Agents of Socialist Realism

Abstract

This article analyzes the ways the educational- and propaganda films produced by the film studio of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior during the 1950s and 60s are part of the broader landscape of socialist realist culture. The author proposes that by tracing the transformations of the fatherly police agent figure across the productions of the film studio, we can understand how the project of socialist realism itself began to change in the aforementioned period. In this light, the police agent becomes a figure on whom the shifting epistemological status of representation under state socialism is projected.