CINE-FILE SELECTS: SON OF THE WHITE MARE

In partnership with film distributor Arbelos, Cine-File is presenting the exclusive Chicago virtual screening of Marcell Jankovics’ 1981 animated Hungarian feature SON OF THE WHITE MARE, in a stunning new digital restoration. The film is available here for two weeks; rental is $10, with half the proceeds going to Cine-File (funds will be used for general expenses, future programming, and to provide honoraria to our contributors).

Cine-File may be presenting additional virtual screenings (primarily new restorations of retrospective titles) if this first one proves successful.
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Read a recent interview with Jankovics on the film, its restoration, and reception here.
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Marcell Jankovics' SON OF THE WHITE MARE (Hungary/Animation)
SON OF THE WHITE MARE, the landmark 1981 feature by Hungarian animation prodigy Marcell Jankovics, belongs to an elite echelon of films that includes Lotte Reiniger’s THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED, Walt Disney’s FANTASIA, and Hayao Miyazaki’s SPIRITED AWAY: personal, utterly singular works by visionary artists, which nonetheless tap into something axiomatic about the life-bestowing art of film animation. Though Jankovics is venerated in Hungary with the same intensity as Disney and Miyazaki, SON OF THE WHITE MARE has never been distributed in the United States, until the Los Angeles-based distributor Arbelos Films partnered this year with the Hungarian National Film Institute to present this 4k restoration from the original camera negative. It’s a cause for celebration and an invitation to awestruck contemplation.

SON OF THE WHITE MARE is a Modernist fairy tale, a horny Hungarian creation myth, but first and foremost, it is high-calorie eye candy, a showcase for sublime orchestrations of sound, color, and movement. So great are the film’s sensory rewards that, in the first ten minutes, I found myself completely absorbed in the abstract drama of light and shadow, scarcely conscious of the mythological groundwork being laid. (I’d probably love the movie just as much if I watched it upside down by mistake.) A supreme colorist, Jankovics sends pools of bold monochrome around the frame with unlikely elegance, favoring symmetrical compositions that sometimes resemble pop-art altarpieces. His figures are big, flat masses of blue, yellow, red, and green whose contours throb with activity even while at rest. Shading and texture are reserved mostly for the backgrounds, built up with layers of supple watercolors, washes, and aerosols; pause on almost any frame, and you’ll encounter an image whose beauty, ingenuity, and material economy are harmoniously unified.

Jankovics claims to have animated a third of the film himself, and his wit and sensibility are stamped unmistakably throughout. But the distinctive aesthetics of SON OF THE WHITE MARE are not quite sui generis: beyond the immediate influences from the world of animation (Disney, the Hubleys, and, yes, THE YELLOW SUBMARINE), Jankovics draws deeply on decorative and folk-art traditions, as well as on the 20th-century geometric and chromatic innovations of the Bauhaus. This lively tug-of-war between folk and modernist styles extends to the brilliant soundtrack, where dialogues drawn from 19th-century narrative poems of László Arany are treated electronically, accompanied by sound design and a score composed entirely with synthesized sound by István Vajda. While other animated films with electronic soundtracks (like René Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET and Piotr Kamler’s CHRONOPOLIS) can feel dated today, there’s something incredibly fresh about the juxtaposition of traditional fairy-tale forms and abstract sound here.

Less contemporary-feeling is the narrative itself—a masculinist fable about three dragon-slaying human sons of a divine horse, bound together in a quest to liberate a captive princess and restore order to the world. Jankovics’ treatment of the material distills the cosmological essence of the source material, but regular flashes of phallic symbolism prove that his interest isn’t strictly spiritual per se. Playing on the proximity of the sacred and profane, SON OF THE WHITE MARE reaches back to Hungary’s pagan roots, pointedly braiding its narrative around symbols and totems such as animals, trees, and personifications of natural phenomena. While outwardly nationalistic, this animist appeal also unites Jankovics with Disney and Miyazaki, natural philosophers whose gift for bringing still frames to life has the aura of magic. Sergei Eisenstein observed, in regards to the work of Disney, “the very idea, if you will, of the animated cartoon is like a direct embodiment of the method of animism.” (More colorfully, art critic Dave Hickey called Disney “a freaking pagan cult...promoting a primitive, animist religion dedicated to investing everything with life, to animating everything from teacups to trees, from carpets to houses, from ducks to mice, with the pulse of human aspiration.”) If Jankovics is a great animator, it is not only because he is a peerless stylist and technician; it is because his gift brings him, and us, closer to this Promethean essence of the animated form.

Hungary’s pagan history seems like an unlikely subject for a state-sponsored film from a Soviet Bloc country. SON OF THE WHITE MARE was produced under the auspices of the Pannonia Film Studio, the state-run animation studio where Jankovics began working as a teenager in the early 1960s. (Pannonia produced Jankovics’ debut feature, 1973’s delightful JÁNOS VITÉSZ, which was the first feature-length Hungarian animated film, and which is also newly available from Arbelos). Like Poland and the Czech Republic, Hungary was a major exporter of prize-winning animated films to festivals around the world at this time. These works offered an appealing image of state socialism’s creative fertility, suggesting possibilities of form freed from the commercial demands that hindered many artists in the West; they also frequently belied the repressive conditions faced by artists working under Communism.

Such is the case with SON OF THE WHITE MARE. As the director explained, his original concept for the film “explored the concept of the recurring nature of time and space. But the studio manager wouldn’t allow [him] to make it because of its anti-Marxist interpretation of time! According to Marxism, time is irreversible.” Yet this instance of censorship simply goes to prove how provocative, or even revolutionary, Jankovics’ pagan symbolism might have felt at the time. Astonishingly experimental and perceptually disorienting, SON OF THE WHITE MARE has frequently been described as “psychedelic,” but I believe the term “shamanic” is more apt. After all, the practice of “taltosism,” or native shamanism, began to reemerge in Hungary in the 1980s not long after its release, significantly gaining in momentum after the collapse of Communism by the decade’s end. Might it be that Jankovics summoned an incipient pagan spirit building up in the Hungarian soul at the time? Perhaps it’s an outlandish thought, but to see SON OF THE WHITE MARE is to be reminded that great works of film art don’t just animate characters on screen—they also animate us. (1981, 86 min) [Michael Metzger]