The Life of an Agent
Az ügynök élete
2006, black and white, 82 mins
- Director: Gábor Zsigmond Papp
- Writer: Gábor Zsigmond Papp
- Script Editor: Miklós Tamási
- Camera: Balázs Dobóczi
- Editor: Szilárd Nagy
- Music: Szabolcs Molnár
- Narrators: János Kulka, Zoltán Rátóti
- Producer: Gábor Zsigmond Papp
- Production Company: Bologna Film
- Cast: Ferenc Elek, Róbert Kardos (voices of spies)
Following a tip-off, I recently had a rummage around the Doc-Air portal website. Launched just over a year ago, the Prague-based site is designed to facilitate the distribution of documentaries from central and eastern Europe. At the time of writing, they have 87 on offer, available in various formats, the price dependent on quality, and there may be territorial restrictions depending on the rightsholder’s wishes.
After exploring their catalogue, I thought Gábor Zsigmond Papp’s documentary The Life of an Agent (Az ügynök élete, 2006) looked intriguing, so I watched the ultra-low-resolution trailer to confirm that it had English subtitles, and took the plunge. You’re given three options: a streamed copy costs €1 ($1.33), a DivX/XviD download is €3 ($3.99) and a full DVD download is €4.50 ($5.99). As I was curious about what the highest possible quality would look like, I downloaded the DVD version. It’s a no-frills presentation – the menu consists merely of the title in English, which you click on to play, and there are no chapter stops – but the picture and sound quality are fine, and the subtitles are clear and idiomatic (bar the odd translation slip-up: at one point a character says “I have two sons, a boy and a girl”). While the default setting is with English subtitles on, they can be switched off.
The film is primarily a showcase of genuine state-sponsored training films made during the János Kádár era (1956-88, though the material mostly dates from the 1960s and 70s), designed to show spies and secret agents the tricks of their trade. It’s presented in four parts, each running about 20 minutes. “Where to put the bug?” looks at surveillance techniques, covering how to shadow targets to surreptitious photography/filming to far more elaborate preparation of full-scale video recording via pre-concealed hidden cameras (whose installation is shown in full). “Introduction to home-raid” shows how to conduct an undercover house search, first by sending the target to a spurious medical appointment, copying his keys and address book once he’s undressed and being examined. The raid then takes place, the agents instructed to wear felt slippers to avoid leaving any marks, and are also told to note aspects of their target’s character, in order to better anticipate the kind of hiding places they might choose for contraband.
Watching this first half of the film, it’s impossible not to be reminded of Peter Wright’s notorious comment that “For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State’s behest” in the book Spycatcher, a reminder that this sort of thing was by no means restricted to totalitarian states. The home raid section also has a coda that reveals the paranoia of the people who made the films – there’s a long list of tricks that the target might use to detect the fact that there had been a raid, including taking a reading of the electricity meter before leaving. As the commentary points out, most people simply weren’t that obsessive, and this merely served to waste vast amounts of agents’ time. (Not that that was necessarily a bad thing). Throughout, they’re told what to do in the event of certain discoveries – “If investigators find foreign medicine, radio receiver, foreign papers or other signs indicating treason, they have to report to State Security instantly”.
The second half of the film changes tack to look at the people who were being trained for these jobs. “Introduction to enlistment” shows that it was either a voluntary or involuntary process, the latter generally a by-product of the authorities discovering something incriminating about the potential recruit. Because the state needed to spy on as many people as possible, they naturally needed a big pool of recruits – the commentary reveals that there were 20,000 agents working for the Kádár regime, spying on 70,000 people directly and over 30,000 more indirectly, adding up to over 1% of the country’s entire population at the time – with another 100,000 contributing in other ways, such as informing on colleagues. Here, the training films become glossier, their production values noticeably higher, sometimes even featuring famous actors (to Hungarians, anyway) performing dramatised scenes, the centrepiece being the story of how a worker was essentially blackmailed into becoming an agent thanks to an incriminating document. Finally “Effective network” explores the relationship between agent and ‘keeper’, the agent’s higher-level minder. Meetings can either take place surreptitiously in public or, if deemed overly sensitive, in one of a number of flats (or “conspiracy apartments”) owned by the government for just such a purpose. Or they could simply swap notes or microfilms via a series of hidden collection points.
The footage from the training films is often presented silent, though occasionally we hear snippets of the original narration, which invariably refers to the agents as “the comrades”, to emphasise that their activities were for the benefit of society as a whole. It’s safe to assume that the strongly Sixties-inflected spy-thriller score is a new addition – but though this initially sounds tacky, but it actually complements the images beautifully, as it’s impossible not to think of their fictional equivalents when watching them. To strengthen this impression, Papp parallels the authentic footage with a series of reconstructions, during which we hear two bored agents whiling away the time – and occasionally missing their man as a result. Aside from these dramatised snippets, the narration generally refrains from overt political comment – a wise decision, since this kind of spoon-feeding is hardly necessary when the source materials are so inadvertently revealing. The absence of talking-head commentary is also welcome, as it frees up more time for archive trawling.
All in all, The Life of an Agent is one of the most fascinating documentaries of its type since Dana Ranga and Andrew Horn’s voyage into the world of the socialist musical in East Side Story (1997). I haven’t yet seen Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s much-acclaimed The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen, 2006), but I suspect it would make a perfect companion-piece to Papp’s film.
Links
- Variety review (Joe Leydon, 19 June 2006)