MY  TWENTIETH  CENTURY

Cheerfully narrated by a chattering choir of friendly female stars two girls-two aspects of a woman to be-are born and the twentieth century begins. A century full of lights and darkness, ideology, sexuality, bombs,  breathtaking innovations, discoveries and dreams.

Accompanied by-the same?-men they turn in the labyrinth of space and time , pirouette  through   thick and thin of times past and places that could be, chasing each other and being chased by the other in the dark and bright continents of an internal landscape. Finally they offer themselves for being found .

Ildiko Enyedi’s XXth century is a complex world of images,  words and encounters embedded in sensuality and fantasy.

This is a film that touches  the heaviest topics: identity, gender, war, revolution, feminism, subversion, prostitution, separation, loss ( topics that all deserve thorough   analytical explorations)-yet  the mix that Ildiko creates  one can not help watching with an internal smile.

What is the secret of this magic?

I think it is playfulness.

Playing is essential for life.

As Winnicott puts it: play  is universal and it belongs to health ,playing facilitates growth.

“The area of playing is not inner psychic reality. It is outside the individual, but it is not the external world….Without hallucinating the child puts out a sample of dream potential and lives with this sample in a chosen setting of fragments from external reality.

In playing the child manipulates external phenomena in the service of the dream and invests chosen external phenomena with dream meaning and feeling.

There is a direct development from…playing to shared playing and from this to cultural experiences.

According to him:” psychoanalysis has been developed as a highly specialised form of playing in the service of  communication with oneself and others”

As an analyst I can not overemphasise the importance of playing; moving in a space where  objects can be constructed and deconstructed , observed and explored  in different ways  ,visions formulated and creative solutions found.

This film’s story line-or rather: story  net-is woven from elements of reality, fairy tales, anecdotes about suffering and joy, parodies of historical moments all  soaked in  a solid belief  that life is worthwhile living.

Having grown up in Hungary and being preoccupied with possibilities of elaborating individual and social traumatisation I have a feeling that this attitude towards handling historical and personal material both in individual and social narratives might be seen as a characteristic formula of survival; Hungarian style.

A sense of hope that we all need- now, when our sense of reality, orientation and security  has been attacked even more than before the 11^th of September -to continue our journey to our own hall of mirrors where, at last ,we might be at one with ourselves ,the others and  the universe we live in.

I am enchanted by Ildiko Enyedi’s  imagery partly because my  XXth Century is a much grimmer and tragic world. The courage that enables her to vote for the joy of life has a healing power.

In this sense  her film opts for -to paraphrase Kundera-  “ the lightness that makes being bearable “.

Dr Judith Szekacs