PARSE

Winding sheets of metal running through the machines.

Four teeth pressed into them.

The noise of the machines rhythmically emphasising the movements.

The opening frames of Mary in Red show the production of barbed wire, abruptly starting and then breaking off, leaving the viewer without any clue of space or time.

The images that follow introduce an idyllic landscape—green fields, a quiet ambience, an overabundance of clerical symbols. The long shots are suddenly torn apart by a female voice stating that she is a ghost, evoked by a violent event, making the linearity of past, present and future collapse. She is pointing out that these are the periods when people might come to look for her and, indeed, the next frame shows a young woman, facing the camera. As the film proceeds, the viewer learns that the one speaking is a former communist female political prisoner, the other woman a visitor who performs gestures of mourning and remembrance for her.

The movie revolves around their failed dialogue.

Both of them have my voice.

My decision to work with the figure of the spectre in Mary in Red meant working with the “presence of an absence” if one were inclined to use a hauntological framework and terminology after Jacques Derrida.1 For him the ghost represents loss: it is the product of hegemony, representing what has been erased or repressed before.2 This seemed to be fitting for a space like Márianosztra, a former monastery, turned into the first female prison in Hungary in 1858, run by nuns, imprisoning a huge number of women* for their sexual, racial, political backgrounds.3 A place transformed into hosting male inmates in 1950 and becoming a prison for the production of barbed wire in 2015,4 serving the fortification of Hungary’s borders, at the very moment that the country’s government decides on legal law enforcements to deny people the asylum they apply for.5 To return to spectres, to welcome them, to encounter ghosts, means a work of mourning for Derrida.6 Contrary to his perception, in the film this work is not done merely on an interpretative level,7 but gains a material presence through the physicality of the person moving at the site, placing her body in the landscape, performing.

First, you can see her—that is, me—situating photographs into the landscape, which were taken in the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1980s, picturing working female and male inmates (Figs. 4 and 7). Following  Michel Foucault, you could say this is about how labour is used as a tool to recreate subjectivity.8 These images and the footage of the production of the barbed wire mirror gestures of control that inscribe themselves into the bodies and the materials produced: rolling, braiding, sewing, holding together performed over more than a century in Márianosztra are gestures that return in the rolling and stacking up of barbed wire, preparing them ready for export.9 These are those other spectres, spectres of order, discipline and authority, which co-exist with the ghosts of the women there. Their appearance is uncanny, because they are repetitive and familiar in their ways of staging and re-staging power over and over again. At a place where Hungarian communist women were imprisoned between 1920 and 1944, the four teeth pressed into the metal of the barbed wire scarily reiterate the form of the Hungarian Arrow Cross, showing a complete convergence between visual form and ideological content. From there the object points towards the concentration camps of the Holocaust, to the trenches of World War I, and to its very beginning, its invention by US farmers for marking land and thus grabbing and stealing territory from indigenous Americans.10 Without a doubt, an object with a similar history appearing at the site of a prison marks an experience of haunting on multiple levels, beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of the place. Once again, the object itself, spectral, conjuring up the ghosts of fascism, produces subjects labelled, marked and branded as living dead, ghosts, lacking any state protection. It is not a situation that could be described as a sign of resistance, as positive or benevolent, for you see nothing else but relations of enmity gaining material presence in violent realities of exclusion.11

To mourn in the face of such a recurrence of violence seems too insufficient.

Why focus on gestures of remembrance?

The visitor seems to be obsessed with them. I seem to be obsessed with them.The setting of the film changes twice and you can see the young woman reading narrative parts about the history of the prison. This is the moment you may discover that both characters speak in and through my voice.

Derrida states that haunting is about relationality, a form of relationality that obstructs time and space and reframes one’s own subjectivity.12 Between speech and image I switch back and forth between being me, Eszter, the director, the visitor, the ghost and playing the role of this or that woman that I have been reading about during my research. You might be confused about who is speaking and who is spoken about in this uncanny collapsing of time, where everyone seems to be haunting and looking for others’ bodies.

The camera turns me into her as I place myself between the lens and the filmed space with a sign that contains a sentence spoken by a communist (Fig. 8). Later I reiterate this gesture, through her again, with another sign that aims to replace a memorial panel erected in 1985 for the antifascist and communist women imprisoned there, but removed after 1991. Its place is taken by a placard, which only mourns the incarceration of male political prisoners, mainly clerical personalities, between the 1950s and 1960s (Fig. 9).

The red signs held by a woman at the site might not only appear disturbing in these surroundings, because of their content and the body that supports them, but also in their aesthetic: through their proportions and their typography they refer to the billboards used by the Hungarian governmental propaganda since January 2015 in the cities and villages of the country against people asking for asylum and against oppositional political formations.

I overwrite their overwriting and I overwrite myself in the roles I am playing as they are overwritten by me. Subjectivity floats in the space between these possibilities in a continuous desire to de- and reconstruct temporality, re-configuring relationalities through a never-ending cycle of trying and failing to approach, to remember, to forget, to retrieve through care.

After finishing the film, I took a closer look at Sigmund Freud’s text “Mourning and Melancholia”, in which he investigates the distinction between the different relations one might have to loss.13 For him, mourning means a successful de-attachment from the lost object, while melancholia is interpreted as feeling pathologically connected to what is already gone. Contrary to mourning, in melancholia one cannot let the object and its libidinal relation to it go. As a consequence, one’s self-esteem suffers and the person is burdened with reproaches against themselves, which are actually directed towards the lost thing.14 This perspective became interesting for me in a context of hauntological research, since many scholars after Derrida, such as Mark Fisher, read hauntology as a form of failed mourning, as melancholia.15 For Fisher this is a politically relevant form of resistance, because through holding on to lost potentialities, to alternative forms of existence in the past, one also resists reality and the very structures producing it in the here and now.16 Similarly, in their book Loss. The Politics of Mourning,17 David Eng and David Kazanjian claim to see melancholia not as a pathological bond, but rather as an attitude that insists on the longevity of social, political, creative potentialities.18

You could assume that in Mary in Red this form of resisting melancholia is proposed too, since the visitor refuses to let go of the past in her memorial gestures, as she aims to return lives to female gendered bodies, which at the site of the prison are projected as dead bodies that have never lived.

She even decides to sew red stars for the imprisoned communist and antifascist women: the sentenced women were obliged to produce, among other things, embroideries for churches, which was against their own ideological standpoint since the majority of them was atheist. In the last scenes of the film, these embroideries are placed on the red crosses, which mark the route of pilgrimage to the village of Márianoszta (Figs. 11-13). Double, triple inversions happen: an iconography of crucifixion and traditionally female gendered work in the Central and Eastern Europe region is combined with a symbol of strong political meaning, showing women as political subjects.

Again, in how the past becomes inverted through holding on to it without letting go, one might believe that the movie favours a perspective of melancholia. However, this view is complicated through the comments of the ghost that continuously question the wanderings of the visitor. In fact, our relation is an uneasy one, conflictive and without the possibility of resolve. While one woman strives to access the past of the first, the other one refuses to remember. In those moments, when she wants to show her past, the other one looks away or does not want to listen. At one point the spectre even complains of being read only through the mirror of the present. She complains about her memory becoming instrumentalised, as the storyline of the movie draws a connection to the barbed wire and her past, making a link between these temporal lines. In advancing her own political perspective and statement, I, the director, once again might erase an erased history.

In a way it is the spectre that pleads for a letting go, while the visitor strives to hold on. At the same time, the spectre suffers from being forgotten and the visitor suffers from being haunted.

How to resolve this tormented relationship?

In his text “Mourning and Militancy” Douglas Crimp views mourning and melancholia in connection to militancy by reverting to Freud’s text.19 His analysis is situated in the 1980s in the context of AIDS activism and the experience of loss that homosexual men faced when their lovers, friends, partners died. He points out how mourning might be regarded as a troubling subject within an activist context, easily accused of hindering action, leading to a state of mind of apathy, something that was already mentioned by Freud as one of mourning’s crucial aspects.20 Instead, Crimps stresses the necessity of the affective relations of care implied in mourning as a psychological process that needs attention. This practice is a communitarian one, not solitary, as Freud frames it. What is more, for gay men it could not have ever happened in reclusion due to the circumstances of social violence and oppression disrupting the tissue of life, breaking in from the outside.21 In fact, Crimp points out that mourning for many of them inevitably turned into militancy exactly because of these reasons, which led to a kind of negation of the irreconcilable pain haunting them. In other words, what is significant in his argumentation is that he views militancy as the externalisation of mourning’s emotional distress; in reading it as a response that denies the power of one’s own pain over loss. This does not mean that he poses himself against the need towards militancy, but he is equally demanding in taking mourning seriously and it not being destroyed by the burden of its grief, since that too is how systemic violence operates.22

In the light of this, one might understand better why the young visitor is so obsessed with performing those acts of remembrance in the film; to not only fight but also mourn or to mourn as a way of fighting. And in this tense relation, the image of my body haunted by a spectre reveals how I am being produced and legitimised, upheld in my privilege through the processes of murdering, forgetting, letting people die in the very centre and on the edges of the continent I call my home. I see my body living in comfort, keeping its vigour in drinking blood and naively still believing in its innocence. I see my relation to the politics of memory of the country I belong to, its history of the past projected into the present, its present projected into the past and the future. I exist within the multiplicities it forms and produces. Yet I also want to claim to exist within the multiplicities that I create in the fight to detach from them in vain. I experience the mutations of my subjectivities in the very emotional, rational, bodily states of understanding the complexities of my and your vulnerabilities that can never meet. It means to feel how my desire towards you mutates between gentleness and violence, destruction and healing, abuse and respect, blurring clear lines of distinction between these binaries. In the act of caring for memory I violate, abuse and hurt, yet I still need to strive for it, despite its very failure.

In this context, haunting—with its potentiality to overwrite the present in overwriting the past and the other way around—plays a crucial role in the making aware of the uncanny oppressive structures that frame subjectivities, in its potentiality to turning “time out of joint”, confusing its linearity.23 The film ends with the spectre pointing towards how she is bound in a mutual interdependency with the visitor, which obviously comes from inhabiting her body, but also from their shared struggle in becoming uncomfortable in the places in which they co-exist. The visitor acts to cross this emotional anxiety, while the ghost relieves it at the same time through reluctantly accompanying her. Their very sensation of being uncomfortable with each other in moving along the boundary between mourning and militancy remains an unresolved tension; which drives the movie and drives me in looking at my own spectre enacting those gestures as an image; which in turn drives me to look at the affective relations of intimacy that are not achievable neither in the present nor the past; which drives me to desire to break in vain with how power frames me in relation to others in the now, the has been and the yet to come.

What might, then, be the point of thinking about these issues? Why are discussions about mourning and hauntology relevant in the context of migration and border politics?

The case of Márianosztra underlines that the prison as a site of memory and as a place where bio- and necropolitcs are produced are two sides of the same coin. The film approaches this relation from the point of view of a body that holds the privileges of the country it questions—being in possession of an EU passport—which allows her to live and travel outside of the spaces she is assigned to. Border politics and migration emerge at the edges of the film, at its very margins, and lead the viewer through this visible manifestation of violence and its dynamics of oppression inside it. These choices were made when in 2015/2016 Márianosztra emerged as one of the locations where Europe’s fortification of its border war regime became palpable, relying on the already embedded histories of fascism, racism and sexism at the site. As emphasised above, the history of the place is constructed through erasure: through erasure of memory but also through the erasure of lives deemed not to be worthy of grief. Thus, the site perpetuates the mechanisms already undertaken “inside” within its own domain towards the “outside”—where, of course, the vulnerability of the bodies it operates against concerns different levels, since the women who were imprisoned there are already dead, unlike the people against whom the border fence is erected. Nothing and nobody can bring dead bodies back to life again, but one can choose to fight for the living, even more so when white supremacy frames the lives on the other side of the barbed-wire as living dead. Even in the moment of people’s death, neither their death nor them having been alive is acknowledged. These are processes that have been ongoing since the production of barbed wire started in Márianosztra. They are processes that have continued and are still happening at the very moment that I am re-editing this article in March 2020.24

Like few other sites in comparison, and as one of the locations of Europe’s border war regime, Márianosztra emphasises strongly that only when one fights for the living without separation and compromise, mourning is possible.