Gabor Szilasi’s existence, like his photographic work, is traversed by a sincere quest for life. Meetings, friendship and family cement his 94 years, keep him upright, with a lucid and serene mind. “Love forever,” he replies, when asked what he wants for the future.
In this biographical documentary titled GaborJoannie Lafrenière (Snowbirds) paints a tender portrait of this beacon of Quebec photography, without falling into pathos, without avoiding delicate subjects – repressed memories of youth. The filmmaker and director of photography manages to reproduce, through her own colorful and joyful approach, the attachment that vibrates around the Montrealer, born in 1928 in Budapest.
On screen, it is not uncommon to see the director and her subject strike a pose. Whether they’re simulating a siesta, whether they’re choreographically walking towards each other or riding a moped; complicity exudes authenticity. Mischievous seems to be their common nature.
If the staging lacks spontaneity when strangers are attacked, it echoes the documentary photography of Gabor Szilasi. For him, the meeting and the discussion are preliminary to the taking of images.
The man and his work
The film is built according to this process. It begins in Gaspésie, where the first contact between the filmmaker and the photographer took place, in 2015. It continues in Charlevoix and L’Isle-aux-Coudres, visited by Szilasi in 1970, and serves as a pretext to show his photos, to talk about his long career. Here he is exchanging, supporting images, with those he has photographed in the past or with their descendants.
Woven in this way, between the explosive colors of Lafrenière and the magnetic black and white of Szilasi, the film reveals the man and his work. Halfway through, the viewer is ready for the most intimate: old age, work in the darkroom, the Hungarian past, including the evocation of the mother victim of the Nazi ogre. Gabor Szilasi does not avoid the subject, but confronts it obliquely, by reading a text.
“Photography, he says, at one point, is poetry. Cinema is a novel. The one dedicated to him by Joannie Lafrenière scrolls through a series of characters – anonymous, some for no reason – including those close to the humble hero: his wife, his daughter, even a colleague who sees in him a “spiritual father”. Rhythmed by their testimonies or by incursions at parties or at the session at the hairdresser’s, the story shows the main interested party in his environment, talkative here, taciturn there. In the end, images speak louder than words. Memory among the Szilasi has always been nourished visually. It is not without reason that the departure of the photographer’s archives to the National Gallery of Canada signals the end of a story. “Seventy years of photos going away,” says, moved, the one who wishes himself “health, good food and a happy life, as much as possible”.