Post-Transition Hungarian Cinema and Its National Imagery: The 26th Annual Hungarian Film Festival

Abstract

The 26th Annual Hungarian Film week, held in February 1995, offered a valuable opportunity to assess the state of the nation's visual culture in the mid-1990s. Like its former East-bloc counterparts, Hungarian cinema has admittedly grown leaner since the changes of 1989: 14 features and 39 documentaries were presented in competition, compared with last year's 25thJubilee Festival of 25 features and 50 documentaries. Ten were coproductions, four had non-Hungarian directors and four were shot on video. Budget cuts reduced by 50 percent the 180 foreign critics, distributors and programmers customarily invited, while the festival itself was held not in the imposing Novotel Congre-ss Center but in Budapest's venerable Feszek Club, with screenings scheduled in city theater venues. Nonetheless, the rich diversity of offerings and the fine production values betrayed surprisingly little of the ongoing economic crises that characterize east-central European national cinemas, suggesting instead that Hungarian filmmaking remains a vibrant artistic community, bravely struggling for profitability and resisting the cocoon of invisibility that increasingly envelops smaller national cinemas. The Hungarian Historical Film Foundation contributed substantially to the production of both documentaries and features, accounting in part for the concentration of films on the consequences of the 1956 uprising, the Holocaust and the history of Hungarian ethnic minorities abroad. Hybrid narrative forms of fragmented cultural identity, several films were structured from the perspective of a single protagonist, as opposed to communist-era vehicles of nationalist discourse that foregrounded larger social contexts. Expressing a sense of internal otherness, an iconographically visualized tendency to recuperate representations of difference and alterity marks a reversal of the territorial imagery of Hungary's communist heritage; among other things, this strategy, evident in motion pictures as elsewhere in public life, privileges the rhetorical use of Central over Eastern Europe. The distinguished director Andras Kovacs presided over ajury that included a priest and member of parliament, a historian, a writer and a cinematographer. Life achievement awards were inaugurated to honor distinguished members of the profession: the actor, Mikl6s Gabor; the editor, Mihaly Morell; and the set designerJ6zsef Romvari. Also noted was the passing of Imre Gyongossy, who achieved mnajor international success with The Revolt ofJob (Job Lazaddsa, 1982), winner of the CannesJury Prize and a 1983 Oscar nomination for its portrayal of a gentile boy separated from his adoptiveJewish parents in the Holocaust. Gy6ngy6ssy's final script was written for Europe is Far Away (Eu-