Book Talk with Susan Suleiman: István Szabó
On Thursday, July 25, at 4pm, at the West Tisbury Library, author Susan Suleiman will discuss her newly released book, István Szabó: Filmmaker of Existential Choices. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Free and open to the public.
“István Szabó is one of the few Hungarian filmmakers to have earned a major international reputation over the past half century. This thoughtful and original book is the first examination of Szabó’s contribution to contemporary thought, engaging the troubled history of Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries.
István Szabó’s importance as a filmmaker lies not only in his attention to film’s formal elements but in his deep and ongoing engagement with some of the most urgent ethical and existential questions of our time.
With detailed analyses of István Szabó’s major films, from his 1960s works to his Academy Award for Best Foreign Film winner, Mephisto, and on through Szabó’s last film in 2020, Final Report, Susan Rubin Suleiman focuses on four important questions pertaining to existential choice: to leave home or to stay in a communist country? To collaborate or not with an authoritarian regime? To affirm or to deny one’s Jewishness in the face of antisemitism? To seek or to give up on community in the face of individual or national conflicts? Above all, Suleiman addresses the single most important philosophical question that haunts Szabó’s work, as it does that of many other Central European intellectuals and filmmakers of our time. That is, how do individuals attempt, through the life choices they make or that are foisted on them, to create a viable self in extreme historical situations over which they have no control?” (Bloomsbury)
About the author:
Susan Rubin Suleiman was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She graduated from Barnard College and obtained her Ph.D. at Harvard, where she went on to a long and distinguished career as a professor of French and comparative literature.Suleiman has published more than a dozen books and over a hundred articles in international journals, as well as book reviews in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and other newspapers and magazines. She is also the author of autobiographical works, including the acclaimed memoirs Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook and Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood.
Suleiman has won many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1990, she received the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and in 1992 she was decorated by the French Government as an Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques). In April 2018, she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur.
On August 1, at 3pm, at the West Tisbury Library, see the film FATHER followed by an in-person Q&A with Susan Suleiman. Click here for more info.
On August 18, at 3pm, at the MV Film Society, see the film TAKING SIDES followed by a Zoom Q&A with István Szabó and Susan Suleiman. Click here for more info.