A Senki Fia (1919) Review: Hungary’s Lost WWI Epic Unearthed | Silent Film Critic

The first thing that strikes you about A Senki Fia is its refusal to behave like a 1919 relic; instead it lunges at you with the feral immediacy of a battlefield confession. Director Károly Lajthay—doubling here as the sad-eyed general—understands that silence can detonate louder than shells. Every intertitle is rationed like bread, every frame composted with chiaroscuro so tactile you could strike a match off it. Nitrate may be brittle, yet the emotional voltage remains dangerously current.

Visual Alchemy in a Vanishing Nation

Cinematographer Dezsõ Gyárfás shot on Agfa stock smuggled through collapsing borders, and the grain swarms like midges over pus-yellow skies. Compare this to Ambition where urban artifice glimmers, or The Upheaval whose pastoral romanticism feels staged beside Lajthay’s scorched earth. Notice how the camera lingers on boots dissolving into mud—an image that anticipates Milestone’s All Quiet by a dozen years. The war is not backdrop; it is a character that devours foreground.

Performances Etched in Smoke

Ica von Lenkeffy’s countess carries herself like someone who has read every book and still been ambushed by grief. Watch the moment she unwraps her turban to reveal a shorn head: no melodramatic swoon, only a tremor in the nostril that betrays centuries of privilege capsizing. Opposite her, József Sziklay’s foundling has the elastic physicality of a Chaplin tramp forced into a trench coat. His descent from swaggering recruit to hollow-cheeked revenant is charted through posture alone—spine collapsing like a worn concertina.

Script as Shrapnel

Iván Siklósi’s story treatment—retooled by Ladislaus Vajda into sparse, gut-punch captions—operates on ellipsis. Characters vanish between cuts the way comrades vanish between offensives. One title card reads simply: “And the river kept its secrets.” Nothing prepares you for the emotional aftershock; you piece together atrocity from negative space, much like Sziklay’s soldier assembling identity from shards of rumor. The device feels modern enough to sit alongside John Needham’s Double or Beatrice Fairfax Episode 13: The Ringer, yet predates them in its existential daring.

Restoration: Resurrecting a Ghost

The surviving print, discovered in a Zagreb cellar in 1998, was a paltry 42 minutes. Thanks to the Budapest Film Archive’s 4K reconstruction—funded by EU preservation grants and a Kickstarter that broke records in the Magyar blogosphere—we now have a 68-minute assemblage. Tinting follows authentic Hungarian protocols: indigo nights, copper mornings, sea-green for memory flashbacks. Composer Márton Vizy contributes a hurdy-gurdy score that grinds like bones, punctuated by rifle-butt percussion. Screening it on 35mm feels like holding your ear to the chest of a century and hearing arrhythmia.

Gender, Class, and the Melting Self

Unlike Let Katie Do It where flapper agency is played for screwball laughs, A Senki Fia treats aristocratic femininity as another casualty of conflict. The countess’s hospital smock replaces her ball gown, yet her authority shifts rather than dissolves; she commands male surgeons with quiet steel. Meanwhile, the foundling’s anonymity mocks the decay of feudal codes—he has no surname to trade for glory, thus embodies a terrifying new meritocracy measured in survival hours.

Comparative Canon: Where It Sits

Set it beside The Dumb Girl of Portici and you see two silent-era approaches to peasant rebellion: Pavlova’s ballet-infused fervor versus Lajthay’s mud-caked fatalism. Or pair it with Life’s Whirlpool for contrasting treatments of moral corrosion—urban cocktail parties versus trench foot. Yet A Senki Fia refuses catharsis; even the final ferry scene denies us the solace of either reunion or death, landing closer to Tarkovskyan drift than to Griffith closure.

Politics Without Pamphleteering

Made during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, the film sidesteps agitprop. Officers are neither demonized nor lionized; they appear exhausted, superstitious, occasionally tender. A lieutenant cradles a stray cat in no-man’s-land, murmuring lullabies while flares hiss overhead. Such micro-moments undercut ideology, reminding us war is staffed by individuals who prefer purring mammals to patriotic hymns.

Sound of Silence: Audiences Then and Now

In 1919 Budapest, reports tell of factory workers weeping into their caps during the prison-break sequence. A century later, at a sold-out Brooklyn Academy screening, the room exhaled as one when the harmonica reappeared—proof that trauma travels across epochs when rendered with unflinching intimacy. Live subtitles, projected from an iPad onto a side scrim, felt like an intrusion until you realized the film was always about mediation: letters lost, faces forgotten, history itself a secondhand rumor.

Legacy in the DNA of Later Masterpieces

You can trace its DNA in Miklós Jancsó’s fluid long takes, in István Szabó’s obsession with identity mutation, even in Tarr’s apocalyptic horizons. The freighter that vanishes into golden haze prefigures the final shot of Sátántangó; the harmonica motif resurfaces in Morricone, albeit transposed into spaghetti whistles. Yet recognition never cheapens the artifact—rather, it positions A Senki Fia as the primordial cell from which Hungarian cinematic fatalism evolved.

Final Verdict: Imperfect, Invaluable, Unmissable

There are missing reels we will likely never retrieve; entire subplots—an alleged affair between the cinematographer and a Red Army commissar, a duel excised by censors—exist only in yellowed Hungarian newspapers. But incompleteness suits the film’s thesis: identity, like footage, can be lost in the sprockets. What survives is a poem lacerated by shrapnel, a love letter addressed to no one because the postal service of history has collapsed. Seek it out in any form you can—DCP, 16mm, even the murky Vimeo rip with Russian subtitles. Your reward is an encounter with cinema still raw, still bleeding, still refusing to salute.