AGITATOROK

This film describes the clashes of a group of volunteer political agitators with the official propaganda machine of the Republic of the Councils in 1919 against the background of historical events that degenerate towards their defeat. The central question is the way in which the reasoning and the ethics of the revolutionary intellectuals of that time were worked out their revolutionary practice. This is a way of posing what practices and possibilities there were of representing revolutionary thought al the time when the film was shot.
The film was first screened publicly in the Filmmuzeum of the Hungarian Film institute as late as 1986. In 1990 it was shown on Hungarian television.)

"Its radicalism is what was supposed to have brought file power of the student protest to the point of exasperation. Another cause was the powerful effect that came about when Czechoslovakia entered into the atmosphere of the era, which tended, at all costs, towards calm and immobility. Agitatorok is a repeatedly radical work. [...] Agitatorok is the corpus delicti of leftist thought. It became the victim of that wrongheaded obsessive policy whose 'fruit' was supposed to be to silence and morally discredit the left." (Vince Zalan, "Magyar Naplo", 29/3/1990)

Director: Dezso Magyar.
Screenplay: Gabor Body, Dezso Magyar; da un racconto di Ervin Sinko.
Operatore: Lajos Koltai.
Cast: Gabor Body, Péter Dobai, Oszter Sandor, Laszlo Foldes, Gabor Révai, Laszlo Bertalan, Tamas Szentjoby, Gyorgy Cserhalmi, Andras Kozak.
Production company: Studio Béla Balazs, Budapest.