POLITICS & COMMUNITY
Steven Bognar
interviewed by Amy Brill on June 6, 1996
A few years into filming, I realized this is not just about this one trip -- this is about my father's entire journey.
Steven Bognar's first film, "Personal Belongings," is an intimate portrait of the filmmaker's relationship with his father, a Hungarian revolutionary turned midwestern American. The father's first trip to his native land in thirty years marks the beginning of a journey of discovery, dissolution and insight for the father, the son, and the whole family. The story, told with humor and compassion, reveals the myriad contradictions and complications of growing up "American." "Personal Belongings" premiered on the PBS series, P.O.V., Tuesday June 11, 1996.
Tripod: You've been making this film for ten years, right?
Steven Bognar: I started shooting this film when I was 23, ten years ago this October. But I didn't set out ten years ago to make the grand film about my family and coming to America.
Tripod: What did you set out to make?
SB: Well my dad was going to Hungary, and it was an important emotional trip for him. I was just going to make a little film about that trip, and that was it. And because the footage was confiscated and all this stuff started happening, I wound up continuously filming, and a few years into it, I realized this is not just about this one trip, this is about my father's entire journey.
Tripod: And then it became about your entire journey?
SB: Well, yeah. This movie grew and got out of hand as it went along. Certainly I didn't anticipate that the Cold War would end, and that that would be such a big plot twist, in a way. It became an integral part of the story.
Tripod: You've talked about 'a dividedness within;' being 'home' in your country, yet not really home. How do you think this sense of dividedness affects our generation, people in their twenties now, as you were while you were making the film?
The game rules in America allow you, at any time, to pick up stakes and move on.
SB: I relate that a lot to America, because this is a rootless land in a big way. I think that if you choose to come here, you are severing ties with whatever community you may have had. The game rules in America allow you at any time to pick up stakes and move on. That's one of the great things about living here, because you are sort of free. But it also leads to a lot of heartache and a lot of damage. I wonder if my parents would have broken up had they stayed in Europe. I bet all the neighbors would have gotten into their business. The whole village becomes marriage counselors and I don't think that happens here. Here it's more like, oh, well, do what you want, man. Someone said, this is a rueful thing, but true I think, that my father finally became a real American when he did the most American of things, and got a divorce.
Tripod: As "Personal Belongings" points out, people do make an attempt here to recreate what they left behind, in community centers, folk dancing, convocations, what have you. What are the implications of that imbalance for the kids? You're American ... but don't forget, you're Hungarian! Or Korean. Or whatever.
SB: It's like swimming upstream to try and maintain a culture in the face of this monstrous American machine, the great homogenizer, that takes everything and turns it up and makes it bland. Growing up, I had a great disdain for all this Hungarian stuff, because it was a paltry shadow of what it should be. I was a kid trying to buy American pop culture. I had to go to Hungary and get drunk with Hungarians to realize it's not just folk dancing under florescent lights. There's a vibrancy there, but you've got to go there to get it.
Tripod: So as this generation tries to identify itself, is it moving toward a discarding of heritage and culture or toward a culture of reclamation that polarizes us?
SB: I wish I had a stronger sense of that. In touring with the movie, a lot of younger people have walked up to me and said how they related to my "character" in the movie. The alienated kid. In that they too were forced to do this or that and they didn't like it. It's only in my twenties that I began to wish I'd spoken Hungarian. I sense a lot of regret in this new generation, but also a lot of pragmatism. Life is so unstable right now, and the whole sense of what are you going to do with your life, and how are you going to put clothes on your back, and can you achieve a modicum of self-fulfillment or happiness ... the whole notion of trying to maintain your ethnic identity, or trying to foster that. It's almost a luxury, given how much other stuff you've got to do.
Tripod: That's a luxury you've chosen, almost as a career, up to this point (Laughter). So what is the motivation behind your choice to make this film?
SB: For me, it was less about my ethnic identity than about some troubling questions about my own father. This mystery guy who I grew up with but didn't know ... Seeing your parents as people who have faced the same choices you're facing, and have made mistakes. Whether or not you have to forgive them something, and deciding whether or not to forgive them, all that stuff is part of growing up. Recognizing your parents' humanity with all its flaws.
Tripod: Was this film a way to navigate that recognition?
SB: Yeah, although ironically, I didn't realize that that's one of the things that would be happening. Part of the whole journey of the movie was me realizing my dad is not a mythic figure. He's an all too real, all too flawed human being. It was well into the editing process when it hit me that this is the journey of the narrator, the supporting character/son. Me.
Immigrant parents try and convey the richness of culture to their kids, and why it matters. But it's like telling a kid to eat their spinach.
Tripod: In the film, you visit the square in Hungary on the thirtieth anniversary of the uprising. You said, "I was proud of my dad that day." I felt some regret there on your part, that maybe your perception of your dad had been lacking something up to that point. What role does this lack of perception play in the immigrant family experience here?
SB: Well, immigrant parents try and convey the richness of culture to their kids, and why it matters. But it's like telling a kid to eat their spinach. Culture is good for you. When you're a kid, you need proof. Or experience. Perhaps not through your parents. If I had kids, and I wanted to introduce them to Hungarian culture, I'd take them to Hungary, and leave them with some crazy uncle, and let them go down a river or climb a hill, or pick some grapes, but I would get the hell out of there. I grew up, a lot, in spite of my parents, not because of them.
Tripod: You refer to your father as, "the only revolutionary parent on the block." Politics plays a larger role in this film than is first apparent. Your mom writes a letter to President-Elect Bush, outlining social issues that need addressing. Your dad exhaustively tunnels his way through a myriad of 'proper channels' to get your confiscated film back from the Hungarian government. What does their faith in the system, the process, reveal compared to the relative disenchantment we seem to have regarding political activity?
SB: A sense of alienation, or a sense of distance and skepticism is a prerequisite for trying to be a thinking person ... We are post-ideals, post-optimism, post-everything. I'm glad to have that though. I would hate to be naive. But skepticism and inertia are two different things. Because our generation is alienated, or dour, or very critical, we are often termed inactive or too alienated to do anything. I disagree with that very strongly.
Tripod: What were you doing while making the film? Were you in school?
SB: No, in the early years I was working odd jobs, and then I started making movies with high school students. I'd go into a number of schools around the state, and we'd shoot video and sometimes film. I'd introduce students to filmmaking.
Tripod: What do you teach them about getting their work into the larger world?
SB: We sent out the work that we created, to festivals and contests. Actually one kid's film about having been sexually abused as a child won a national art award. With that film, he raised money to make a low budget independent feature called "Tattoo Boy". It played the Hamptons Film Festival, and it was the closing film of The New York Underground Film Festival. And won best feature. He's 21 or 22 now.
Tripod: What was it like for you as a first-time filmmaker in an increasingly tight-fisted funding climate?
It's ironic that as funding disappears, access to technology becomes more democratic.
SB: It's ironic that as funding disappears, the technology becomes more democratic. It's actually a healthy development. Now that there's going to be digital video, you'll have Betacam quality on a little Hi-8 camcorder, and that's really going to open a lot of doors. The funding is always tough. You can't get hung up on it. I wrote a ton of grants on my film, and I got turned down probably six times out of seven. And that's fine. What do you say? I'm making a movie about my dad? I'm this white kid from Ohio. You've just got to have a really tough skin. As soon as a grant left the house it was done, it was gone, it never existed. And if the money came through, great, that was icing.
Tripod: Where'd your money and your equipment come from?
SB: All local, all borrowed, all edited at night in this place where I had the day job. My camera person was a friend of mine who I went to film school with who had his own 16mm camera. I did the credit card thing. In the end I got six credit cards and charged them up twenty grand.
Tripod: Did you end up getting a grant, in the end, to pay for the lab, the prints, etc.?
SB: I think I had $20,000 in grants from four different sources. The biggest grant I got was $7,000, from the Ohio Arts Council. Living in Ohio, of course, was a prerequisite, but they saw something in the film that a lot of other granting agencies didn't. I was a first-time filmmaker, so it was definitely a risk on their part. I had compelling footage, and maybe I managed to write something decent in the application. You have to read as much as you can about grantwriting, look at other grant applications that have gotten funding. Learn about the agency, so you know what they're looking for. If they're not for you don't waste your time. Or if an aspect of what you're doing is up their alley, then you can talk about that aspect of it more specifically.
Tripod: What were some of the difficult details of the process, seeing as your subject was so close to home?
Documentary is a narrative art form, and finding the narrative within the real life, and trying to make it sing was the hardest thing.
SB: I've been running around with Super 8 cameras since I was a kid, so shooting was really easy. And when you make a movie about your own family there's already a sort of intimacy and casualness that a documentary filmmaker should have with their subject. But one of the most challenging things for me was the editing of the film. I showed the film as a rough cut to as many people as would watch it, because I had no perspective on my family. Anybody with an honest friend in this world is lucky. I tried to find filmmakers and non-filmmakers who were going to say what wasn't working, or what wasn't clear, or meandering, or too long, or too short. Documentary is a narrative art form, and finding the narrative within the real life, and trying to make it sort of sing, I guess, was the hardest thing.
Tripod: How did you feel when you were searched in Hungary, at the border?
SB: It's so easy for Americans to get all huffy, you know, "Goddamnit, I'm American..." It's laughable now, it wasn't laughable at the time. Having someone staring at my genitals and making me bend over was not nice at all. I have very vivid snapshot memories of it all, what the guys were wearing, their uniforms; the look of a submachine gun, which of course makes an impression; even the haircuts, how neatly trimmed they were. It was no fun, but I wasn't brutalized or anything.
Tripod: So in the end, who is this film for, do you think?
SB: Well, I started it for me, really, to try and understand my dad. But I hope the movie is for anybody who has wanted to know more about the American psyche, and how as a nation of immigrants, how our leaving and our sense of detachment has impacted on us and makes us who we are both in a good way and in perhaps a harsh way.
Tripod: Your father's friend, Laszlo, gets very indignant when in the film you ask "What's the point of this heritage? Why should we care?" Have you answered that question yet?
SB: Well, what Laszlo says -- "It gives you something later in life" -- is not enough of an answer. One's ethnicity and one's heritage, it doesn't make the world a better place, it doesn't ease the pain of people. And you've got to keep that in perspective. But it does make life richer. Because we are our stories, we are our histories... and one of the responsibilities we have as people is to be curious. Because other people were curious we can talk on the phone, we can work at a computer. I can't do basic algebra. But I can be curious about other things, and I think I have a responsibility to get these rumblings out and that's what I hope my movie does. In sharing, we all push each other. Learn a little bit more and not settle and not get lazy. By being curious and looking for mystery and trying to understand those weird things, we grow as people. That is one of our jobs, to grow as people.
