Remembering bodies: picturing the body in Hungarian cinema after the fall of communism

Abstract

ABSTRACTOne of the most interesting features of contemporary Hungarian cinema is the frequent use of bodies and corpses as central tropes in films. The directors of the so-called Young Hungarian Cinema of the 2000s often build their stories around bodies in order to discuss various psychological, social and historical problems. The great number of such films seems to indicate that this phenomenon is part of an overall trend in Hungarian films that, in many cases, has a direct connection to the representation of historical memory and the depiction of post-socialist identity formation. In this article, I examine two films, István Szabó: A napfény íze/Sunshine (1999) and György Pálfi: Taxidermia (2005), that use the body as one of their main tools for dealing with the questions of historical memory and the depiction of socialist and post-socialist identity. The selection of these two films also provides an opportunity to detect the differences between the approach of two generations of filmmakers to the historicization of socialism and to the post-socialist condition.