Dear Ladies and Gentlemen! Dear Remembrancers!

It is a moving honor and at the same time a great responsibility to give a speech in front of the memorial plaque of Géza Radványi, the Kossuth Prize-winning Hungarian filmmaker.

It is an honor and a responsibility, which also means a thoughtful task for the speaker, what to highlight from the life and career of the filmmaker born on this day 117 years ago under the name of Géza Grosschmid.

After his paternal grandfather, the artist who took the name Géza Radvány is indisputably and today unquestionably one of the most important Hungarian filmmakers, whose sketchy presentation of his biography and films not only represents an artist with a European influence, but also the 20th century. they also evoke the turbulent and at the same time the darkest periods of Hungarian history in the 19th century.

Radványi, born in 1907 and brought up in Kassa in a respectable bourgeois family, lived in Hungary for 11 years, and without leaving his hometown he became a resident of another country after World War I and the Trianon decision that ended it.

Even in the changing world of Kassai, his talent showed early, and he published his poems at a very young age, during his high school years, in the Kassai Naplo under the name Tamás Ember, and then, like his older brother, Sándor Márai, he traveled all over Europe after high school.

At a young age, his life-long journey to Europe, the “road movie” of his life, begins, in connection with which he said “I’ve been on the road all my life, I’ve never had an apartment in my name, I’ve never bought furniture for myself”.  

He works as a journalist in Paris, Geneva, and Madrid, then he came into contact with the film industry in Paris, and from the beginning of the 1930s he was an assistant director, screenwriter, and editor in German and French film factories. As Radványi put it, “I never wanted to be a filmmaker, I was a reporter, then I started writing screenplays and directing was only one step from there”. 

He was open and inquisitive, primarily inspired by German expressionism and French lyrical realism, but by the end of the 1930s he was already involved in Hungarian film production, in Budapest, surrounded by his contemporaries, talented young people, the now legendary István Szőts, László Ranódy and Félix Máriássy .

Even in his adventurous life, Radványi’s marriage also deserves a separate film, since he married Mária Tasnády Fekete in 1937, the former Miss Hungary winner, singer-actress who was already successful in Germany, from her then-husband Brúnó Duday, the powerful German film company UFA he asked his Hungarian producer to marry him.  

His wife will not only be his partner in his private life, but will also appear as a main character and perhaps as a muse in his first independent films.

Radványi already attracted attention with his very first film, directed in 1940, his psychological drama, A Zárt targyalas, shows the struggle of a lawyer who is deathly jealous of his wife, whose role was of course played by the director’s wife, Mária Tasnády Fekete.

In the 1941 adaptation of Kálmán Mikszáth, The Talking Robe, he also worked with Mária, who played the role of Cinna in the high-budget superproduction of the time.

In the same year, Géza Radványi’s cult film “Europa does not answer” was presented at the Venice Film Festival, also starring Tasnády, with which he entered the international stage and at the same time entered the history of universal cinema. Radványi was the first Hungarian filmmaker to speak out against the war with his humanistic and brave artistic work, and his work became a role model for neorealist creators. In the following two years, he moved to Italy with Mária, where they filmed the script of an Italian writing couple, The White Men, starring Pál Jávor.

After that, Radványi and his wife returned home and in 1946 he started teaching at the Academy of Dramatic Arts and partially reorganizing film education. In the year after the war, the Hungarian film industry struggled to get back on its feet, between 1945 and 1946 only four films were made, including the 1947 film directed by Radványi.

The film Somewhere in Europe, which also brought the country and Géza Radványi worldwide success. It is interesting in film history that Radványi’s students Péter Bacsó and Károly Makk assisted in the filming, and Radványi said of the finished film: “People came from a horrible hell to a renaissance, which no one knew yet how it would turn out. People were still afraid. They were afraid of what they had experienced, they were afraid of what the future would bring, they were afraid of whether there would still be human life in the world. This fear was mixed with the feeling of liberation… Somewhere in Europe gave the feeling that was needed, it brought together the scattered world.” The film was shown in 29 countries, the United Nations took patronage over it, and it was awarded first prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Despite this, however, during the Rákosi era, the film was not screened in Hungary, and Radványi left the country again in 1948. He also directed in the film industry in Munich from 1954. He worked with Lilli Palmer and Romy Schneider in his film, as well as with Belmondo in the movie An Angel on Earth.

Finally, in 1979, he returned to Hungary with the support of his former students, but primarily Makk,d Félix Máriássy . to be able to work with Hungarian artists again and make the final work of his career, Circus Maximus, where Sándor Sára is the cinematographer.

In Hungary, several directors filmed Radványi’s work, a documentary film was shot about him and him while he was still alive, but his career and memory could not be fulfilled in his country. Film director István Szabó’s statement is true and, in many ways, symbolic: “Hungarian filmmakers owe a great debt to Géza Radványi”.

Finally, Radványi’s thoughts will help me with how to close the memorable sentences and what lessons I should highlight from his life. Although he was physically on the road all his life, he only lived in Hungary for 6.5 years after his childhood, but at the end of his life he says “always I was at home on the way … and the Hungarian language was the real home for me … and of course, if you go to Odysseus and one day you feel where you are at home”

Géza Radványi died on November 26, 1986, aged 79, in Budapest.

It is our duty and at the same time our national responsibility to cherish the memory of Géza Radványi, the world-famous film director, in a dignified way here in Kassa and Budapest!
Thanks for listening!

Tamás Kollarik