of Father as
the saviour of the Jews in Father.
56 Chapter Three
out” (on the stage, publicly) he tries to overwhelm the silencing hiss of the
conductor. The childhood silencing, thus, triggers the direction of his entire life.
This lies at the core of the hysteric fit he produces at the beginning of the film.
Silenced, he cannot bear to listen to the high-pitched voice of the singer on the
stage. The applause that celebrates that soprano voice is, for Höfgen, the
celebration of his enthusiastic and overwhelming soprano as a child in the boys’
choir. The triumphant pose of the emperor he takes up when “facing” the
applauding crowd (although, he faces himself) derives from the replaying and
reliving of this traumatic scene.
Höfgen’s career is then a quest for his voice. He wants to shout, to make heard
what was silenced. He is ostensibly unsatisfied throughout the narrative, as he does
not realise that “the voice, by definition, is something that is lost.”102 All the roles
he plays on and off the stage are attempts to regain the lost (silenced) voice: the
higher he gets (just as with his highest pitch in the choir), the more his voice would
be heard. Höfgen, as a result of his trauma, suffers from “aphonia,” which is “a
frequent hysterical symptom … the enforced silence.”103
I argue that in Mephisto, in the case of Hendrik Höfgen, the aphonia is not
simply a hysterical symptom. To label it as such would mean to forget about the
sudden vocal jump he performed in the choir and that precipitated the prohibition
of the voice. What I am interested in is the force behind that vocal performance
prior to the traumatic castration. To remain on the level of the analysis of the
hysteric symptom of aphonia would be an investigation of the mechanism
described by Freud as “dynamic repression,” whereas an analysis of the event that
brought about that repression will lead me to a consideration of a repressed
material that does not simply “return” in compromise formations. This latter kind
of repression is baptised by Abraham and Torok as “preservative repression”
which forms the crypt. In the case of dynamic or constitutive repression, the
repressed tries to find ways to surface, whereas in the case of preservative
repression the repressed “lies buried – equally incapable of rising or of
disintegrating.”104 What is repressed therefore cannot simply return. Instead, the
gap this crypt creates gets objectified as the phantom.
Furthermore, the secret encrypted may not be preserved in the subject’s psyche:
it can travel from one generation to the next. This transmission is precisely the
work of the phantom. The effects of inheriting the crypt by the transmission of the
phantom are manifestations similar to hysteric symptom formations. However,
102
Poizat 1992, 93.
103
Dolar in Žižek and Dolar 2002, 15.
104
these symptoms haunt precisely because they do not originate in the subject’s own
repressions. These symptoms derive from the repressions of the other (usually from
one of the parents): “The phantom which returns to haunt bears witness to the
existence of the [crypt] within the other.”105 The cause of Höfgen’s vocal jump
during the performance is prior to the symptoms of aphonia – which are clearly the
returns of the repressed, the results of the castrating prohibition. That is to say, his
sudden vocal jump (a clear sign of ventriloquism, being an unwitting vocal
performance, as Höfgen acknowledges) is phantom driven.
This uncovering of the unwitting urge behind Höfgen’s vocal performance
reveals a further gap beyond the gap in his psyche. In order to get to the traumatic
kernel that is not his own, I first wish to relate his seemingly hysteric symptoms to
the narrative of Mephisto. The analysis of the narrative will open the way to the
investigation of the haunting visual feature in the register of monstration, which is
also an attempt at the mapping of the mechanism of filmic representation in the
Szabó oeuvre. In other words, by connecting the narrative and the visual analyses, I
intend to map the way narration and monstration are laminated not only in
Mephisto, but also in other films made by István Szabó.
So, to give a precise account of the scene in question: following Höfgen’s
proposal to Barbara, the Bruckners give a party to celebrate it. The two families are
sitting at a table in the garden, eating. Everybody is silent, even the jingling of the
cutlery is muted. All of a sudden, Höfgen stops eating, his face goes into a strange
grimace, a convulsion, and then he starts to retch. During the afternoon siesta he
tells Barbara his childhood trauma, identifying it as the cause of the retching. It is
thus the mute lunch, the “enforced silence” that brings up the traumatic memory.
Something “got stuck in the throat” as Žižek says following Lacan’s description of
the voice qua object.106 It is the manifestation in symptom formation of the voice
per se: “the exemplary case of the voice qua object is a voice which remains silent,
i.e., which we do not hear.”107 It means that Höfgen is incapable of evacuating the
object that literally got stuck in his throat, he cannot get over his trauma, and he
cannot yet regain “his voice.” “His voice,” the voice as object a, is not his as such:
it is not on the side of the subject, but on the side of the object (as in the case of the
gaze).
105
Abraham and Torok 1994, 175. (italics in the original)
106
Žižek 1992a, 117.
107
Ibid.
58 Chapter Three
This silenced voice (which is the surplus of signification in Lacan108) revives

the horror of encountering the Real.109 The Real that intrudes into reality here is
clearly Höfgen’s traumatic experience. But the question arises, why does he start
retching precisely at that moment, in other words, why does the repressed return
precisely at this moment of celebration? An answer may be attained if we examine
the circumstances of the castration of the voice and compare it with the traumatic
encounter with the Real at this lunch. The only common element in the two scenes
is that both are connected to marriage. The traumatic kernel should be thus
connected in some way to weddings and to marriage in general. It implies that, in a
genealogical perspective, there is some unspeakable secret encrypted in Höfgen’s
past (that echoes the secrets in Father and Love Film, too).
If the haunting effect comes from without Höfgen’s psyche, the return of the
enforced silence must also be generated outside him. In this view, I consider his
vocal jump in the choir as “the loss of control over one’s own voice”110: an
unwitting performance, which is the example of ventriloquism. To refer to
Abraham’s theory of the phantom, when the case of ventriloquism cannot be
pinpointed as the result of conversion hysteria, the analyst should look for the
phantom and the secret it carries. Therefore, in Höfgen’s case, the cause that
brought about the trauma of castration (the enforcement of silence upon him) is
merely an effect of the work of the phantom. In other words, the cause (i.e.,
dynamic repression) is the result of a prior cause (i.e., preservative repression of
the other’s) that may be an inclusion—materialised as a crypt or block in the
narrative—in the hidden aspects of Höfgen’s family history.
Reading Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Žižek in fact comes close to
describing the work of the phantom in visual terms. However, he does not go
beyond the Lacanian framework, which for him provides a “precise answer” to the
appearance of “uncanny spectral” apparitions in representation.111 He argues that
the Real “(the part of reality that remains unsymbolized) returns in the guise of
spectral apparitions.”112 This would mean that the spectre comes forth as the
messenger of the Real. However, Derrida implicitly works with Abraham’s
108
As Dolar argues, the voice qua object is “the outcome of the structural operation.”
(Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Žižek and Salecl 1996, 9.
109
Žižek 1992a, 117.
110
Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Žižek and Salecl 1996, 15.
111
Žižek, “I Hear You with My Eyes,” in Žižek and Salecl 1996, 112.
112
Ibid. (italics in the original)
concept of the phantom,113 which implies that the phantom never appears, it is
present in its very absence. What appears is a display that is created in order to
hide something else, as I have argued previously. The phantom, that is, does not
return in the form of uncanny apparitions, but it returns to form uncanny
apparitions. Höfgen’s traumatic kernel thus has to be cracked to open the walls of
the crypt (a real primordial traumatic kernel, prior to the subject’s own, which may
merely be a result of the return of the former one), to make the concealed secret
and the nescience of its presence in the subject known.
But where does the energy that propels the work of the phantom come from? In
other words, where does the phantom get its energy to form such visual scenarios?
According to Abraham, the phantom “has no energy of its own,” as it is “sustained
by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the
unconscious, in the coherence of logical coherence” that finally leads to “endless
repetition.”114 The unconscious in the case of a work of art, however, is not the
author’s, but of the text’s itself: the phantom thus becomes a “fictive” authority
generated and induced by the work and the unconscious of the work.115
It seems that Abraham’s description of the work of the phantom also fits my
attempt to designate the mechanism of cinematic representation at work in the
Szabó oeuvre, since the agent responsible for the filmic intertextuality within the
oeuvre gets its agency from the unspeakable secrets lurking in the domain of the
phantom text. Thus, the phantom is heterogeneous to the specific textual
environment it appears in, while it would not exist without getting objectified
there, i.e. without having the capacity to fill in the gaps of a text while
foregrounding the existence of the gap with the very same gesture. The phantom
governs the text and the intertext with the mandate of effective repressions outside
these domains. Its agency derives therefore always from the outside, always from
somewhere else, but producing the uncanny effects within its textual environment.
This logic makes it return from text to text whereby the virtually endless repetition
Abraham talks about is also given way.
As I have argued, the focal body qua Höfgen is a displacement of the previous
focal bodies in the oeuvre, thus continuing the line of a kind of genealogy. The
113
Derrida himself refers to his own introduction to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s
Magic Word: A Cryptonymy in his Specters of Marx (Derrida 1994). Cf: Derrida 1986, xi-
xlviii. Furthermore, Nicholas Royle points out that the concept of the ghost, spectre, or
phantom that underlies the Derridean programme of “hauntology” derives from Abraham.
(See: Royle 1995.; and especially his latest book: Royle 2003.)
114
115
60 Chapter Three
phantom that ventriloquizes his body at the childhood performance can thus be a
messenger of a crypt that does not reside in the diegesis of Mephisto. In this light, I
would like to refer to the analysis of Father, in which I revealed that there are
uncertainties about Bence’s (the central character’s) origins: the marriage scene
appears in a fantasy sequence of the child, who was not even born when it
happened. This is the only visual representation where Father appears together with
Mother, otherwise they are always shown separately. The wedding seems to be
hasty, and is put into the context of “saving” that implies a Jewish descent. The
unclear origin and identity of Father/father points at an encrypted secret that haunts
the life of the central character. It is an issue that is further elaborated in Love Film:
Father is now completely missing, and his birthplace presents an important crypt
screen.
The haunting effect of the crypt put into operation by the phantom is present in
Mephisto, too. The issue of the voice qua object refers to a possible trauma in the
genealogy that is not explicitly present in the film. The question still insists: why
does Höfgen’s voice jump an octave then and there? It is impossible to answer the
question relying only on this particular diegesis. The intertext—as a web of
recurring tropes and references—does not reveal the source of this unwitting
performance, either. The roots of this ventriloquism may then be found in the
phantom text that is precisely the silenced story of the encrypted secrets of the
Szabó oeuvre. As the investigation seems to reinforce in the case of Mephisto, so
far the secrets that haunt are the following: Jewish origin, illegitimacy and incest
(which will be reinforced by Sunshine, revealing a complex mechanism of
haunting at the core of the mechanism of cinematic representation in the Szabó
oeuvre).
Höfgen’s “proper” name

I have already analysed the way names transmit the encrypted secrets in
previous chapters.116 There I argued that the displacement of the names imply that
none of them can be considered as the “proper” name for the body it signifies. In
Mephisto, as Höfgen is an actor, his body is signified by several names, and it
seems that the most “proper” name for him is one of his roles: Mephistopheles in
Goethe’s Faust. However, as I will point out, it is not a “proper” name at all,
neither is it a “proper” role. It is in fact the role that reveals the case of
116
In this respect, see my discussion of Love Film, where I describe the operation of the
displacement of names over the focal bodies.
pseudonymy here: Höfgen’s original name (Heinrich/Heinz) comes to be a

cryptonym. It is so, as this name encrypts an entire dramatic text, which argument
will shed light on the potential source of the over-intense white light that floods the
scene at the end of the film, resulting in a kind of X-ray of Höfgen’s focal body.
The “impropriety” of the name in Höfgen’s case can pose problems over the
issue of narrative identity. According to Anikó Imre, the actor—being both
Mephisto and Höfgen, inseparably—“has no core of identity.”117 Imre takes it to
illustrate Judith Butler’s concept of the reiterative performance of identity, as
“Höfgen repeatedly reconstitutes himself in the mirror, in a literal re-enactment of
the mirror phase; his Mephisto mask becomes increasingly less theatrical and more
continuous with his skin; he wears a Mephistoesque robe at home.”118 This mise-
en-abîme personality structure can be argued to constitute a mask that is designed
to conceal the phantomatic mechanism behind the sheer ventriloquism. Höfgen’s
profession (actor) is a primary device for ventriloquism, and this “performance of
identity” takes over his life entirely in the course of the narrative. This is
articulated in Höfgen’s cry, “My face is not my face; my legs are not my legs; my
name is not my name!”
Höfgen’s anxious cry at realising his disowning of his body and name has
further implications for the present study, as well. I have claimed that the Szabó
oeuvre presents a focal body, the history of which entails the entire narrative
corpus. Höfgen is actually the character who is made to utter the very words that
underscore the plausibility of my undertaking: his body and his name are but
representations formed by the phantom to create an avenue of appearing in front
of the spectator. The films—from Mephisto on—are more often than not denoted
by the “improper” names in the title: the names of the central characters name the
film texts in turn: this gives a complex mechanism of hiding and showing.
Mephisto, Redl, Hanussen and Sunshine (alias Sonnenschein) thus come to be
pseudonyms for the same focal body – the spectral body.
In Mephisto, the trick is that the constant play of the slippage of names over the
body conceals a rather illuminating perspective. While Imre argues that Höfgen
more and more becomes Mephisto, identifying completely with his stage role, I
claim that this is precisely what cannot happen. By claiming that, I wish to point
out that there is a text that is continuously evoked, referred to, and “incorporated”
into the film text – in other words a text that itself is an inclusion in the diegesis.
This text is of course Goethe’s drama, which forms an inclusion in the Klaus Mann
117
Imre 1999, 410.
118
Ibid.
62 Chapter Three
novel first, and then is “adapted,” i.e., transmitted into the film also, as a kernel or
narrative core. The trick here is concealed by the fact that Höfgen not only plays
Mephisto on-stage, but he appears as a Mephistoesque character off-stage, as well.
However, when he is “put on the stage” (mise-en-scène, literally) in the final scene,
he is anybody but Mephisto.
Goethe’s text gives me the clue: there is a Heinrich (i.e., Hendrik) in the drama,
and that is Faust, not Mephisto. The diminutive of this name, Heinz, in fact appears
in the film when Juliette calls him by that original name, which Höfgen detests.
The inclusion of the drama is even more forceful, if we look at the passage when
Faust is blinded in the final, fifth act. There he talks of a darkness that enwraps
him, but then his “inmost spirit” shines up:
The Night seems deeper now to press around me,

But in my inmost spirit all is light …119
What happens in the adaptation of these lines into the film120 is the process
Abraham and Torok call “demetaphorization” or “designification”: a momentary
slip in the process of signification that implies the concealment of something.
When demetaphorization happens, what is meant figuratively is now taken
literally.121 Demetaphorization or designification is “capable of defeating
signification and of laying bare, at the same time, the very foundation of the
signifying process [signifiance].”122 This is precisely what is the case in the final
scene of Mephisto: the film takes literally what in the dramatic text features
figuratively, by which the visual scenario demetaphorizes or designifies the lines
uttered by Faust. By way of rendering the voice in visual “language,” the film not
only incorporates these lines (and via them, the entire silent drama lurking in the
film text through the “proper” name of Mephisto) but it also silences and transmits
them. Moreover, the sudden eruption of the uncanny, over-intense light thus is
Faust’s not Mephisto’s. When Höfgen should be Mephisto, he comes to be Faust:
more precisely, the light emanating from within Faust’s body.
119
Goethe 1964, 407.
120
I need to emphasise that there is no apparent acknowledgement that these two lines are in
fact “adapted” by Szabó and Dobai directly from Goethe’s drama. Nonetheless, they literally
“appear” without the mediation of Mann’s novel.
121
122
Op. cit., 85.
The over-intense white light of the final scene of the film, and the
spectral body
Szabó’s Mephisto breaks with the technique of narration employed in the
preceding films. Here there is no one to stand in front of the window of an
apartment, face the camera and tell the story. The narrative in Mephisto is a
Hollywood narrative with linear narration, seamless editing, and no discernible
narrative voice, no voice-overs, nor long inner monologues. Still, at the end, in the
final sequence, Höfgen—sent onto the stage, chased by spotlights—finds rescue in
facing the camera. Although this recalls similar instances from previous films, the
situation here is somewhat different. He turns to face the camera (in an attempt to
escape the spotlights closing in on him), and desperately asks the spectator, “What
do they want from me? What do they want? I’m just an actor.” By defining himself
as “just an actor” instead of being Hendrik Höfgen, he evokes and commemorates
all the masks he has put on to find his voice, by which he retains the ventriloquism
that made him utter words and sentences.
First I will examine the appearance of the harsh white light that fills the frame
and then petrifies the image and the body caught in this image. I will investigate
the mechanism of this uncanny light emanating from within Höfgen’s focal body,
and its role in potentially revealing the concealed and unspeakable secrets that are
subject to the work of the phantom in this display. Then I will analyse a different
aspect of the very same scene: the way Höfgen begins to address the spectator as
Other. This aspect not only focuses on the route of desire between subject and
Other, but it also sheds light on the way the secrets are transmitted to the spectator
in an interrogative manner. My aim here is to point out the way the “interrogative
text” (Belsey) prepares the way for the phantom to appear, and how Szabó gives
the spectator the opportunity to annihilate it.
The interrogative text is a notion adapted from linguistics. According to
Catherine Belsey, Emile Benveniste distinguished among three functions by which
“discourse” can be characterised: declarative, imperative and interrogative, which
Belsey reappropriates as three kinds of texts.123 The declarative text simply gives
information to the reader; the imperative gives orders. “The interrogative text, on
the other hand, disrupts the unity of the reader by discouraging identification with a
unified subject of the enunciation.”124 This opens a gap in comprehension that
seeks to be filled in by the answer of the reader/spectator. In other words, the
123
Belsey 1980, 91.
119
Ibid.
64 Chapter Three
interrogative text “does literally invite the reader to produce answers to the
questions it implicitly or explicitly raises.”125 I will apply the notion of the
interrogative text to describe the way the film addresses its spectator, and to
highlight its relevance for the analysis of the work of the phantom in the Szabó
oeuvre.
I have referred to the final scenes of Love Film and Mephisto as strange or
uncanny visual effects. The effect in those scenes is that of blinding: the spectator
all of a sudden cannot see the bodies that address him/her. Moreover, s/he comes to
be involved in the scene/seen not merely because s/he is addressed, but also
because the audience is lit up by the light returning from (or erupting from beyond,
in another sense) the screen. In each case, the sudden eruption of the strange and
highly intensive light indicates – and creates – a gap in the understanding of the
narrative, as its source is heterogeneous to the narratives. The spectator—when “lit
up”—is also “left in the dark” as to the motivation of the apparition. Why does this
light appear, and why then and there?
The appearance of the light happens via designification. It simply means that
the words I have quoted from Goethe are visualised, more precisely, specularised.
It is significant that this specularisation differs from the specular rendering of the
entire novel: the light that composes this final image is entirely different from the
light that orchestrates the narrative of the film. Neither is it a simple repetition or
reappearance of the light from the end of Love Film. As I pointed out there, the
light suddenly pours over the screen, blinding the spectator, and then forms the
face that starts to speak. The body in that case was an object a in the sense of the
leftover or remainder of signification, an imaginary object standing in for the Real.
The appearance of Kata’s face constituted and at the same time concealed the gap
in the mechanism of representation.
By contrast, the final scene of Mephisto reverses the birth or outpouring of the
uncanny light. Here the body is first put on the stage (which is nothing but a never-
ending desert) and light beams start to chase him, to grasp him. Höfgen tries to
escape this trap of lights, and exasperated, asks the spectator what the lights—and
the movers of the lights—want from him. While he is waiting for an answer
(which, as I attempt to demonstrate later on, returns at best as a question from the
field of the Other) the locatable sources of the light beams slide off-screen,126 and a
massively overwhelming light erupts from the body in sight. This light is the over-
125
Ibid.
126
Up to this point in the film whenever Höfgen appears, there is a source of light (usually a
light bulb) somewhere near him – always in the same frame. In the final scene, the source of
light disappears for the first and last time.
intense light that blinds. Clearly, the body, i.e., Höfgen’s body, has until now
contained the over-intense light, his body was a shell for this impossible and
invisible kernel. By invisible I mean “beyond the visible,” since this light renders
the visible completely invisible in the film. The desert that surrounded Höfgen is
now continuous with his body: this very extimacy (to use the Lacanian, more
expressive term instead of the Freudian unheimlich) attests to the eruption or
flooding of the Real in this scene.
What is haunting in this extimate scene is not merely this sudden eruption of
the light. The light emanating from within the body and then blinding the spectator
would clearly signal the end: there is nothing else, since it is per definitionem
nothing or no-thing. In that case the process of signification that establishes the
screen127 would be halted or disrupted so that what has so far been concealed or
hidden suddenly erupts: the reality of the subject is dispersed by the intrusion of
the Real. Retrospectively, this is how Lacan defines the concept of trauma in the
form of touché.128 In Abraham’s theory of the phantom this eruption is the
constitution of a secret that is encrypted. But what creates the uncanny effects is
not the return of the Real, as that is encrypted, and is under preservative repression.
It is the phantom that creates a display to hide this crypt even more effectively.
However, due to the logic of the work of the phantom, the display (or shell) always
includes (even incorporates) what it hides, that is, the traumatic, impossible, and
invisible kernel. This kernel, however, is not the secret itself, not the trauma, not
the pain, not the Real. This kernel is only another shell for all those, in the manner
of a mise-en-abîme.129
127
On the constitution of the screen as a result of signification as a socio-cultural process,
see: Silverman 1996, 10. See especially: Chapter Six, “The Screen,” 195-227.
128
Lacan 1998, 53-64.
129
The origin of the term goes back to André Gide’s Journal 1889-1939 (Gide 1948, 41.)
The trope got “its name from a heraldic device that Gide no doubt discovered in 1891.”
(Dällenbach 1989, 8.) Gide introduces the term so as to refer to a play of relexion of a work
of art within itself: such as Velazquez’s Las Meniñas or the play in Hamlet (to mention only
two of the examples Gide refers to) and thus to a complex narrative technique. I am
referring to mise-en-abîme in terms of its original use in heraldry: in the sense of “the
placement of a small escutcheon in the middle of a larger one” (Translator’s note in Derrida
1984, 262., fn. 73.), best exemplified perhaps by the picture on the famous “Quaker Oats”
package, “showing a Quaker holding a Quaker Oats package on which there is a picture of a
Quaker holding a Quaker Oats package, and so on” (McHale 1989, 124.). Although both
Derrida and McHale describe the figure of the mise-en-abîme as the model for infinite
regress, in terms of Abraham I need to specify that this play of reflections stops the moment
66 Chapter Three
The premise of this argumentation is provided by the film itself: the eruption of
the light should reach its climax in its complete outpouring, in the total light, in the
overwhelming invisibility. However, the intrusion of this light is petrified right
before the moment of its complete blinding effect. The body in sight lights up, the
light floods over the carnal boundaries, the look empties out first, then all the other
orifices (so that the visual effect is that of a skull), and just when the body becomes
homogeneous with its very exteriority (hence the adequacy of the Lacanian
extimacy) the scene freezes. Indeed, the screen does not “heat up” as was the case
in Love Film, it rather freezes: this white is far from Love Film’s white-hot quality;
here the colour temperature is “white-cold.”
What the eruption of this over-intense light foregrounds is not the traumatic
kernel but the nescience of the presence of the crypt. Petrified, the image reveals
that the seen is in fact the discovery of a crypt, and precisely the shining forth of
the crypt that I have used as a definition of the crypt screen. The petrified field of
vision thus lends a shell to the spectator’s investigation, which is the source of the
unease. The spectator does not know what it is (that is why it is a nescience), and
whether it is at all. As Derrida discusses the work of the phantom:
It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if
precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence.
One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-
present present, this being-there of an absent … one no longer belongs to
knowledge.130
Derrida here circumscribes Abraham’s notion of the phantom that operates in

complete silence, transmitting the nescience from one subject to another. Then he
defines this “Thing” in visual terms as the Lacanian gaze, corresponding to the
asymmetry in the field of vision caused by the anteriority of the gaze summed up
in the phrase “You never look at me from the place from which I see you.”131 As
Lacan argues, it follows from this that what the subject looks at is never what s/he
wishes to see.132 Indeed, in this scene from Mephisto the spectator is made to
realise that what shines forth is but a crypt, the nescience (literally “not knowing”).
What the spectator wishes to see is what is contained within the crypt. This
one finds the encrypted secrets, which—for Abraham—form the unconscious of the work,
not of the author of the work. (cf.: Abraham and Torok 1986, 119.).
130
Derrida 1994, 6.
131
Lacan 1998, 103. (italics in the original)
132
Ibid.
revealing of the nescience, presenting the crypt as if it were a kernel, is the work of
the phantom. By camouflaging the crypt as a kernel, the phantom succeeds in
strengthening its walls: the very walls that in fact hide the Real kernel. So, whereas
in the Lacanian framework the scene may be described as the eruption and
outpouring of the Real, in terms of the theory of the phantom in Abraham it is a
snare: an illusion of the Real.
The final scene of Mephisto is thus nothing else but a display of “the furtive
and ungraspable visibility of the invisible” that presents “the tangible intangibility
of a proper body without flesh,”133 to quote Derrida’s more than simply adequate
lines. Höfgen used the masks of his stage roles to show himself by hiding behind
them, while his body is used as precisely an apparition by the phantom. In this
respect, the final scene of the film is the “stripping down” of the improper body in
order to show the “proper body”: the spectral body. Perhaps this is the reason why
no name is proper for the central bodies of the entire Szabó oeuvre: the proper
body is unnameable, so there cannot be any “proper” names.
But is Höfgen really “just an actor” – no-body, only the amount of masks he
puts on? Can somebody be “just an actor” in a context that evidently has effects on
the very roles (i.e., masks) that mark his body and name? When arguing that with
the eruption of the strangely over-intense light Höfgen’s body is stripped down into
what it really is, the spectral body, I also claim that the X-ray shows more than the
empty nothingness. Although the contours of his body are about to dissolve into
the light, the process stops abruptly resulting in a strangely petrified image. I need
to emphasise the fact that he is put on the stage, in other words, he is framed,
contained. Then come the spotlights, which disturb him, and chase him round the
stage. What is uncanny here is that an actor should never be disturbed by the
spotlight that in fact is the device that makes him visible, i.e. the device that makes
him a focal body, a character, on the stage.
If we also regard the context in which the lights appear relevant, it may be
argued that the spotlights that chase Höfgen on the stage disturb him because they
are so strong as to “see through” him. And if they can see through him, they might
also spot the presence of unknown knowledges, nesciences, that may be evoked to
surface only in specific circumstances. The lights thus transform into the sharp
light of the interrogator’s lamp, or even into the chasing and surveying searchlights
of a concentration camp. This way Höfgen’s hysterical disowning of his own body
at the beginning of the film in Juliette’s flat (“My face is not my face…”) turns into
its opposite when he is caught by the searchlights as a particular Jewish body.
133
Derrida 1994, 7.
68 Chapter Three
While the hysterical outburst may be seen as the recognition of ventriloquism, in

the final scene of the film the eruption of the light seems to find his deepest “own”:
the crypt that contains the secrets that triggered his acts through the work of the
phantom.
Assuming that given the specific historical context, this interpretation opens up
Mephisto for the analysis of the narrative and intertextual investigations, I claim
that the secret Jewish heritage lurking unknown in Höfgen’s family history can be
seen at this point of the film. This can explain why Höfgen was so eager to help
those Jewish friends from his Hamburg time while at the very same time he
showed a public face (a mask again, indeed) as a faithful Nazi, “playing” politics in
the cultural arena.
The phantom, thus, effectively hides the cause of its return. The visual tableau
that constitutes a paradoxically enigmatic disclosure reinforces the concealment of
the secrets of the Szabó oeuvre. Nonetheless, this scene also draws attention to the
origin of the phantom’s return to the field of visible in the form of a spectral body:
it does not arrive for the spectator from the diegesis, nor does it come from the
intertext of the oeuvre. All these (the individual films and the intertext they make
up) are displays for the phantom text, which is the silenced story of unspeakable
secrets. The phantom returns from film to film, here overtly, there in a more covert
way, to haunt the narratives. Since the haunting feeds on nescience, the kernel of
the displays (or shells) is an other that ruptures the chain of signification at work in
the oeuvre. These moments, when a gap opens up, reveal the presence of the
phantom, but cannot disclose the cause of haunting.
Sound and the spectators’ “collective interrogation” of

themselves
In the final scene the audible level is not petrified, though: the soughing of the
wind continues for a moment only to merge with the score of the credit. This
makes the scene more “unrealistic.” It is as if the question that causes Höfgen-
Faust’s anxiety were echoed far beyond its range. It may amount to what Szabó
revealed about Mephisto: a film that comes to be for the spectators “a ‘collective
interrogation’ of themselves.”134 The sound of the wind is rendered “more”
realistic than it would be in reality: it acquires a haunting quality by simultaneously
filling in and echoing the emptiness of the dark desert suddenly lit up by the light
emanating from Höfgen’s body. The Nazi General shouts that this will be the true
134
Imre 1999, 414.
and total theatre that they (but first and foremost Höfgen) have been dreaming of: a
theatre that shakes up the spectator and propels him or her to act. It is thus not by
mere accident that the over-intense light appears right here - when Höfgen started
to carry out his plan to create the total theatre early on in the film, he wanted to put
street lamps on the edge of the stage and into the auditorium to shake the spectators
up. This light was to literally “strike their eyes.” This piercing light appears in the
final scene, accompanied by the hollow voice.
This sound is not an imaginary one, nor is it symbolic in the form of a code, but
something that Michel Chion defined as rendu: the immediate rendering of reality
that does not simply reproduce but rather over-emphasise it. This emphasis is
achieved by the reinforcement of small audible details “that would be missed if we
were to find ourselves in the “reality” recorded by the film.”135 The effect of this
more than reality rendered to hit the spectator the same way as the light is the
intrusion of the Real in Lacanian terms. More precisely, it is not an intrusion per
se, since it enwraps the entire scene: the symbolic order (i.e., the chain of
signification in terms of the film narrative) is now reduced to occupy the place that
is “normally” the place of the Real. In other words, whereas in reality the Real is
inscribed as a lack that has to be covered, and is surrounded and contained in and
by the Symbolic, here the spectator witnesses the reverse.136
Höfgen looks into the camera and addresses the spectator directly. I have
discussed a similar case with Love Film, where this moment signalled the
actor’s/actress’s extraction of himself/herself from the narrative context whereby a
radically subjective view gets inscribed into the very heart of so-called objective
reality. This inscription is the opening of a gap onto the Real, which was
underscored by the eruption of the over-intense light. In Love Film, the light made
it possible for Kata to speak, and address the spectator, that is, it was the light that
formed her and facilitate her utterances (hence her ventriloquism). In Mephisto,
however, the situation is somewhat different. Here Höfgen is not the effect of the
light: he does not appear as a result of the light’s eruption, rather, he disappears
when the light emanates from within his body. He becomes a “spark” that breaches
the gap between two signifiers as Bruce Fink defines the subject in Lacan’s
theory.137
The moment of the birth of the subject qua spark, according to Fink, is a
metaphor of “the traumatic experience of jouissance” that is the leftover of “the
135
Žižek 1992b, 40.
136
Ibid. Žižek here examines several effects of rendu, where the films provide an immediate
access to the Real in the form of what Freud called “psychic reality.”
137
Fink 1995, 69.
70 Chapter Three
encounter with the Other’s desire.”138 The question of desire comes up when
Höfgen addresses the spectator. He asks, “What do they want from me?”, which is
an echo of the famous Lacanian graph of desire, and in particular of the question,
“Che vuoi?” [“What do you want?”].139 Höfgen’s question is in fact a question of
the desire of the Other. The Other in this case is the spectator as Absent One (i.e.,
absent from the screen)140, the vanishing point. Höfgen wants to know the desire of
the General and his company who control the lights – but by the time he asks the
question, they are already Other. The question is therefore “What does the Other
want?” and “What is the Other’s desire?” It is as if he were looking for an answer
himself: “I am just an actor,” that is, “I can only act this desire out.” As Bice
Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy argue, “the subject is the one who has to question
somebody else, an Other, in order to know the truth about himself,” which
interrogation comes at the moment when the subject “experiences a lack of
cohesion, a moment of ‘discord’.”141 This discord brings about the “fading” of the
subject, by which the subject is “barred,” or constituted as subordinated to the
signifier which then represents it to other signifiers in the chain.142
The questioning is not that simple, though. According to Žižek, the question
itself is a gap which should be filled in by an answer.143 Thus, the question itself
reveals the gap in the representation that opened onto the Real, and it threatens to
swallow up not only the subject (Höfgen) but the entire scene, as well. This could
lead me to identify the cause of the petrifying image that finishes the film. When
the scene freezes, the gap can be observed, and the moment of interrogation is
belated. This way the demetaphorized “fading” is postponed, the experience of the
jouissance is prolonged, the question is waiting for the answer. This answer will be
the filling in of the gap of the “collective interrogation” of ourselves as spectators,
as Szabó described the film.
Furthermore, this self-interrogation on the spectator’s part is also a potential
encounter of jouissance: the spectator is also “lit up,” and is about to become a
“spark.” This is the stake of the interrogative film text. The questions, I suggest, hit
138
Op. cit., 70.
139
Lacan 1992a, 313.
140
Stam 1992, 170. Here the Absent One is originally the character who is off-screen and
brings an awareness of the space outside the visible domain. The spectator comes to occupy
the place of the Absent One through primary identification, i.e., via identifying with the
perspective of the absent character.
141
Benvenuto and Kennedy 1986, 169-170.
142
Lacan 1992a, 313.
143
Žižek 1989, 114.
the spectator in the case of the interrogative film text like the light that Höfgen
wanted to put on the edge of the theatrical stage back in Hamburg. It is also the
light, by mere metonymy or displacement, which emanates from his body to hit the
spectator of the film.
What hits the spectator of Mephisto in the form of the over-intense light is the
effect produced by the phantom. Inasmuch as the scene is an “apparition,” it is
directly the phantom that appears for the spectator in the form of the spectral body.
What the film does is to allow the spectator to speak to the phantom, which,
according to Derrida, is almost impossible.144 Szabó allows us to do it with this
scene. If we fail, we fail to notice that the phantom is here to transmit the traumatic
secrets. If we “speak to it” (i.e., provide answers), we may annihilate the phantom.
Eventually, this is what is at stake in watching Mephisto.
144
Derrida 1994, 11.
CHAPTER FOUR
SUNSHINE (A NAPFÉNY ÍZE, 1999): THE MAP OF
THE SZABÓ OEUVRE
Szabó’s 1999 film, Sunshine, provides a kind of intertextual knot and a model
or map for the analysis of the oeuvre in the present book, since it is in this film that
the work of the phantom and the role of the spectral body in structuring cinematic
representation become most explicit. The spectral quality of the focal body/ies will
be disclosed in the final scene of the film which also concerns the finding and the
immediate loss of the family secret that generations of the family of the
Sonnenscheins had been in search of. It is in this secret, nonetheless, that the
hidden family secrets that haunt the entire Szabó oeuvre find their knot – both in
the register of narration, and in that of monstration.
Sunshine is not the latest film made by István Szabó.145 However, even though
the film made just after Sunshine, Taking Sides (Szembesítés, 2001), also tackles
the traumatic effects of World War II, the issue of Jewishness as an unspeakable
secret, and the role of the family history (clashing at some point with the history of
a nation) in forming the subjectivity of the younger generations, it is still Sunshine
that provides the fullest view of the operation of both the narrative and the
representational strategies of the oeuvre. Sunshine can also be seen as the
“destination” of many characters of previous films, as the spectator is invited to
find connections via these characters and their stories and fictional lives with
subplots or marginal stories in those films. It is precisely this overt allusive strategy
that nurtures the filmic intertext of the Szabó oeuvre which, in turn, conceals the
unspeakable secrets that haunt the particular diegeses. The aim of this chapter is to
trace these allusions in order to map the intertext, and also to disclose the
phantomatic force behind this map: the very urge that makes the films work.
The film starts with the death of Áron Sonnenschein, the owner of a village
pub, and the inventor of the herbal liqueur called “Sunshine,” referring to the name
of the family (being a literal translation of the German “Sonnenschein”). His son,
Manó, witnesses his death and, figuring that the only way to maintain the family is
to leave home, he starts his journey to Budapest alone. The only equipment he has
145
Szabó’s latest films to date are Being Julia (2004), which is an excursion on his part into
the world of film comedies, and Relatives (Rokonok, 2006).
is his heritage from his father: a black book containing the secret formula of
Sunshine, and a watch that he found in the embers of the pub where his father died.
In Budapest he starts producing the liqueur, and by the age of twenty-four he
becomes a respected member of the middle class in the Monarchy. He gets married
and has two sons, Ignác (Ralph Fiennes) and Gusztáv. Soon Manó adopts Vali, the
daughter of his brother, following his unexpected death. The three young
Sonnenscheins choose different careers: Ignác becomes a legal student, Gusztáv
trains as a doctor, and Vali (Jennifer Ehle) discovers the power and beauty of
photography. In order to make their professional lives easier and free of
hindrances, they decide to change their name to get rid of its explicit Jewish
connotation. As grown-ups, Vali and Ignác enter into an incestuous love affair and
finally get married, while Gusztáv leaves the country fearing the persecution
because of his participation in the Revolution of 1918 and in the subsequent
political arena in 1919.
The higher Ignác climbs in his carrier, the worse his private life becomes,
which results in Vali’s estrangement from him, and finally in her leaving him. But
as Ignác’s health starts to decline seriously, Vali returns with the two teenage sons,
Ádám and István, to help him. After Ignác’s death, a new chapter begins in the
film, with the focus on Ádám’s (also played by Ralph Fiennes) sports career. As
was the case with his father, Ádám’s career is highly successful (he wins the 1936
Olympic Games in fencing), while his private life is in ruins (he has a secret affair
with his sister-in-law). And again, history intrudes family life: in 1944 the German
forces invade Budapest, herd the Jewry (the Sonnenscheins among them) into the
ghetto, and subsequently kill them. Ádám’s humiliating death is witnessed by his
son, Iván (Ralph Fiennes’s third role in the same film), who arrives home to Vali
(now played by Rosemary Harris, Jennifer Ehle’s mother), his grandmother, after
World War II as a living dead. Surprisingly, Vali’s brother, the émigré Gusztáv
also returns to participate in the new Communist government, and gets a job for
Iván as an investigator of war crimes.
Iván’s urge in his job is to take revenge on the death of his father. He believes
in communism and Stalin, but when he has to find evidence against his benevolent
boss (a father figure for him) to provide a reason for his execution on political
grounds, he gets entirely disappointed. In 1956 he takes part in the revolution and
gets imprisoned. Upon his release he goes back to Vali, his great-grandmother,
who shortly after gets into hospital and dies. Vali’s death triggers Iván to take back
the original name of Sonnenschein and—while getting rid of all the worthless
pieces of his heritage—to start a new life without the burden of his past.
74 Chapter Four
The secret of the name

The film starts with the title, Sunshine, projected over a cloudy sky. The most
obvious interpretation of such a visual paradox may be that the overt denotation of
the word (sunshine) is blocked by the antagonistic force (the cloud). In other
words, the sunshine is thwarted by a screen, which is to say that the film itself, as
signified by the title, will not express explicitly what it is about. Everything the
spectator gets is filtered, so the story of the family will be the projected surface,
beyond which another story may hide.
Just as in the case of several previous Szabó films, here the title of the film does
not only allude to the thwarted sunshine behind or beyond the clouds, but it also
refers to the name of the protagonists, of numerous generations of the
Sonnenscheins – since the English “sunshine” is a literal translation of the German
“Sonnenschein.” It suggests that it is not merely the story of the film that is a
display that hides something else, but the accessible family history can also be seen
as a display hiding unspeakable and unrepresentable secrets within the genealogy.
The knot of the two (the film and the family history) is precisely the title-name,
Sunshine, which thus becomes a cryptonym, a word that—for reasons to be
disclosed in this chapter—hides.146
The more so, since “sunshine” becomes the name of the special herbal liqueur
as well, which is seen as the drink with magical power, invented by the ur-father
(the first father mentioned in the genealogy). Now it may be crucial to see that the
liqueur bearing the name of the family and providing its subsequent wealth is the
result of the death of the father: Manó embarks on his long way, topographically
and socially speaking as well, following the traumatic death of his father. I may
thus claim that the happiness this liqueur brings to the family is based on the
trauma of losing the inventor of it. The name “Sunshine” on the label of the bottle
containing the magical drink encrypts the trauma of death. This way, as Lacanian
parlance would establish, the “magic” of the drink, the “bliss” it confers on the
146
Strangely, psychoanalysis also gets encrypted in the name “Sonnenschein”: Lipót Szondi,
the inventor of the psychoanalytic method known as the diagnostics of instincts or drives
(Triebdiagnostik) was originally Lipót Sonnenschein. Interestingly, the method is also called
the analysis of fate (“sorselemzés”) – which includes “sors,” the name chosen to displace
Sonnenschein in the film. He later changed his name to Szondi, virtually for the same
reasons as the young Sonnenscheins mention in the film. Although Szondi’s method has
very little in common with the approach I take in the analysis, his insistence on the
particularity of family history may be worth to mention.
family is the jouissance of the Other, that connotes the transgressive quality of
jouissance encoding both extreme pain and extreme pleasure.
The lack of the father as a typical trope featuring in Szabó’s films appears here,
too, in a traumatic way. It is quite conspicuous in the film that the ups and downs
of the life of the Sonnenscheins are always connected to the magic liqueur in some
ways. Thus when they are celebrating New Year’s Eve, the bliss comes with the
tasting of Sunshine. Also, when a tragedy happens, a bottle of Sunshine appears
immediately. The bottle of Sunshine thus becomes a visible crypt, the hiding
mechanism (operated by the phantom) of which becomes the more effective by its
patterning rhythm of returns.
The name of the drink becomes a screen too: it provides a screen for the name
of the family to appear, and hides its overt Jewish connotation. At the time of the
invention of the secret formula of the liqueur it was not an important factor, it was
simply a way of using the name of the family without making it a trademark. This
is what the Hungarian name of the liqueur describes even more cunningly: “A
napfény íze,” which translates as “The Taste of Sunshine.” Strange as it may
sound, the original name for the magic drink offers the taste of the family bliss.
The original name of the drink is also the Hungarian title of the film (A napfény
íze). The difference in the titles is instructive here: while the English version calls
attention to the name (Sunshine = Sonnenschein) and the cloudy sky in the credit
sequence of the film, the Hungarian version points beyond that, since it refers not
merely to the name, but also to what may be encrypted in it. To taste Sunshine is to
meet the jouissance of the Other – not so surprisingly the only persons to taste the
liqueur in the film are the members of the family. The jouissance (the magical
quality of the drink) contained in the bottle remains effective even after the liquid
itself has long disappeared. Upon Gusztáv’s return to Hungary after World War II,
the Sonnenscheins have a family dinner, where they find an empty bottle of
Sunshine. They open it and imitate drinking from it, the effect of which could not
have been better if the bottle had been full. This scene happens when they
commemorate all the dead family members, killed by the Nazis in Budapest, but
the mournful atmosphere blends with an unspeakable happiness that they are alive
and can drink the “nectar-essence” of their family.
The empty bottle of Sunshine may also be seen as a rather obvious reference to
the poverty of the Sonnenscheins at this point in the film. While the affluent years
were signalled by the drinking of the liqueur, by this point there is nothing to drink
– and in fact the family has lost everything during the war. This “emptying” runs
parallel with the story of the name of the family. First they are the Sonnenscheins,
a well-off Jewish family. But then the three children, Vali, Ignác and Gusztáv,
decide to change their name to conceal their Jewish origin, to make their career
building easier. When they decide to change their name, Ignác asks Vali:
76 Chapter Four
Ignác: “What comes to your mind first when you hear the name Sonnenschein?”
Vali: “My love.”
Ignác: “But what if you don’t know the person?”
Vali: “That he must be Jewish.”
As this short dialogue testifies, their name carried an explicit Jewish

connotation. Hence their need to change it. Interestingly, they want a name with
meaning; one which is Hungarian, but not an everyday name. They finally agree
upon the name “Sors,” meaning “fate” both in Hungarian and in Latin. This
becomes a cryptonym, encrypting the “erased” name while at the same time
referring to it in the first two letters. This becomes evident when they are asked to
sign the profiles at the Ministry to validate their new name: the two men, Ignác and
Gusztáv, sign their new name without a problem. However, Vali continues after
the first two letters as if nothing had happened, so she has to cross out
Sonnenschein, and sign again as Sors. This way, her signature as Sonnenschein
being “under erasure” becomes a surplus and a remainder (which is also a
reminder) that will haunt her and the family even when it is not present.147
Putting the name under erasure might evoke the concept and practice of “sous
rature” introduced by Derrida in his Of Grammatology. In her preface to the book,
Gayatri Spivak, the translator, explains that putting a word “under erasure” means
that it is seen “inaccurate but necessary” since it entails “unfamiliar conclusions”
when one examines “familiar things.”148 “Sonnenschein” thus becomes
“inaccurate” as the name of the family is now Sors, nonetheless it is “necessary,”
as—at least via the liqueur, and the tradition carried on by Manó—it is what
sustains them as a family. Moreover, there is no word of denying their Jewish
identity – only they wish to keep it a secret, concealed from the public. The
original name that comes under erasure may be seen as a “familiar thing” (i.e.
Heimlich) which in this case becomes repressed in a way, and with this all the
returns caused by this repression feature as “unfamiliar conclusions” (i.e.
unheimlich): this may explain why everybody in the film knows precisely that
147
Vali is not the only one who cannot forget the original name: when Ignác is awarded a
hearing by the emperor Franz Joseph, he introduces himself as Sonnenschein. This unwitting
“slip of the tongue” may be explained by the fact that the emperor is a father figure for
Ignác: even the death of the “fathers” coincide, as both Manó and the emperor die on the
very same day.
148
Gayatri Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Derrida 1997, 2.
“Sors” is nothing but a cover for another name, and even this new name cannot
defend them during the 1944 Nazi occupation.
Lacan also used the formula of putting words under erasure, although in a
different way. As Bruce Fink explains, the trope was always connected with some
of the striking claims Lacan made with reference to existence, such as “The
Woman does not exist,” “The Other jouissance does not exist,” or “There is no
such thing as sexual relationship.”149 According to Fink, “existence” in Lacan is
always tied to “ex-sistence,” which comes from the French translations of
Heidegger. As Fink writes, this was to refer to the original Greek ekstasis and the
German Ekstase – at the root of which one might discern the word “ecstasy,”
which in turn became related to the jouissance of the Other.150 Playing on this
potential of multiple meanings, Lacan used “ex-sistence” to “talk about ‘an
existence which stands apart from,’ which insists as it were from the outside;
something not included on the inside, something which, rather than being intimate,
is ‘extimate’.”151 I have already mentioned the term “extimate” in the discussion of
Mephisto, where it was used to highlight the mechanism of the erupting over-
intense white light, and what this outpouring does to the focal body. Here, in
Sunshine, it seems that the name (the “proper” name) insists from the outside, i.e. it
returns from without the “new” family (the Sorses) to haunt them, in other words,
it “ex-sists.”
As a “necessary” name, i.e. one that helps to sustain the entire family via its
composite of trauma and bliss, “Sonnenschein” returns at the end of the film from
the outside. When the narrator, Iván Sors - who was born Sors, and thus has never
been Sonnenschein – decides to take on the name of his ancestors, the name comes
from without him as it were. It “ex-sists,” is “extimate,” which his identification
with it (and with all that it contains or, rather, encrypts) turns into a fake sense of
“intimacy.” I claim that it is—along with the apparent happiness and carefree
atmosphere his walking on the sunny street suggests, underscored by a faint smile
on his face—fake, as what he adopts is not his regained origin as a “proper”
Sonnenschein, but rather a nescience: he does not know that his name is a
cryptonym, a name that hides unspeakable secrets.
I have pointed out earlier that the name features in a complex of relations with
the liqueur, the hidden train of family history, including Jewishness, and the—
hitherto not tackled issue of—incestuous love. What Iván believes he adopts is the
golden age and the morality of that age connoted by the name of the
149
Fink 1995, 122.
150
Ibid.
151
Ibid.
78 Chapter Four
Sonnenscheins, suggested to him by the letter he finds when he gets rid of the
ancient furniture and litter upon deciding to start a new life after Vali’s death.
There is a letter falling to the ground at the entrance of the house of the
Sonnenscheins together with the black book (containing the long searched-for
secret formula of Sunshine – and metaphorically speaking the secrets of the
Sonnenscheins). Iván takes up and reads it. The texts is written by the three
generations of Sonnenschein fathers (Manó, Ignác and Ádám), giving moral advice
on how to lead his life. I will later return to this letter, as it is the specularization of
the narrating of the text that reveals the phantomatic mechanism of the
representation of the spectral body in the Szabó oeuvre, but at this juncture I only
wish to point out that the letter is nothing but a cover, a concealment of the loss of
the black book. While Iván is reading the letter, the black book is thrown into the
grind of the garbage truck, and disappears for ever. The moment of the throwing is
emphasized enough for the spectator: we can follow its flight in slow motion, while
Iván concentrates on the content of the letter. This way he misses the secret, and
believes it to be what his ancestors tell him in the text.
When he decides to “be” a Sonnenschein, he clearly wants to identify with the
past as narrated by his “fathers.” What he does not know is that by adopting that
name which was not his own, he takes on himself a hundred years of silenced
suffering as well. In other words, with the name he inherits a crypt unwittingly.
The specularized text of the letter is a cover, a crypt screen, for the text of the
secret formula. The secret is contained in the black book which is destroyed when
Iván is reading the letter. What is visible of the secret is its cover, its shell. Thus,
whereas the visual rendition of the text of the letter may be considered as a crypt
screen, it is so only because the slow motion of the flight of the black book as a
crypt is also visible. If the book contains the secret formula of Sunshine, and
Sunshine is a patterning device in the narrative of the family history of the
Sonnenscheins, the secret formula metonymically contains the secrets of the family
as well. These secrets are unspeakable, and remain so with the destroying of the
book. It does not mean the destruction of the walls of the crypt, though: on the
contrary, by demolishing everything that visibly points at the existence of the
crypt, it becomes even stronger, since the rupture it causes passes unnoticed (by the
characters/subjects).
This scenario is the work of the phantom. It shows the crypt containing the
secret, it shows it being destroyed, but it never lets a peep into what it contains.
This way, true to the description of Abraham, the phantom shows something in
order to hide something else more effectively. Nonetheless, the secret is
transmitted: Iván is the last to taste Sunshine, to feel the secret of the
Sonnenscheins saturate his body. When he adopts the Sonnenschein cryptonym, he
unwittingly recalls the secret that already resides in his body through the sip of
Sunshine. This is how the “extimate” secret, via the crypt, becomes his innermost
self (i.e. he becomes a “real” Sonnenschein, the descendant harbouring the
unspeakable secrets, while he believes he is the Sonnenschein depicted in the letter
signed by his ancestors).
I suggest that the black book is a visible crypt, more precisely, a crypt screen in
itself. It is supposed to be a book that contains unspeakable and undiscussible
secrets: the secrets that make up the taste of Sunshine. The written form of the
secret formula is thus a displacement, a metonymy itself, the secret—as the dying
Vali notes to the unbelieving Iván—being within himself. It is here that the moral
of the letter may appear as the bearer of the secret, as Iván thinks that by learning
or “internalizing” the knowledge his forefathers bestow on him he really plants the
secret in himself. However, it is the last descendant of the family, Iván, who tasted
Sunshine last. If we consider the taste of Sunshine to be the carrier of the encrypted
secret, Vali’s assumption can be understood in a demetaphorized manner: the last
drop of Sunshine, the secret, is indeed in Iván.
The patterning role of the music and the secret of incest

The main score of the film seems at first to be absolutely non-diegetic music. It
enters the audible register of the film with the projection of the title of the film over
the cloudy sky. Later on, it will signal the caesuras of the different “chapters” or
generations in the genealogy of the Sonnenscheins. In this respect, the music
connects each and every new focal body (looking almost the same in all cases) to
the name, and to the diegesis. This way, it has a patterning function: it gives a
special rhythm to the plot of the film.
The melody is, however, first played in the film by Vali and Ignác. This is the
piano music that they learn together, and that they always play together as children
and then as adolescents, and finally as adults. Therefore, it may be seen as standing
for their later incestuous love culminating in marriage. This love affair is
something that has to be repressed, is illegal, and is about to shatter the harmonious
life of the entire family. However, when the parents agree on the children’s
marriage and thus legitimize this primarily secret and illegitimate relationship, the
intra-diegetic music is transferred into the non-diegetic realm. This realm is also
the one in which the narrator performs his storytelling. If the melody seals the
secret of incest and is transferred from the intra-diegetic realm into the realm of the
narrator, then the secret also gets transmitted to that level. Since the narrator seems
to get his cue from this melody in the narration of the transitory time between the
chapters or generations, it may be stated that his voice (i.e. the voice of Iván as
80 Chapter Four
narrator) incorporates in his utterance of the surface story the secret that
accompanies his utterance, thus encrypting it in the narrative register as well.
Sunshine is a story narrated by Iván, whose voice is accompanied by the music
that refers to the unspeakable secret of incest. As I have mentioned, the spectator
first encounters the music under the credit sequence, when the title of the film is
seen. Based on the above logic, I claim that this multiple transfer and transmission
of the original secret and its imbued articulation via the audible register finds its
knot in the title, which happens to be the name of the family and the brand name of
the magic drink the family produces.
In this light the potential origin of the music in the knot of the name of the
family and the liqueur may be examined. According to DezsĘ Mosonyi, music
ontologically derives from the intense feeling of pain: the function of music and of
songs was primarily to give way for the articulation of otherwise unspeakable
pain.152 In Sunshine the unspeakable pain that never gains utterance is the traumatic
death of Manó’s father, the inventor of the liqueur. The magic drink bears his name
and contains in its taste the unspeakable pain that is now a secret. The music
played by the two young Sonnenscheins, the music that underlies Sunshine and
patterns the genealogical changes in the life of the Sonnenscheins is related to the
liqueur via the name – which also connects it to the traumatic pain of the death of
the father.
It is this traumatic pain that merges with the incestuous desire of Vali and
Ignác. The explicitly sexual urge that binds them together may be explained as an
effect of music, as Imre Hermann argues. According to him, music activates not
only the central nervous system, but also elicits sexual urges in the subject, which
happens in great force.153 This force may eventually be so great as to result in a
rupture in the psyche of the subject – similarly to an incorporated traumatic pain.
This intensity in fact connects the traumatic pain of the death of the father and the
excessive bliss caused by the sexual urge via music. The music—through the
name—seals the secrets into one crypt, rendering both unspeakable at once.
Whenever the music puts a caesura in the rhythm of the film, it is on the one hand
a signal that a new chapter is about to begin, but on the other hand it also
commemorates the unspeakable secrets.
One more detail underscores the relationship of the secrets discussed above: the
father’s prohibition exerted on Manó’s incestuous desire towards his cousin, Sára
152
Mosonyi 1954, 13.
153
Hermann 1999, 66; 86.
Bettelheim.154 In this light, Vali and Ignác’s illegitimate relationship is but a

repetition, which refers back to an earlier repression in the family history. Based on
the Abrahamian phantom theory I argue that the incest that becomes first visible
and overt, and then legitimate in Vali and Ignác’s relationship is in fact the
unwitting reliving of a secret under preservative repression.
The transmission of this secret (Manó’s repression) does not stop in this
generation of the family with the legitimization of it by the traditional Jewish
wedding ceremony.155 Not as overtly as has been the case with Vali and Ignác,
incest seems to feature as an organizing element in the plot of the next two
generations (Ádám’s and Iván’s) as well, becoming more and more displaced in its
form. In a sense, incest should be seen here as a subversive force in the given
context of its appearance, in the given contextual order. While Vali and Ignác are
virtually sister and brother (after all, they are in blood-relation), Ádám, the fruit of
this marriage repeats incest with his sister-in-law. It is still the framework of the
family, but the motif of incest gets on a “legal” level, as the sister in this
relationship is a sister by the law.
In the third chapter or generation the image of the harmonious, traditional
family is shattered: Iván has only Vali as a living relative. This way, incest cannot
happen on the level of the family, so it gets displaced onto another level, which in
Sunshine is a socio-political one. Having delivered an emotionally heated address
at a party convention celebrating the birthday of Stalin, Iván finds himself flirting
Karola, who turns out to be the wife of the party’s hero, an influential leader. Later,
the flirt becomes a—mainly sexual—relationship, which is subversive in as much
as Iván has sex with his “sister-in-ideology” or his sister-in-arms. Thus the very
moment their bodily desire is fulfilled, sexuality faces party ideology, incest
(metonymically) becomes subversive in this context.
The visual register of the film provides a thread to underscore the above
argumentation. In the first generation, when Vali and Ignác start to grow cold
toward each other, Ignác desperately wants to regain the lost happiness, and almost
rapes Vali in his fury when being refused. Just before penetration would happen, a
154
The surname of Sára Bettelheim refers to the Jewish psychoanalyst helping Hanussen in
Budapest in Szabó’s 1989 film Hanussen. Interestingly, Dr. Sonnenschein in Colonel Redl
(Redl ezredes, 1984) has the very same role as Bettelheim, as he is the best friend of Redl.
Sunshine brings the two names together in Manó’s primal scene.
155
It is difficult to see why Manó’s wish to marry his cousin was forbidden, as their religion
allows marriage for cousins. According to historian Tamás Halász, the decision against it
might have been the effect of assimilatory politics, as this type of wedlock is still allowed in
orthodox communities. Halász 2001, 120.
82 Chapter Four
porcelain bowl falls to the ground and shatters into thousand pieces. At that
moment Ignác realizes what he is about to do and retreats immediately, ashamed of
himself. Vali collects the fragments and puts them on a plate in front of a
photograph hanging on the wall above the mantel. The uncanny feature of this is
that the photograph is the one taken by Gusztáv when Vali wanted to take a picture
of the courtyard of their house that blossomed in a golden light one day, all of a
sudden. When Vali set up the camera on a tripod and found the best angle for the
photo, she realized that there is a chair by the huge old tree in the middle of the
courtyard, and ran there to take it away. On her way, however, she stepped on a
thorn that got stuck into her foot. To pull it out, she sat down on the chair and it
was then that Gusztáv made the exposure. Thus the object of the photograph (the
first photograph in the narrative) is the photographer-subject herself. Moments
before the photo was taken, in the little crowd gathering behind the camera
somebody mentioned that “The courtyard blooms if somebody in the family is in
love.” Curiously it is Vali, the “model” in the middle of the courtyard bathing in
golden light (in fact, it is the colour of Vali’s hair) who was in love with Ignác.
This way, the photograph takes on a special meaning: it commemorates and, in
fact, petrifies the incestuous love, and becomes a signifier for it in the film.
The incestuous affairs in the film always end with the breaking of a similar
porcelain bowl, the fragments are always collected by the female character, and
these fragments always end up in a plate in front of Vali’s photograph. It seems
that all the focal love affairs refer back and, thus, commemorate the incest of Vali
and Ignác – which is but a repetition or commemoration of the repressed story, the
encrypted secret of Manó’s incestuous love (which, in fact, is only referred to in
the film, but never presented). The motif of the breaking of the porcelain bowl and
its explicit (or at times implicit) relation to incest is an intertextual reference in the
Szabó oeuvre. When, in Love Film, Kata and Jancsi reunite in Paris, they make
love, and start to talk about their possible life together, which ends up in a quarrel.
During the gesticulation a porcelain bowl is shoved to the floor, similarly to the
scene in Sunshine. In both cases it is the central female character and the focal
male body that are presented as sisters and brothers, which underscores the
intertextual reference. In Love Film I connected the soundtrack of Kata and
Jancsi’s lovemaking and the image of their childhood sledging as a combination
foregrounding incest, which would figure in Sunshine as the main score (the piano
melody intra-diegetically bound to the young Sonnenscheins) played during the
lovemaking of Vali and Ignác.
The photograph taken of the photographer, Vali, has further implication. I will
talk about Vali’s narrative function as a focalizer in the film, but at this juncture I
wish to focus on her photographic image. The fact that her foot gets injured may
refer to two possible interpretations: first, perhaps the most obvious reference is the
myth of Oedipus (literally “swollen foot”); second, it recalls the issue of

Jewishness. The courtyard is coloured (by the sunshine) in the colour of Vali’s
hair, and the entire scene is that of “blooming” as one of the family members notes.
The “blooming” is connected to someone being in love, and I have already
mentioned that it is Vali (and Ignác), which—taken together with the Oedipal
visual and bodily reference—underscores the displaced representation of incest.
Apart from this Oedipal connotation, Vali’s hurt foot may also signify Jewishness
as, according to Sander Gilman, in nineteenth-century depictions of Jews the foot
was considered as a “hidden sign of difference attributed to the cloven-footed devil
of the middle ages.”156 This connotation is secondary and not emphatic in the film,
whereas the Oedipal one seems almost obvious: at this point in the film the love
between siblings is discussed so openly that the hurt foot arrives to underscore this
train of thought. The Jewish connotation thus cannot be overt, even though the
Jewish ancestry of the family is not a secret. It seems that both incest and
Jewishness are in a way secrets (or at least there are points in the narrative where
each of them becomes repressed or silenced), and they are connected in their
silence.157 This interpretation is not so striking in the light of Sunshine, however,
taken onto the level of the intertext of the oeuvre, it may underscore my previous
arguments relating to these issues.
When Ádám, Vali’s son, is in Berlin, having won the Olympic Games in
fencing, he visits a museum to meet an American sports manager. Ádám arrives in
time, so he walks around, and suddenly he finds himself face to face with a
sculpture that is the materialized photograph of his mother in the courtyard of their
house. He eyes it attentively and unbelieving, but even the movement of the hands
picking out the thorn from the foot are the same as in the picture.158 The encounter
is enwrapped by the main music score, which anchors the possible connotations
into the Oedipal myth (the son meeting the mother). In the present analysis it is a
reference to incest, which Ádám commits upon his return to Hungary. The
156
Gilman 1991, 39.
157
The two possible interpretations are already connected in the dialogue Ignác has with
Vali when they want to find a name instead of Sonnenschein, which Vali associates first
with her “love” then with “Jewish” connotation.
158
After the crew had filmed the scene where the photograph was taken of Vali pulling the
thorn out of her foot (which is modelled on the basis of a sculpture in the Pergamon
Museum of Berlin), Rosemary Harris told Szabó that she had seen this before. Then she
went home to America, and upon her return to the location in Hungary she gave a photo to
Szabó. In the picture the two-year old Jennifer Ehle was playing in front of the replica of the
four thousand years old sculpture Ádám meets in Berlin. (Fazekas 2003, 81.)
84 Chapter Four
sculpture as a material objective correlative to the image may be seen as a petrified

(cryptic) rendition of a “foregone jouissance”.159 The correlation of the two
postures seems to be a screen operated by the phantom: the display is then doubled
(photo and sculpture), making the hiding mechanism more effective by producing
uncanny spectacle with ambiguous meanings for the spectator.
The sculpture refers back to the courtyard of the house where the
Sonnenscheins live. The house is in fact in TĦzoltó Street, i.e. Firemen’s Street –
the location where Father, Love Film and the film bearing the name of the street,
25 Firemen’s Street, take place. It is not a mere suggestion: next to the house one
may spot the clock shop run by Emil Hackl, one of the pivotal characters in 25
Firemen’s Street. Moreover, Hackl in fact visits the house in Sunshine during Vali
and Ignác’s wedding party. There is one more covert reference to the place: the
motto of the Sonnenscheins, “Do not trust anyone, always investigate everything
yourself.” This is a sentence that Manó passes on to Ignác, and it is also uttered in
the final scene when the ancestors appear voicing the letter Iván finds among the
litter in front of the house (a scene which refers back to the house-clearance scene
of 25Firemen’s Street). The very same motto appears on the back of a door
slamming in the face of a character returning home from a long journey in 25
Firemen’s Street. This character is a father, whose identity is unclear, as his
photograph is missing from his ID card, and who calls out to his daughter who fails
to recognise him. Then he starts following her in the flat, and that is when—before
completely losing sight of the daughter—the door slams, making the sentence of
the motto visible. The unclear identity of the father refers back to Father, and thus
the motto connects at least Father, Love Film, and 25 Firemen’s Street to the
narrative of Sunshine.
Finally, the main score of the film returns at the very end of the film. Having
“re-gained” the name of the family, Iván is walking on the street, in broad
sunshine; his narration is over, its non-diegetic function completely taken over by
the music. I suggest that this is the sign that the phantom’s work is complete: the
production of a perfect crypt screen, where the painful secrets are silenced for ever.
The silence of the secrets, of course, is the very sound of the music – which
completes the effective crypt screen in the film.
159
MacCannell 1996, 443.
The phantomatic logic and mechanism of bodily representation:

the birth of the spectral body
The film is narrated by Iván. The spectator hears him in a voice-over, his voice
coming from the non-diegetic realm of the narrative. It means that his narrative
voice is not tied to any body in the diegesis, even if Iván appears as a character
within the diegesis. The voice that floats and narrates without a clear point of
origin is the voix acousmatique, or the “acousmatic voice” as introduced to film
theory by Michel Chion elaborating on the original term by Pierre Schaeffer.160 In
fact, voice-over narration and music are usually not acousmatic, since they are in a
way part of diegetic reality, thus their origin can be “placed.”161 However, the
narrating voice is never “de-acousmaticized,” i.e. the narrating body does not
appear, the spectator only assumes that the voice is Iván’s but does not see that the
act of enunciation belongs to his character (or it does not). It is also uncanny how
the intra-diegetic music gets transferred into the non-diegetic realm, and thus—
even though the spectator may relate its origin to the piano piece played by Vali
and Ignác—how this music becomes a patterning narrative device signalling and
foreshadowing crucial changes in the family history of the Sonnenscheins is
unclear. Similarly, if one argues that the music is primarily non-diegetic and it
enters the intra-diegetic realm later, the piano music for four hands gets uncanny,
as it refers to some music outside the diegetic reality.
One more feature may underscore my claim that the narrating voice (along with
the music as carrier of the crypt) is acousmatic. Uncannily, the narrating voice is
par excellence the voice of the focal bodies in Sunshine. Yet, the voice of narration
cannot be tied (i.e. “de-acousmaticized”) to any of these bodies: it floats in “some
indefinite interspace.”162 I suggest that this “interspace” is the space of the
phantom, the space which is the location (precisely a non-location) of the phantom
text, the text beyond the intertext of the Szabó oeuvre. It seems that the voice of the
focal bodies (Ignác, Ádám and Iván) slides over the bodies, i.e. it does not belong
to the bodies. It means then that the utterances these bodies make are
“phantomogenic:” the focal bodies are therefore subject to ventriloquism. (It may
be noteworthy that the Hungarian voice of the focal bodies in the Szabó oeuvre—
in Mephisto, Colonel Redl, Hanussen, and the three focal bodies in Sunshine—is
one and the same voice.)
160
Stam 1992, 61.
161
Žižek 1992b, 126.
162
Ibid.
86 Chapter Four
The voice of the focal bodies in Sunshine is not the “proper” voice of those
bodies, just as the many names were not Höfgen’s “proper” names in Mephisto. In
my analysis of Mephisto it was via the outpouring of the uncanny light at the end
of the film that the phantom prepared its avenue to appear, which had
consequences for the spectator: by missing his or her encounter with the phantom,
as Derrida suggested, s/he may inherit the nescience it guards and carries. In the
case of Sunshine, it is primarily via the audible register that the phantom prepares
its way, but even so, here again the focal bodies are implicated in the phantomatic
process. What is at stake for the spectator in Sunshine is that, as Žižek suggests, the
acousmatic voice is “uncannily close to us, as if its origins were within us,”
spectators.163 In other words, the missed encounter with the phantom in Sunshine
may result in an unconscious inheritance of a crypt.164 However, once the spectator
realizes the phantomatic mechanism in the cinematic representation, the work of
the phantom is disclosed, and its effect diminishes.
The phantomatic circle of the transmission of the secrets in Sunshine closes in
the visual register of the film. This register has already been mentioned as
partaking of the process of encrypting the secret of incest via photography: this
was the case of the photographer (Vali) being the object of the very first photo in
the film. Vali uses her camera to document the life and thus the history of the
family. The photographs taken by her are inserted as still images into the flow of
the narrative. This way, similarly to the patterning rhythm of the recurrence of the
main score, these photographs produce a visual rhythm. These photographs are, on
the one hand, prime instances of monstration, since they are literally taken out of
the frame of the film to be reinserted (in a way, to ex-sist) later on. This is how, on
the other hand, they acquire their narrative function of framing specific segments
of the story of the film. Thus they connect the registers of monstration and
narration. (In this sense Vali’s pictures may be seen as echoing the photo-montage
at the beginning of Love Film, where the photos serve as trampolines for the
fantasy sequences of Jancsi, the central character.)
The bodies of the central characters become focal bodies in Sunshine by being
framed in the photographs. While the narrating voice is supposed to be Iván’s, the
focalizing function is realized by Vali: she is the one to focus on the bodies and the
stories of these bodies. By taking photographs of the central characters of each
chapter (and interestingly only the central characters’ photos are emphatic in the
film), those bodies are first taken out of their contexts, then reinserted, inhabiting
163
Op. cit., 93.
164
Derrida 1994, 11.
thus the “interspace” between monstration and narration, or if not “inhabiting,” at

least transgressing it. It is precisely this transgressive quality of these bodies that
spectralizes them.
There is another camera in the film that also keeps on focalizing the bodies of
the central male characters: the camera of a filmmaker documenting the turning
points in the history of Hungary. It may be argued that the two focalizing functions
complement each other, as Vali documents visually the life and history of the
family, while the filmmaker documents the socio-political context in which the
members of the family appear. The two histories (the family history and the history
of the nation) meet in the bodies of the central characters, as somehow they always
appear at pivotal social or political changes – that in turn have consequences on
their family history. The most obvious examples of the encounter between these
two histories may be seen in the second and the third generations, in Ádám’s and in
Iván’s chapters. Ádám is filmed when he wins the Olympic Games in Berlin, and
also upon his arrival in Budapest, where he finds occasion to address the
celebrating crowd. This address seems to be repeated by Iván, who addresses the
audience on the birthday of Stalin, which is also filmed by the very same man. In
fact, the filmmaker is arrested just when Iván takes his job as a police interrogator:
the filmmaker is his “first case” to solve. He interrogates the man suspected of
collaboration with the Nazis, because the filmmaker documented the invasion of
Budapest and the herding of the Jews into the ghetto (which echoes the film
shooting scene in Father). Later it is also the very same filmmaker (released from
prison where Iván sends him) to document the events during the 1956 revolution,
where Iván takes sides with the people – ironically, Iván gets imprisoned because
he can be seen in that film. He also takes part in the dismembering of the Stalin
statue (again, the very same footage is inserted here as was used in Father, where it
was the central character of Bence to take part in the revolution and in the tearing
down of the Stalin statue).
I have already discussed the final scene of the film in terms of its concealing
feature, its property of being a crypt screen. Nonetheless, this scene is crucial for
disclosing the phantomatic mechanism at work in the cinematic representation that
is responsible for the production of the spectral body. When Iván starts to read the
letter of his forefathers, the atmospheric sounds start to fade. No sooner do the
faces of the fathers appear and their voice (which is the same as Iván’s) can be
heard, than the atmosphere—both the imagery and the voices and noises—
disappears completely. The text of the letter is then read out by the fathers, their
faces dissolving into one another – the same voice insisting until the end. I suggest
that the rendition of this scene discloses the phantomatic mechanism at work in the
Szabó oeuvre, as it is here that the metonymic displacement of the focal bodies
becomes overt. The voice insists while the focal bodies change (which is a change
88 Chapter Four
in names only, as the actual bodies are visually the same) – which is another way
of arguing that the voice ex-sists, i.e. returns from without the visible bodies.
Condensed as this scene is, it contains the logic of the recurrence of focal bodies
under different names (here, for instance, Ignác and Ádám, and then in the counter-
shot Iván) in different yet strikingly similar contexts (here, different generations,
same family background – just as in the case of the films discussed in the present
analysis).
The technical solution of the dissolve of the faces of the focal bodies into one
another creates the visual effect of the merging of those bodies – the displacement
thus becomes a kind of condensation or even transubstantiation. This process sheds
light on the essentially spectral dimension of these bodies and discloses the
operation of ventriloquism. In other words, this very scene reveals that there is a
phantom at work beyond not merely this specific film, but the entire Szabó oeuvre.
The focal bodies as spectral bodies are covers or screens for the phantom to appear
and transmit the unspeakable secrets sealed into the crypt. In the case of Sunshine
the title word is the cryptonym that hides the secrets via multiple displacements.
The end of the film is the opposite of the beginning in the sense that the clouds that
screened the sunshine are nowhere by now. Iván is walking on a renovated
pedestrian street in Budapest in sunshine. The light that froze Höfgen and shone
forth from his body reaches Iván (the new and last Sonnenschein) from the outside:
the crypt has disappeared from sight – which is to say, it exists or ex-sists (“insists
from without” like a sinthome in Lacanese), with stronger walls and a more
effective guard.
CONCLUSION
My aim has been to analyse the invisible and undiscussible aspects of István
Szabó’s feature film oeuvre via an investigation of the focal bodies appearing in
particular films. The bodies in the cinematic representation have been selected on
the basis of their uncanny characteristics: features that make them in some ways
outstanding or extraordinary when compared with the other bodies appearing in the
same diegesis. At the beginning of the text I referred to two phenomena in Szabó’s
Love Film and Mephisto that gave the premise to talk about the strange focal
bodies in relation to their narrative context, including their family history too. I
argued that tackling such an issue involves two separate, yet intricately intertwined
agendas: an analysis of the narrative aspect of selected films, and an investigation
of visual representation in Szabó’s oeuvre.
In the narrative analysis I set out to trace the potentially coherent story of the
central characters who, more often than not, happen to be the narrators of the
particular films. Listing the recurrent visual and verbal motifs, objects and names
of certain characters parallel to the story and family history of the central
characters revealed that there is a narrative intertext nurturing this web of filmic
references in turn. In other words, the particular and personal narratives of the
central characters can be seen as channelled into a coherent narrative going beyond
their actual narrative or filmic context. This kind of tracing of narrative lines was
most emphatically carried out in the chapters on Father and Love Film, where the
insistence of the narrator’s focal body in the films made it possible to fill in
occasional ellipses in one film using references from the other. This was possible
because of the ostensible similarity, or even sameness, of the family history, the
family background and the specific historical and topographical situation of the
central characters (who appeared as the very same focal body).
To define my use of the term “intertext” and of “intertextuality,” I returned to
the original Bakhtinian concept of “dialogism.” The notion of dialogism refers, on
the one hand, to the most often understood definition of intertextuality: texts do not
exist separately in a self-enclosed textual world of their own, but are interspersed
with traces, references, quotes, citations, etc., of other texts, thus occupying a
position in the whirl of textual interaction at work everywhere and virtually for
ever. This approach forms the basis of Kristeva and Genette’s reformulation of
dialogism as intertextuality. On the other hand, however, the original Bakhtinian
definition of dialogism offers an even more useful aspect regarding the topic of the
present project: Bakhtin also talks about an aspect of dialogism that refers to what
is hidden or unsaid and unspeakable behind or beyond the obvious intertextual
references.
90 Conclusion
This hidden aspect of the intertext, or narrative map, of the oeuvre is designated
as the motor for narration. I identified this, on the basis of the work of Peter
Brooks, as a form of repetition compulsion that is set into motion by a trauma in
the life of the narrator. The hidden trauma propels the focal body to reappear in
film after film and perform the act of narration that seems to circle around the
unspeakable traumatic secret or secrets. These secrets, however, are left unresolved
in the particular films – they insist or, as Lacanian parlance would put it, they ex-
sist, pointing beyond the obvious intertext that the films ostensibly make up.
Most of these secrets are transformed into visual features and phenomena that
hide their narrative source. It is at this point where the analysis of visual
representation in Szabó’s films becomes pivotal. The phenomena tackled in the
book are primarily those visual effects that simply do not fit the narrative of the
intertext, nor are they homogenic to the particular diegetic realm which they appear
in. Thus they block the understanding of the given films to a certain extent. At this
juncture I relied on Nicolas Abraham’s notion of the “phantom,” in order to
analyse these “foreign” or heterogenic effects. The phantom is a psychic formation
responsible for guarding and transmitting unspeakable secrets from one subject to
another, most often from one generation in a family to the following one. Thus, it
becomes a kind of a foreign body that ventriloquises the particular subject,
governing its speech and acts.
Abraham’s definition and description concerns the secrets travelling and being
transmitted by the phantom in language. To account for the disturbing visual
effects of the Szabó films, I extended the original notion to call attention to its
essentially visual nature. Based on the etymological root of the word phantom, I
found that it is originally a synonym for “vision,” “spectre,” and “display,” all of
which are indispensable terms for the present analysis, tackling the issue of
haunting secrets in the medium of the cinema.
In the discussion of the selected four films (Father, Love Film, Mephisto and
Sunshine), I connected the two lines of the narrative and the visual analyses via the
use of the notion of the phantom, which allowed for an investigation of a potential
hidden narrative beyond the narrative intertext of these films. Referring to
Elizabeth Bronfen’s term, I defined this “transtextual” realm as the “phantom text”:
the aspect of the oeuvre that is hidden from the spectator, governed by the
phantom.
By the end of the analysis the secrets under preservative repression have been
uncovered, their crypts (either narrative or visual, or both, by nature) have been
revealed. The haunting and painful secrets that were travelling from film to film in
the Szabó oeuvre have now been identified as the following unspeakabilities:
incestuous love, illegitimacy and the repressed knowledge, or nescience of Jewish
identity. These secrets propelled the phantom to act, to hide them by presenting
various camouflage displays. Nonetheless, these displays, being phantomatic crypt

screens, as I revealed, contain their secret source. This caused the strange or
uncanny effects that were channelled into narrative and visual phenomena. These
secrets, being hidden in crypts, resulted in the ruptures in the map of the cinematic
oeuvre of István Szabó, and also, these cryptic hindrances initiated the phantomatic
logic of representation at work in Szabó’s films.
Apart from the analysis of the Szabó oeuvre, I have also attempted to bring
together two distinct lines of psychoanalytic investigation that may even be seen as
antagonistic: one developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and the other
by Jacques Lacan. It is well known that they did not merely dislike each other
personally, but Abraham even “cultivated an ignorance of Lacan’s work,” which
“he did not regard … as central to psychoanalysis,”165 while Lacan was astonished
at Abraham’s work (which he misinterpreted as being the violation of his own
teaching).166 On the level of theory, Abraham and Torok’s approach to the
definition of subjectivity largely differs from Lacan’s, since they
do not admit an irreducible separation or barrier … between linguistic elements and

their meanings. Rather, they create avenues to study and overcome the obstructions
that serve to separate linguistic entities from their potential and concealed sources of
signification.167
Furthermore, what Abraham and Torok see obstructed in a specific analytic

situation is not meaning per se, “but a situation (both intersubjective and
intralinguistic) whose interpretation consists precisely in evaluating its resistance
to meaning.”168 It means that while a Lacanian analysis of the strange visual effects
of some films in the Szabó oeuvre would stop at the investigation of those effects
in order to determine its potential meaning (and point to the intrusion of the Real in
terms of Mephisto, for instance), following Abraham and Torok, the recognition of
the uncanny is only the primary step in analyzing what the strange scenario
potentially hides or obscures. In other words, while in a Lacanian vein I could
determine the Real in certain images and effects, with Abraham and Torok it would
only serve as a trampoline: as the effect would be seen as a cover, a “shell” for
another kernel. What lies behind this approach may be seen in Abraham and
Torok’s invention of the concept of the crypt and that of preservative repression
165
Roudinesco 1990, 598.
166
Op. cit., 600.
167
Rand, “Introduction: Renewals of Psychoanalysis,” in Abraham and Torok 1994, 17.
168
Rand 1986, lx.
92 Conclusion
that goes beyond the dimension of the “return of the repressed,” so that the
symptom (linguistic, somatic or visual) signals not the repressed itself, but the
presence of a nescience, i.e. an unknown knowledge of another repression in the
form of encrypted psychic material.
Nonetheless, the Lacanian approach is recognizably more open to a visual
analysis: Abraham and Torok’s concepts, however visual they might seem at first,
are largely linguistic in scope. Relying on the advantage of Lacan in this respect, I
redefined the Abrahamian notion of the phantom to open it up for the possibility of
investigating strange visual scenarios, as well as keeping the original linguistic
orientation. It is at this point that the two antagonistic theoretical lines may benefit
from an analytic collaboration. Simply put, where one of the approaches stops
short, the other one seems to help the interpretation to proceed, and also points at
possibilities to further elaborate the other analytic line and enrich its reading.
This is what my reading and investigation of the Szabó oeuvre gives to the
reading of the theoretical background used in the tackling of the films. It should
also serve as an attempt to present how specific approaches to the analysis of the
mechanism of cinematic representation may serve to inform the theories involved
in the undertaking. One is tempted to conclude that the phantom of the oeuvre has
somewhat been intertextualised as a phantom of the theories – not only the other
way around, as is the case usually.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abraham, Nicolas and Torok Maria. 1994. The Shell and the Kernel. (Trans.
Nicholas T. Rand). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Abraham, Nicolas and Torok Maria. 1986. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A
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INDEX
—A— Auschwitz, 25, 34, 48
—B—
Abraham, Nicolas, 7-9, 11-13, 18,
19, 20, 22, 32, 44, 49, 55-58, 61,
64, 65, 77, 89-91 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 88
crypt, 11-15, 22, 23, 26, 28, 30, Bálint, András, 3, 15, 39
31, 32, 36, 43, 44, 49, 51, 55- Barthes, Roland, 19, 21
59, 64, 65, 66, 74, 77, 78, 79, Belsey, Catherine, 23, 62
83-90 interrogative text, 23, 62
cryptonym, 17, 18, 59, 73, 75, 76, Brandauer, Klaus Maria, 3
77, 87 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 9, 21, 89
demetaphorization, 61, 69, 78 Brooks, Peter, 5, 19, 89
designification, 61, 63
foreign body, 8, 9, 19, 20, 89 —C—
inclusion, 28, 44, 57, 60, 61
kernel, 7, 11, 20, 21, 31, 32, 43,
44, 51, 56, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, Chaplin, Charlie, 26
65, 67, 90 Chion, Michel, 68, 84
nescience, 12, 13, 16, 17, 21, 22, rendu, 68
27, 32, 46, 49, 50, 58, 65, 66, voix acousmatique, 83, 84, 85
67, 76, 84, 89, 91 Cowie, Elizabeth, 32
phantom, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, Crary, Jonathan, 21, 22
15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, crypt screen, 12, 59
31, 35, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51,
55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, —D—
65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 77,
80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91
preservative repression, 11, 44, Derrida, Jacques, 18, 57, 64, 65, 66,
55, 57, 64, 80, 89, 90 70, 75, 84, 85
shell, 11, 20, 21, 32, 43, 63, 64, Dobai, Péter, 52, 61
65, 77, 90
ventriloquism, 8, 20, 35, 56, 57, —E—
58, 59, 60, 62, 66, 68, 84, 87
Adams, Parveen, iii, 14
aphonia, 55, 56 Eizenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich, 53
98 Index
incest, 45, 47, 59, 72, 76, 78-82, 85,

—F— 89
intertext, 2-5, 7-9, 15, 16, 20, 26, 36,
40, 43, 44, 49, 58, 59, 66, 67, 71,
Ferenczi, Sándor, 46 81, 82, 84, 88, 89
thalassal regression, 46, 47, 48
Fiennes, Ralph, 72 —J—
Fink, Bruce, 50, 68, 76
Freud, 8, 11, 63
Freud, Sigmund, 6, 11, 12, 13, 21, Jewishness, 17, 25, 30, 33, 34, 35,
37, 42, 55, 68 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 52,
dynamic repression, 13, 55, 57 54, 58, 59, 66, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76,
79, 80, 82, 86, 89
—G—
—K—
Gaudreault, André, 15
monstration, 15, 22, 43, 44, 50, Kristeva, Julia, 4, 88
56, 71, 85
Genette, Gerard, 4, 88 —L—
Gide, André, 64
Gilman, Sander, 82
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 53, Lacan, Jacques, 5, 10, 12-14, 19, 20,
59, 60, 61, 63 21, 43, 49-51, 56, 57, 63, 64, 65,
Faust, 53, 59, 60, 61 68, 69, 73, 76, 89-91
anamorphosis, 43
—H— ex-sist, 76, 85, 86, 87, 89
extimitè, 21, 43, 63, 64, 65, 76,
77
Halász, Judit, 39 gaze, 10, 13, 14, 51, 56, 65
haunting, 4, 7, 8, 11-15, 17, 18, 20, jouissance, 19, 50, 68, 69, 73, 74,
21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 76, 82
39, 46, 48, 49, 53-57, 59, 64, 67, object a, 19, 43, 50, 56, 63
71, 75, 76, 89 Other, 51, 62, 63, 68, 69, 73, 74,
Hermann, Imre, 79 76
Holbein, Hans, 14, 43 Real, 19, 20, 43, 44, 50, 51, 56,
The Ambassadors, 14, 43 57, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 90
screen, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 22, 23,
—I— 25, 26, 32, 35, 36, 49, 51, 59,
The Cinematic Oeuvre of Istvan Szabo 99
63, 64, 65, 69, 73, 74, 77, 78, 25 Firemen’s Street (T zoltó utca
82, 83, 86 25., 1973), 3, 5, 36, 39, 46, 48,
sinthome, 87 53, 83
Lukacher, Ned, 17 Budapest Tales (Budapesti mesék,
1976), 3, 5, 15, 35, 39
—M— Colonel Redl (Redl ezredes,
1984), 3, 16, 17, 53, 79, 84
Confidence (Bizalom, 1979), 3,
Mann, Klaus, 52, 60, 61 39, 47
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 20 Father (Apa, 1966), 1, 3, 5, 6, 16,
mise-en-abîme, 60, 64 17, 22, 23, 24-38, 39, 40, 41,
42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 54, 57,
—O— 58, 83, 86, 88, 89
Hanussen (Hanussen, 1989), 3, 6,
16, 17, 18, 53, 60, 79, 84
over-intense light, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19, Love Film (Szerelmesfilm, 1970),
21, 23, 48, 49, 59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12, 16, 21, 22, 23,
67, 68, 69, 76 26, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39-51, 57,
59, 62, 63, 65, 68, 81, 83, 85,
—R— 88, 89
Meeting Venus (Találkozás
Vénusszal, 1990), 17, 36, 53
Rand, Nicholas T., 11, 18, 90 Mephisto (Mephisto, 1981), 1, 2,
Rashkin, Esther, 6, 13 3, 6, 8, 12, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22,
Rose, Jacqueline, 10 23, 35, 48, 49, 51, 52-70, 76,
—S— 84, 88, 89, 90
Torok, Maria Sunshine (A napfény íze, 1999), 3,
see: Abraham, Nicolas 6, 16, 17, 22, 23, 27, 34, 35,
Sonnenschein, 6, 16, 17, 18, 34, 35, 39, 45, 46, 47, 59, 60, 71-87,
39, 60, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 89
78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87 Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe (Édes
spectral body, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 49, Emma, Drága Böbe, 1991), 17
50, 60, 61, 66, 67, 69, 71, 77, 83, The Age of Daydreamings
86, 87 (Álmodozások kora, 1964), 1,
Stam, Robert, 4, 15, 69, 84 3, 5, 6, 16, 22, 25, 38, 39, 40
Szabó, István, 1, 2, 4-9, 11-27, 31, Szondi, Lipót, 73
32, 33, 36, 39, 40, 43, 47, 49, 52,
53, 56-62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, —T—
74, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86-91
100 Index
trauma, 1, 5, 6, 11, 23, 24, 31, 34, unconscious, 5, 7, 8, 11, 30, 37, 58,
54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 64, 73, 76, 89 64, 85
—U— —Z—
uncanny, 1, 6, 9, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, Žižek, Slavoj, 13, 14, 50, 51, 55, 56,
21, 23, 32, 33, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48, 57, 68, 69, 84
49, 50, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66,
81, 83, 84, 88, 90

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THE SPECTRAL BODY

THE SPECTRAL BODY

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

This book first published 2006 by

Cambridge Scholars Press

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2006 by Zoltan Dragon

Concepts and aims in the narrative analysis of István Szabó’s

earlier films the central character is embodied (without exception) by András

simultaneously they participate in them. Their personal narratives can be

blocked by resistance.”13 This resistance is the unconscious repressed, that is, a

exorcised. The “daemonic possession” underlying the compulsion to repeat is thus

Concepts and aims in the analysis of visual representation in the

Film and the phantom

“Secret” is not synonymous with “hidden,” “unknown,” or “latent,” even in the

it may be known (heimlich – “homely” as “in the home or family”) in a previous

Names and the phantom

In recalling the role of Dr. Sonnenschein in Hanussen, Szabó remembers that

these painful nesciences (unknown or unrecognised knowledges). Names are given

Body and the phantom: the concept of the spectral body

The outline of the book

The fourth film of my analysis will be a kind of synthesis of the investigation of

FATHER (APA, 1966): THE GHOST OF THE

childhood when he struggled hard to be distinguished and to have himself accepted

The hidden past of the father

testify—Hungary is fighting another dictator: Stalin. Bence, equipped with the

Levels of narration in Father

The secret of Jewish origin

In an awkward situation—having listened to Anni’s confession on the bank of

Memory, fantasy and narrative reconstruction in Love Film

Klári, an émigré living in Paris, recalls her miraculous escape in Budapest, on

The secret of incest in Love Film

In Mephisto the central character can be seen as a displacement of the focal

and many of Höfgen’s former colleagues emigrate. He becomes a prominent icon

The phantomatic symptom of Hendrik Höfgen

This silenced voice (which is the surplus of signification in Lacan108) revives

Höfgen’s “proper” name

pseudonymy here: Höfgen’s original name (Heinrich/Heinz) comes to be a

The Night seems deeper now to press around me,

Derrida here circumscribes Abraham’s notion of the phantom that operates in

While the hysterical outburst may be seen as the recognition of ventriloquism, in

Sound and the spectators’ “collective interrogation” of

The secret of the name

As this short dialogue testifies, their name carried an explicit Jewish

The patterning role of the music and the secret of incest

Bettelheim.154 In this light, Vali and Ignác’s illegitimate relationship is but a

myth of Oedipus (literally “swollen foot”); second, it recalls the issue of

sculpture as a material objective correlative to the image may be seen as a petrified

The phantomatic logic and mechanism of bodily representation:

thus the “interspace” between monstration and narration, or if not “inhabiting,” at

various camouflage displays. Nonetheless, these displays, being phantomatic crypt

do not admit an irreducible separation or barrier … between linguistic elements and

Furthermore, what Abraham and Torok see obstructed in a specific analytic

Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis.

Žižek, Slavoj. 1992a. Enjoy Your Symptom. New York: Routledge.

—A— Auschwitz, 25, 34, 48

incest, 45, 47, 59, 72, 76, 78-82, 85,