Susan Rubin Suleiman at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN—C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France at Harvard University and author of Daughter of History—for a discussion of her new book István Szabó: Filmmaker of Existential Choices. She will be joined in conversation by DAPHNE KALOTAY—award-winning author of Russian Winter and The Archivists.

About István Szabó: Filmmaker of Existential Choices

István Szabó is one of the few Hungarian filmmakers to have earned a major international reputation over the past half century. Szabó’s importance as a filmmaker lies not only in his attention to film’s formal elements but in his deep and ongoing engagement with some of the most urgent ethical and existential questions of our time.

With detailed analyses of István Szabó’s major films, from his 1960s works to his Academy Award for Best Foreign Film winner, Mephisto, and on through Szabó’s last film in 2020, Final Report, Susan Rubin Suleiman focuses on four important questions pertaining to existential choice: to leave home or to stay in a communist country? To collaborate or not with an authoritarian regime? To affirm or to deny one’s Jewishness in the face of antisemitism? To seek or to give up on community in the face of individual or national conflicts? Above all, Suleiman addresses the single most important philosophical question that haunts Szabó’s work, as it does that of many other Central European intellectuals and filmmakers of our time. That is, how do individuals attempt, through the life choices they make or that are foisted on them, to create a viable self in extreme historical situations over which they have no control?