Legends circulate about Gross Arnold’s toy realm. He collects toys and film experiences, as he says of himself. No sooner had it been clarified — in his own words — “why he had come into the picture,” namely that I wanted to ask the printmaker about film, than within moments half a dozen tiny locomotives appeared, with their matching miniature carriages. These prettily painted little trinkets with their brass handles once raced back and forth, in the original, through America’s heroic age and the cowboy films.
– The General! Buster Keaton’s train. An exact replica, down to the smallest detail, of the one that was Keaton’s “partner” in the film The General. It is across the tops of cars like these that he climbs; this is the locomotive he leaps into.
By way of proof, Gross Arnold produces a hefty album full of photographs from Buster Keaton’s films. It falls open almost by itself at the famous train scenes. A splendid Chaplin album emerges too. Both contain hundreds of film stills and original photographs unavailable anywhere else. The large-format book entitled The Humor of Cinema is a veritable home cinema. Page after page of scene sequences, broken down into tiny movements. Even the punchlines come through from the stills. The gags of Laurel and Hardy and of cross-eyed Ben Turpin live on its pages.
Foreign film encyclopedias weighing several kilos, with thousands of photos.
– Every time I take them out, these pictures surprise me anew. Here every movement has stopped, the process is frozen into frames, and yet I feel the motion in them. It never ceases to fascinate me.
The magic word: motion. For Gross Arnold, the great miracle of film is MOTION. In capital letters. Perhaps because in the world he created in his prints — a world comparable to no one else’s — the dream stands motionless? The key to the attraction surely lies deeper than that. A remark by Cavalcanti on film’s influence on the fine arts may bring us closer to the answer: “…film has been a valuable contribution for both painters and sculptors from a documentary point of view, in the normal or slow-motion mapping of ‘subjects.’ And being even more precise than the mere photograph, it has made the study of movement easier.”
– Film captivated me even as a child, says Gross Arnold. – My father bought a projector that counted as very smart in those days. I bought myself one just like that old one. It doesn’t work, it’s true. It tears the film. And yet: here beside me is the wonder-box of my childhood… With the original, whenever I could, I played cinema. I had a varied program. Longer and shorter scenes, depending on how big a piece the projectionist of the cinema next door threw out when the film snapped. To this day I go to the cinema more often, and more gladly, than to exhibitions. For me, Miracle in Milan says more about the world than today’s fine art is capable of saying.
Scene photos from Miracle in Milan line the bookshelf; tucked into the frame of one picture, as if he were a member of the family, is De Sica’s portrait cut from a newspaper. On the wall, right next to Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, hangs a worn poster. Framed, protected by glass. On coarse paper, clumsy letters advertise Miracle in Milan. With a misprint: instead of Sica’s name it reads Siac. The story of this treasured curiosity: as a student at the academy of fine arts, he bought a bite to eat on his way home. At home, a piece of a poster torn in two emerged from the paper bag. He bought another bagful — and the two half sheets fit together.
– I gathered my great film experiences directly in the years after the war. From De Sica’s films. Miracle in Milan and Umberto D., shown here under the title A sorompók lezárulnak (The Barriers Close), shook me with their stunning images. For a long time De Sica was the director for me. Once, later, I even saw him in the flesh. A film was being shot near the Hungarian Academy in Rome, where I was staying. There stood De Sica on the roof of a ruined house. He stood there bellowing into a funnel-shaped megaphone. His actors ran about below on the square.
Back at home, the experience was completed from memory — etched in copper. No one stands on the rooftop with a megaphone; the idol cannot be etched into copper. But there is the little Italian cinema, its display case full of the titles of his best-loved films. Gross Arnold’s hit list. Its title, simply: Roman Houses (Római házak).
– Yes, Fellini is there on the posters too. Two of his films affected me with a force that remains unrepeatable to this day: La Strada and 8½. Those people! They positively burst into my life. Never again did Fellini’s heroes come as close to me as in these two films. 8½ stunned me above all with the realization that even an artist blessed with such powers of the spirit as Fellini is at the mercy of the world, unarmored against it. Fellini, I sometimes feel, allows himself idle stretches too. Even so — he is the greatest. He is the greatest precisely because he is so, even with all that.
After János Rózsa’s earlier Gross Arnold portrait film, Csudavilág (Wonder World), a curious new portrait film about Gross Arnold, Játék–film (Toy-Film), in which he also took on an acting role, has now been completed and awaits its premiere on television.
– But that is not even the interesting thing about it; the interesting thing is that something incomprehensible happened. Originally it was to include a four-minute documentary interview with Béla Kondor. At the unveiling of his mural in the Grand Hotel he spoke about his work and his plans. I knew about this interview, and it was I who asked for it to be included in our film. I saw with my own eyes that it was there in the original version. Then, when the film was shown again, the Kondor interview was missing. I asked after it, but learned only as much as I had seen. It had vanished. Precisely this unrepeatable piece of footage. The only one ever made of Béla Kondor…
– If I were young, I would make films. Film is a great thing. It can say more than the fine arts. We would need a hundred Bergmans and a hundred Fellinis…
Éva Bársony’s article in issue 1980/3 of the film journal FILMVILÁG
Gross Arnold’s projector in the gallery:
