Az ember tragédiája
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“Man’s greatest weakness is his love for life.”—Molière
DIRECTED BY: Marcell Jankovics
FEATURING: Voices of Mátyás Usztics, Tamás Széles, Tibor Szilágyi, Ágnes Bertalan
PLOT: God creates the universe; Lucifer, the eternal spirit of negation, tells God that Man will inevitably revolt, and is allowed to tempt Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. After the Fall, guided by Lucifer in various guises, Adam watches his descendants slip into tyranny and debauchery in more than a dozen succeeding segments that run from the earliest cavemen to the last humans of the far future. Adam returns from his historical survey feeling suicidal.
BACKGROUND:
- Based on Imre Madách’s 1861 play “The Tragedy of Man.”
- The same story was adapted to film in 1984 as The Annunciation, with the story enacted by a cast of children.
- Although production began in 1988, it took Jankovics 23 years to complete this magnum opus. Since his state-backed financing ended with the fall of Communism in 1989, he animated individual segments one at a time as funding allowed.
- Because the film took so many years to make, many additional voice actors had to be brought in, although Mátyás Usztics (Lucifer) and Tibor Szilágyi (God) were available for the entire production.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a nearly 3-hour animated film where each individual frame is a work of art, it’s a boggling process to try to pick a single image to represent the whole. Forced to pick, we’d have to go with something depicting Lucifer, the key figure driving the drama. The version of him as the red-eyed shadow with translucent wings, reminiscent of Fantasia‘s Chernabog, works as well as any other.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: The French Revolution was just Johannes Kepler’s dream, Spaceship Adam
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The literary source material might be dry, but Marcell Jankovics uses it as a launching pad for his constantly morphing, psychedelically-colored cosmic animations, transmuting the already complex story into a nearly-three-hour-long fever dream.
Blu-ray trailer for The Tragedy of Man
COMMENTS: It seems that Marcell Jankovics can make nothing but masterpieces. First Son of the White Mare, a mind-bending odyssey based on a Hungarian folk tale, and then The Tragedy of Man, a mind-bending odyssey based on… everything. 23 years in the making, this animation is epic in every sense of the world; nothing less can be expected from a movie that begins with the creation of the universe and ends (chronologically, at least) with the sun burning out and humanity reduced again to savagery, passing through ancient Egypt, Greece, the French revolution, and imaginary space-age dystopias on the way. Our guide through this story is none other than Lucifer himself, who calmly waxes philosophical about man’s inevitable failures through the ages as a raging and rebellious Adam insists his offspring will build a utopia right around the next historical bend. God Himself has to settle the argument. Imre Madách supplies the high-minded 19th century prose, but Jankovics’ drawings add a new layer of commentary and metaphor. This adaptation of a Christian epic is a massive undertaking, and one which the animator takes with all possible seriousness—even when indulging in earthy wit, such as when the chivalrous Tancred courts a coy maiden while, around the corner, Lucifer toys with a buxom, amorous nun who magically grows a chastity belt around her nethers. The movie brashly claims to encompass all of human experience, and, despite its parochial Eurocentricism (there seems to be no world east of Galilee or west of London)—and an embarrassingly small role for Eve, the sole feminine influence—to a large part it does.
There’s enough material in this opus for several masters’ theses, on any subject from literature to film studies to theology to fine art. As it has to do in order to get through centuries of Christendom, The Tragedy of Man barrels forward without pause, trusting the viewer to catch the many biblical, historical, philosophical, and even pop culture references strewn throughout its 160 minute runtime without footnotes. The best advice may be to not even try to follow the details on a first viewing; just let it flow through you like a dream. There will be plenty of time to dive deeper on a second and third viewing.
Philosophically, The Tragedy of Man is dualist, dialectical, and almost Manichean, mixing cynicism and irrational hope in equal measure. From the beginning, Lucifer presents himself as the eternal spirit of negation, a force co-equal to God Himself, the Shiva to God’s Brahma. Evil is inevitable, failure is inevitable, death is inevitable, but man still struggles on, through a lifetime and through the ages, until the next man comes along to pick up the baton.
The literary source Tragedy of Man most resembles is “Paradise Lost,” and as in Milton’s poem, Lucifer drives and dominates the action. Most commentators cast Tragedy‘s Lucifer as a pure villain and foil, compared to Milton’s sympathetic Satan, but that is not necessarily the case. Although his sibilant, sarcastic tone suggests a great deceiver, this Lucifer is quite charming, in his rakish way. He even helps Adam get a date with a coy Victorian maiden. His commentary on the human condition is wry, but not wrong. “Family and property will be the world’s twain motive power, the source of all its pleasures and pains. These two ideas will grow unceasingly, begetting all that’s great and noble and, Saturn-like, devouring his own offspring.” This state of affairs, it appears, was not dictated by God, but by God and Lucifer together, the eternal dialectic of creation and destruction, two sides of the same coin. The despair Lucifer revels in with each of man’s successive failure does not deter Adam; instead, it motivates him and drives him forward. Throughout, Jankovics’ identifies Lucifer with mankind’s oldest and most loyal companion, the dog, from the devil’s first appearance as a pseudo-domesticated wolf companion to his incarnations as the jackal-headed god Anubis and three-headed Cerberus. The Adversary is a companion along life’s journey, and not to be feared: he has his own wisdom to impart, which is just as much part of the plan as anything else.
Jankovics’ lively graphics put their own spin on Madách’s musty play, and for most, this will be a case of the illustrations overwhelming the text. A cosmic opening in a primordial starfield segues into the verdant Garden of Eden, where Eve’s body forms from tree roots, morphing into a face and then back to a luminous body. In Jankovics’ vision every object is constantly changing into another form; there are moments in the tale when one character will briefly metamorphose into another character we haven’t yet met. The style supports the movie’s theme, suggesting a continuous unity of experience beyond the individual. Transitions between historical eras meld into one another in a similarly flowing fashion. The transformations have surreal appeal, but Jankovics uses them meaningfully: slaves working on pyramids kneel and become blocks of stone, Hitler grows out his mustache and becomes Stalin. Jankovics illustrates each era in an appropriate period style: the Greek segment looks like it could be playing out on a red clay urn. The world of the crusaders is a medieval tapestry. Johannes Kepler lives within a metal etching. The succeeding French Revolution segment is similarly etched, but instead of being completely monochromatic, the artist splashes revolutionary blues and reds everywhere. Jankovics inventiveness is boundless, and there are so many amazing mini-sequences—Danton’s severed head still orating while bleeding on a pike, a deadly Ferris wheel conveying multitudes to their death, including the Beatles from Yellow Submarine—that you won’t be able to pick a favorite. Freeze frame any random spot in the film and you have a piece of art worthy of hanging on your wall.
It is all overwhelming and exhausting, but in the best possible way. The Tragedy of Man‘s ultimate theological resolution—despite apparent hardships we must have faith in God’s mysterious providence, and all that—betrays a certain “best of all possible worlds” Panglossianism that might not satisfy modern audiences. Never mind. You’ll be too awestruck to complain.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
OFFICIAL SITE:
The Tragedy of Man – An English-language webpage partially preserved at the Internet Archive, with the original poster and many informative links still active (the video is lost)
IMDB LINK: The Tragedy of Man (2011)
OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:
Tragedy of Man (2011) review – short video review by Matthew Ford
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
“The Tragedy of Man” – English translation of the original play
HOME VIDEO INFO:
Deaf Crocodile released the completed version of The Tragedy of Man on Blu-ray in 2025 (buy). It should go without saying that the transfer is top-notch, with Jankovics’ colorful visuals accompanied by a rousing score of classical favorites from Mozart, Liszt, Mussorgsky, and so on. Extras include a commentary track by three film buffs, a visual essay annotating the film’s historical references, and interviews with a a few of the film’s animators and an expert in Hungarian film history. The movie is not available digitally at the time of this writing, but it feels like a moral necessity to have a physical copy of this one—this is a commitment, not a movie to stream on a whim to fill time on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
The Tragedy Of Man
- Legendary Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics’ kaleidoscopic masterwork following the endless battle between Adam, Eve and Lucifer through history.
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