East Punk Memories – A Rather Personal Film Review

Originally published in the 36th issue of "The CEU Weekly".

Lucile Chaufour visited Hungary during the 1980s, when it was still a so-to-say “soft dictatorship” behind the Iron Curtain. She formed friendships with the young punks of Budapest, and not only attended their concerts but also recorded them (illegally) with a Super 8 camera.  Besides the music of punk bands she got acquainted with the life of youth in a struggling Communist regime, where several teenagers rebelled against their parents’ generation not only because they were young, but because they held the system built and tolerated by older generations as unbearable. As Chafour’s film and its characters argue, punk had a different meaning behind the Iron Curtain than in the West, it was not about following a fashion trend. Some characters admit, that in the 80s they did not even necessarily have a clear idea what the punk movement meant in Western Europe. Of course Hungarian punks differed a lot among each other as well, some of them dreamed about a human-faced Socialism, while others about the abolishment of a leftist regime altogether. Nevertheless, while the common oppressing enemy, the “existing Socialism” lasted, the few punks of Hungary were held together by a feeling of belonging together. They rebelled against the same regime.  However, later on, the international phenomenon of schism within punk along political, leftist-versus-rightist lines, reached Hungary as well.

Lucile Chaufour was not only interested in what it meant to be a punk in Communist Hungary, but she followed the fate of the movement and her friends. She kept on returning to Hungary and during the 2000s made interviews with twelve of her friends who used to be punks in the 80s. In her 2012 documentary “East Punk Memories” she combined records from the 80s and interviews from the 2000s. In the interviews, all the characters outline their personal narratives of the punk community in the 80s, the change of the regime in 1989-1990 and the political storms thereafter, up until recent years. These narratives demonstrate dramatically the diversification of political views of people who once belonged to the same community, and now stand on the opposite sides of a trench that cannot be bridged.

Balázs Kelemen in 1984

One of the characters is Balázs Kelemen, my brother, which made this sensitive documentary additionally personally important for me. The film is dedicated to his memory, since he was no more alive when the film was finished.  His premature death was not independent from his rebellion against all kinds of systems. The despair expressed in his words regarding the political and moral climate dominating Hungary in 2008 now seem to me to be prophetic.  He was desperate to witness the democratic change that went terribly wrong in our country, our society got more distant from his generation’s dreams from year to year. The society itself, not politics, produced a new system, which was not more humane than the “existing Socialism” of the 80s. He was definitely not the only ex-punk or the only member of his generation to view it as so.

Ágnes Kelemen

More information on the film available here

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Source of the photo: http://eastpunkmemories-english.blogspot.hu/2007/08/photographs.html 

With the permission of Lucile Chaufour.