Simultaneous Social And Scientific Advancement - Ildiko Enyedi's "My Twentieth Century"

Ildiko Enyedi, My Twentieth Century (1989)
3-7-07


Ildiko Enyedi’s first feature film, My Twentieth Century (1989), is both cinematically beautiful and intellectually thought provoking and troubling. As mentioned in our class discussion, the film does not rely heavily on a linear plot as much as it expresses themes through juxtapositions and episodic portraits of situations that comment on each other. In isolation, any single “episodic part” would not tell us much about the messages and themes of the film as a whole; these themes are compounded through their repetition within different contexts. For example, the theme of freedom is perhaps the most prevalent throughout the film. It is depicted in terms of animals and symbols as well as through the freedom each of the twin sisters have or strive to possess.

As the film opens, we are reminded of the progress of Edison as he ushered in a new way of life with the invention of the light bulb. Bright bulbs fill the dark screen and we see a new freedom for mankind as he will continue to make technological advancements. Yet, at the end of the scene, the camera focuses in on Edison looking blankly into the dark, star lit sky. Voices are heard, telling him not to be sad, but to look toward, Europe – Budapest. There is a cut to a mother giving birth across the globe. As she holds her twins, we see a different, yet perhaps even more astonishing miracle, that of childbirth. The twins’ names appear below them: Dora and Lili, but any feelings of hope for a future full of possibility are complicated by the next, fated scene of the twins as young girls selling matches in the street. They fall asleep and chance has it that they be separated to grow independently from one another, exerting different levels of freedom and operating under different conceptions of femininity in their opposite environments.

We do not see the girls again, until the turning of the century when they both board the Orient Express and we notice that Dora has grown into a materialistic and sexually manipulative woman while Lili has devoted her life to political activism and blushes at the glance of a man. The two women could not be more opposite, but their opposition does not fully speak to the furthering of the freedom of women because it only represents two notions of women – as either virgin or whore, while a truly free and independently meaningful woman would be a complex combination of both.

The sequences/episodes of the dog being tested and caged all of his life and then set free and of the monkey fascinated with man’s grimace, who is captured comment on the lives of the twins who have, by chance been caged within certain parameters by being defined as either virgin or whore. After hearing the Weininger speech, Lili illustrates how deeply women can be trapped within their own lives, questioning whether they are anything by their own nature, totally absent from men or living according to a man’s influence. It is almost as if they opposite lives of the twins is an experiment in finding the nature of woman – they each deal with men and independence in different ways, but ultimately, neither possesses the freedom they seek; Dora cannot be free because she depends on using her sexuality to manipulate men and economically support herself; Lili is not free because she devotes herself entirely to politics and wonders whether women do have any identity of their own or if it is true that “the absolute woman has no self.” The end of the film suggests that the true woman embodies aspects of both virgin and whore and that this realization is just as necessary to the progress of mankind as any new technological advancement.

The final statement of the film is a bit troubling to me. We return to the shots of Edison, asked to talk about the telegraph and one statement in particular stands out: “The world, which was created by God, is magnificent. And man, who has learned to shape it, is also magnificent.” The fact that this comes directly after Z’s realization that he desires a woman who is both virgin and whore seems to suggest that man has learned that woman is not capable of being rigidly classified, or at least has begun to notice that she has a nature of her own and that his perception of her must be shaped according to that reality. However, the statement relies heavily on “man.” Man is responsible for shaping his world, while woman continues to hope for new possibilities in future generations (suggested by the return to the twin birth scene from the beginning of the film), according to an alternate reading of the statement.