Robert Vas in Context
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Born in Hungary, the filmmaker Robert Vas (1931-1978) fled his country in 1956 and came to London, where he made two notable shorts for the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund, Refuge England (1959) and The Vanishing Street (1962). His first film for BBC Television was The Frontier (1964).
In the next decade and a half he directed BBC films about, among other subjects, the story of the magic lantern, Alexander Korda, the work of Humphrey Jennings, the music of Bela Bartok, the Katyn Forest Massacre, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the television archive, Stalin, Laurel and Hardy, and the survivors of Hiroshima. All this despite the “Christmas Tree” mark on his personnel file (above) identifying him as a potential political subversive.
As Alan Rosenthal wrote in The Documentary Conscience, “Robert Vas [was a unique and important figure in the history of documentary… The key to all Vas’s s work was his moral fervour. Concern, commitment, passion – these were the words he used over and over again, and which guided him."
This symposium marks two anniversaries. One is the 100th anniversary of the May 1926 General Strike in the United Kingdom, about which Vas made his most controversial film, Nine Days in ’26 (1974). The other is the 70th anniversary of the October 1956 uprising in Budapest against the Soviet-controlled government, the crushing of which led Vas and his family to flee their homeland and settle in Britain.
The symposium is conceived to spotlight Robert Vas’ achievements, to celebrate his productions, and to extend the processes of critical and creative engagements with his legacy. At the same time, the symposium is concerned to situate and contextualise Vas and the central themes of his work within creative documentary practice that similarly explores those themes with personal and poetic approaches.
Symposium Programme
9.00 Registration with coffee
9.30 Welcome: James Jordan, Eleni Liarou and John Wyver
9.35 Robert Vas Filmmaker (1978) with Matthew Reisz introduction
10.20 Panel 1: Beginnings
Elizabeth Simpson: Robert Vas and Refuge England
Alan Dein: A Farewell to Hessel Street
Patrick Russell: Coal cutter: an interlude in Robert Vas’s career
11.50 Coffee
12.00 Panel 2: The European context
Ian Christie: How Not to be an Alien - Hungarian émigrés in British culture
Eleni Liarou: Looking history in the face: documentary as testimony
13.00 Lunch
13.45 Video conversation: Sukhdev Sandhu and Rachel Lichtenstein followed by screening of Belonging (1967)
First broadcast in June 1967, Belonging saw Robert Vas return to the East End which had been central to his two short films for the BFI. It offers a portrait of the area told through the lives and work of Yiddish poet Avram Stencl, painter Johnny Martin and writer Johnny Quarrell. ‘The East End of London is hardly unexpected territory,’ wrote Stephen Hearst in a companion piece in the Radio Times. ‘Yet it may strike you as a different place from the one you thought you knew, simply because the director behind the camera observes and communicates in an individual way which has a personal ring of truth about it.’
14.45 Panel 3: Reworking the archive
Lucy Szemetová: Remediating revolution: Robert Vas and the archival afterlife of 1956 imagery
James Jordan: In the absence of access. The written archive and The Issue Should Be Avoided
15.45 Mike Dibb, BBC producer and colleague of Robert Vas, in discussion with John Wyver
16.10 Coffee
16.20 John Burgan: Magyar Memory Crasher (2026) – introduction + video
16.50 Next steps, and thanks
17.00 Close
18.30 Screening: Nine Days in ’26 (1974) with John Wyver introduction
Here's more details about the screening and how to book your free ticket:
https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event/59952/nine-days-in-26
Contact name: Eleni Liarou
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