Anti-Tribalism in SON OF SAUL

Commissioned by a Hungarian art museum.

Arguably, one of the more questionable and limited practices of film historians is the classifying of films and filmmakers according to a certain form of tribalism known as nationality. The problem with this admittedly convenient and obvious method of cataloging is that important elements–perhaps even essential ones–that elude or defy tribalism may get lost in the shuffle.

For starters, many of our greatest filmmakers – Chaplin, Dreyer, Hitchcock, Jancsó, Murnau, Renoir, Sirk, Stroheim, Welles — can’t be tied to a single country or tribe without being drastically oversimplified in the process. And even though most of what we call neorealism is Italian, this tends to overlook the fact that comparable examples can be found elsewhere in the world, not only in the 20th century but in the new millennium as well.

In the two short films that Nemes Jeles László made for the Inforg studio in 2007 and 2009, Try a Little Patience and The Counterpart, one can already find not only the same camera techniques, themes, and even emotions that will characterize his 2015 masterpiece Son of Saul — such as a mise en scène constructed in relation to close-ups, the experiences of a war prisoner, and a male adult’s feeling of tenderness towards a boy — but also, even more fundamentally, a sense of universality that goes beyond nationalism and tribalism. Read more