Who doesn’t love a good story? And Deborah Pearson’s is better than most.
History History History – the Canadian artist’s performance documentary, which kicked off this year’s Leeds Compass Festival at Live Arts Bistro on Friday – is an intricate, endlessly inventive examination of the shifting nature of truth seen through the unlikely prism of a 1956 Hungarian football film-comedy. Hilarity ensues.
A live audio-commentary, Pearson’s story is also a form of time travel, delivered mostly from behind a desk, as the film is projected onscreen behind her. The movie’s straightforward narrative involves mistaken identity; the rather more skewed narrative of the story behind the making of the movie also involves identity, but is a mystery: about a writer who loses his name; about an actor who loses his language; about a country that loses its revolution. What emerges is a personal expedition on search of the truth, an expedition which has its own unique set of coordinates: “this happens and then that happens, then that happens and then this happens…”
The performance bristles with ideas that bounce off one another like atoms. It is an excavation of the sedimentary layers of meaning and speculation that build up around the truth. Pearson pulls off a brilliant sleight of hand. She playfully repurposes the subtitles of the film with frequently hilarious results. Ultimately she has a deeper resolve however. The country that lost its revolution is Hungary. The 1956 uprising, brutally crushed by Russian troops as Britain and America stood by, forms the backbone of Pearson’s story. At one point, she breaks off to teach a potted history lesson about Hungarian Cold War politics, using an overhead projector like a particularly sweary primary school teacher. As she describes each of the various Hungarian leaders, their banal, hard-faced expressions flash up behind her – unsmiling and bureaucratic, the vilest of them photographed grimacing heroically in a wheat-field.
But History History History is not a story about one nation’s suffering because the world failed to act; nor is it about the suffocation of artistic expression under Soviet rule (the writer who loses his name is Tibor Méray, a scriptwriter erased from the film’s credits when he was denounced as a political undesirable). In fact, though it could easily be about both these things, what History History History is really about is Imre Pongrácz, the popular Hungarian star of the film who, after the revolution had failed in 1956, fled to Canada with his young family – and who just happens to be Pearson’s grandfather.
Pearson interviews both her mother and grandmother about their memories of him. These interviews run throughout the performance and are bittersweet, affectionate, sometimes unintentionally funny, even occasionally outraged. At one point, Pearson’s grandmother describes her fury with her former-husband (the two separated) and his ‘habits’. What these habits might have been are witheld – the screen goes momentarily black in a parody of Soviet-style censorship – out of respect for a grandmother who is 90 years old and entitled to her secrets.
Pongrácz, it seems, was a mystery to his family: a gifted pianist who could not read music, a proud man who suffered the indignity of becoming a refugee, an austere, deeply private man who never mastered English or French – he was literally the actor who lost his language – and who left his family in Canada to briefly return to Hungary as part of a disastrous public relations exercise.
Early on in History History History, Pearson tells a story about a son who climbs the mountain where his father went missing. He finds his father’s dead body, frozen in ice, younger than the son is now. Near the end of the performance, Pearson reminds us about the story and its paradoxical nature. Though she has no memory of her grandfather, she tells us that performing the piece live with him there behind her onscreen, younger than she is now, she feels a connection, like she finally knows who he is. It announces the end of something as well as the beginning of something else: this happens and then that happens, then that happens and then this happens.
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