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A Personal/Political Artist: Márta Mészáros The Hungarian Cinema of Márta Mészáros by Catherine Portuges. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1993. 190+ ix pages; $35 cloth, $14.95 paper; 32 photographs.
Catherine Portuges's new book, part of the Women Artists in Film series from Indiana University Press edited by Roswitha Mueller and Kaja Silverman, examines the work of the Hungarian documentarist/narrativist Márta Mészáros, whose prolific output and tenacious commitment to the art of film remains extraordinary by any standard of measurement. As Portuges correctly suggests, Mészáros is
a woman of vision, tenacity, and spirit. . . . Márta Mészáros's most powerful strategies for survival and continuing creative success within the oppressive decades of post-Stalinist Hungary are, I suspect, the desire and ability to write about film the times through which she lived and, in doing so, to accept-and understand-her own past. No less important is the fact that her "first" career was that of documentary filmmaker, with over one hundred films to her credit, a record that alone exceeds that of many filmmaker's lifetime achievement.
Turning from documentaries to feature films, Mészáros produced a series of socially responsive works including Adoption (1975), Nine Months (1976), On the Move (1979), Mother and Daughter (1981), and numerous other projects, up to and including her most recent works, Diary for My Father and Mother ( 1990) and Gypsy Romeo, a feature film still in production as Portuges's book...