OCR
130 Ildikó Sz. Kristóf From Movies to Childrens Books and Beyond Figure 3 shows the frontispiece image of Mays popular tetralogy, Winnetou, published in Hungarian for children in 1974 by the childrens publishing house, Móra, in Budapest. Figure 4 is a black and white drawing from A Nagy Medve fiai, the Hungarian translation of Die Söhne der Grossen Bärin, a two-volume novel of Welskopf-Henrich (1901-1979), a popular East German writer of the time (her novel has been published in German since 1951). The Hungarian translation came out in 1971 in Budapest, it was made from one of the original German texts (it is not specified though which one) and was addressed to the Hungarian youth. Accordingly, new drawings were attached to it. If one takes a closer look at these two pictures in the figures, one finds a certain resemblance of the Indian chiefs depicted in them to the contemporary movie stars shown in figures 1 and 2. The resemblance to Miti¢ is especially remarkable as to the physical appearance, the shape of the figure of the Indian shown in both Figure 3 and Figure 4. The body of Winnetou drawn in Figure 3 by a renowned Hungarian graphic artist of the day, Adam Wiirz (1927-1994), seems to bear peculiar similarity to Miti¢s body presented in movies like The Sons of the Great Bear (1966), Trail of the Falcon (1968), Osceola (1971), and so on. The body and the face of the French actor Pierre Brice could however also affect the illustrations, especially Figure 3, and other drawings of Winnetou. Brice played the role of May’s Apache chief in the movies Winnetou I (1963) and Winnetou II (1964) and featured in some other great Indian films of the 1960s and 1970s. As for the black and white drawing in Figure 4, it represents Tokei-ihto, an imagined Sioux (Dakota) chief whose character was played by Miti¢ in The Sons of the Great Bear. This movie, as mentioned above, was based upon the novel entitled Die Söhne der Grossen Bärin of Welskopf-Henrich (who also wrote the screenplay), and the drawing was made by a Hungarian graphic artist, Tamäs Szecskö (19251987), who had produced numerous illustrations for children and youth literature of the period.’ The image shown in Figure 4 is taken from the Hungarian adaptation of the novel (1971). If one examines the shape of the face of Tokei-ihto in that drawing, one finds again possible traces of the influence of the face of the young Miti¢—especially the form of his head, his face, and especially his cheeks. Examples are numerous; much of infiltration and interpenetration can be detected among the different media of the socialist period conveying representations of those rather imagined indigenous inhabitants of North America. One can trace 7 "The son of Tamäs Szecskö, Peter Szecskö, has also become a graphic artist, making illustrations for childrens’ books. He illustrated, for example, the Hungarian translation of Grey Owl’s The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People, published in 1975 by Móra Ferenc Könyvkiadó (see Szürke 1975). Ihe first Hungarian translation of this work was due to Ervin Baktay (1890-1963), painter, traveller, and Orientalist who did a lot for popularizing North American Indian culture in Hungary between the two world wars, and after WWII he initiated the first “Indian camp”, a kind of hobbyist movement for Hungarian intellectuals in the 1930s. This “camp” was copied later on as well in different places in Hungary; one of the elderly contributors of my research had met Baktay in the 1960s.