Screen memory: The Jewish question

Abstract

This paper explores intersections of memory and cinematic representation in contemporary Hungarian film culture. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, with the concomitant financial crisis in Hungarian cinema, a number of films have foregrounded questions of Jewish identity, a taboo subject on Hungarian screens after 1945 when nationalistic historiography supported an official government culture of denial with regard to responsibility for the deportation and extermination of some 550 000 Hungarian Jews. The production of relatively few narrative and documentary films on this subject, the essay suggests, is perhaps in part attributable to the fact that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 tended to eclipse the drama of Jewish deportation and genocide. The authors consider post-socialist filmmakers’ uses of the past in the context of the country’s current nationalistic climate, interrogating the impact of controversal films such as László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015, Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival ; Academy Award for best foreign film) within a Hungarian society still conflicted about its Holocaust trauma.