A Falu rossza

A single, scorched 17.5 mm strip—once marketed as PATHE RURAL—survives like a folk-song half-remembered after battle. Within its flicker, a Carpathian hamlet awakens to the rumor that Lajos Szõke’s shiftless herdsman has returned from army exile with pockets allegedly lined in imperial gold. The parish splits between the tavern’s amber lamp and the church’s beeswax taper: Sándor Fülöp’s notary, drunk on law books, demands back-taxes; Péter Andorffy’s miller hoards sacks of stolen grain beneath his mill-stones; Mari K. Demjén’s spinster winds her dowry lace tighter every night, as though suffocating hope itself. Meanwhile, Szõke’s swagger ignites the blood of Amália Jákó’s bored wife, whose cuckolded husband, József Kürthy’s farrier, responds by shoeing his rival’s horse with a reversed iron—an old hex meant to spin the rider back toward damnation. Across three harvest moons the village square becomes a stage for masked saints’ day processions, drunken serenades, and a nocturnal fire that turns the sky into a copper bell. Zitkovszky Béla’s camera—hand-cranked, sun-flared—catches every cracked icon, every fly that walks across a corpse’s open eye. When the Imperial Gendarmes finally arrive, they find not guilt but collective delirium: the herdsman’s pouch holds only brass buttons and a child’s marble. Yet retribution rolls forward like a mill-wheel; the notary signs warrants with a flourish, the miller testifies for mercy, and the farrier’s forged shoe becomes evidence of pre-meditation. In the last image the camera tilts skyward: gallows erected against dawn clouds that look suspiciously like theater curtains closing.