Hungarian film

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Measured against the country's relatively small population, Hungarian films have great cultural significance. The market at the time of the silent film , which was more open due to the technical conditions, facilitated the international distribution of Hungarian productions over several decades. Later, during the liberalizing communist rule under János Kádár , film production became one of the regime's cultural figureheads and received considerable international attention, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, the waves of emigration at the beginning of the 20th century and in the wake of the Hungarian popular uprising of 1956 increased the role of filmmakers of originally Hungarian origin in the international film business.

The time until 1918

Hungarian film history begins with the screening of a film by the Lumière brothers in the café of the Budapest Hotel Royal on May 10, 1896. Hungarian filmmaking developed, initially under French patronage, embedded in the great European empire of the Danube Monarchy . The visit of Emperor Franz Joseph I to the Budapest Millennium Exhibition in 1896 is already documented on film. Here and in a short feature film made in Hungary in 1898 (based on a Hungarian script), French film companies were initially at work. The first actually Hungarian film was A Tánc (1901) (director: Béla Zitkovsky), a film accompanying a lecture by the writer and politician Gyula Pekár in the Urania public education society . Among other things, the then famous actress Lujza Blaha took part in it. In Hungary around 1900, the path of the cinema from being a fairground attraction to being a "serious", middle-class, acceptable entertainment medium followed in step with Europe. Denmark set an example with its first international star Asta Nielsen : Sándor Korda , who began his career as a film critic at the age of 18, had spent several months in Denmark, for example. The first Hungarian film company was the "Projektograph" founded by Mór Ungerleider in 1908 , which also sponsored its own film magazine. Around 1910, the film began to become among the intellectuals oriented towards Western Europe around the magazine Nyugat Mode. Around 1910 there were 270 permanent cinemas in what was then Hungary. In 1911 the Hunnia production company affiliated with the Budapest Vigszinház Theater was founded. Alongside Budapest, the Transylvanian Kolozsvár (Klausenburg, today Cluj) became a center of early Hungarian cinema. The lead was Jenő Janovics , the director of the local theater, who, with the help of the French company Pathé , became the mentor for the first practical test of later important international filmmakers such as Alexander Korda (originally Sándor Korda) and Michael Curtiz (originally Mihály Kertész). Janovics relied on local color and historical fabrics. One of Janovic's most successful films was the period film Bánk Bán (1914), based on the famous tragedy by József Katona . Korda set up his own production company Corvina in Budapest in 1917 and shot the first of three versions of the famous Hungarian novel "Az aranyember" ( The Man with the Golden Heart ) in 1918 . Towards the end of the First World War, Hungary quickly became one of the most important film-producing nations in the world, not least because the Central Powers closed the market to opponents of war such as the pioneering film countries France and the USA.

1918 to 1948

The period from the collapse of the Habsburg Empire to the establishment of communism in the wake of the Second World War was also an eventful one for Hungarian filmmaking. After the end of the short-lived Soviet republic , left-wing filmmakers like the film theorist Béla Balázs left the country. Soon the Weimar Republic also had a brain drain with its growing film production ( Alexander Korda , Emeric Pressburger etc.). In the relative political and economic stability of the Horthy era , the Hungarian film industry also consolidated, not least thanks to discrete aid from the state, and primarily provided the audience with the entertainment films they wanted . According to experts, the phase of the "artistic" silent film of Expressionism largely bypassed the Hungarian film industry. The tendency towards pure entertainment cinema continued with the triumphant advance of the sound film (which massively disadvantaged Hungarian as a "small language"). Hippolyt a lakáj (1931) with the popular comedian Gyula Kabos as the title character and Meseauto (1934) by Béla Gaál are typical examples of this "dream factory" era, whose escapist comedies were intended to divert attention from growing economic and political threats. At the end of the 1930s, the conservatively ruled Hungary found itself surrounded by fascist powers and drifted into ever closer, fatal dependence on Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Third Reich. The Hungarian race laws introduced on January 1, 1939 eliminated the film activities of such successful directors as Paál, István Székely and Viktor Gertler , but Kabos was no longer allowed to play either. The film industry increasingly produced "heroic" films, melodramas and fate tragedies for this purpose. The actress and singer Katalin Karády became the Hungarian femme fatale of the 1940s. Emberek a havason (People on the Mountain Top ) won the Grand Prize of the Venice Film Festival in 1942 . At the end of the war, Hungary, which was predominantly pro-Western, found itself part of the Soviet sphere of influence.

1948 to 1989

Valahol Europában (Somewhere in Europe), director was Géza von Radványi , signaled openness and optimism in 1947, but in 1948 Stalinist totalitarianism began. Some Hungarians were inclined to grant the new regime a certain leap of faith, for example the poorer rural population who had previously lived in a kind of late feudalist system - the government tried to signal a kind of social awakening by obliging filmmakers. Zoltán Fábri's film Körhinta ( Carousel ) from 1955 with the young Mari Törőcsik as the star provides an artistically successful example. The ubiquitous social repression, later the subject of numerous films, for example of Vera's Education (1979), led to the political explosion in 1956 (and subsequently to mass emigration, which also affected important filmmakers such as the cameramen Jean Badal and Vilmos Zsigmond ). Some overly critical films from the period of upheaval, such as those by Tamás Banovich , Zoltán Várkonyi , or Lászlo Kalmár , were banned for decades. From the end of the 1950s, however, the regime slowly moderated its repressive measures and the film industry became a kind of liberal figurehead - not least because the fundamental opposition to the "socialist" society was less pronounced among filmmakers than, for example, among writers. The films of the Hungarian New Wave of the 1960s, with which filmmakers such as Miklós Jancsó , István Szabó and Károly Makk established themselves internationally, attracted a great deal of attention among Western European cineastes . Commercial success outside of Hungary was only achieved by Szabó, who was allowed to go international co-productions early on. The Hungarian Film Week was held for the first time in 1965, creating an internationally recognized platform for Hungarian film. Even if Hungarian filmmaking was (and is) male-dominated, some women were able to establish themselves as directors during the period of Real Socialism, such as Judit Elek , Márta Mészáros and, at the very end, Ildikó Enyedi with her late debut film Az én XX. századom ( My 20th Century ).

Since 1989

Towards the end of communist rule, a kind of end-time feeling spread among many Hungarian filmmakers. The previously protected domestic film market was opened up with increasing liberalization, American and (by far) Western European productions flooded the Hungarian cinemas. The Hungarian audience largely refused to deal with the dark visions of the Hungarian avant-garde filmmakers, but many within the industry strictly rejected Hollywoodization and feared for their subsidies. From the beginning of the 1990s, there was a gradual departure from this apocalyptic phase. Entertainment films like those by Róbert Koltai or Peter Bacsó slowly gained ground again, the Hungarian-Jewish humor of the interwar period was rediscovered and in some cases used as a benchmark. Gábor Gelencsér put it in an exaggerated form (In filmkultura.hu 1999) that there was nothing but comedies in Hungarian film before the war and nothing in comedies after the war, but that was no longer true. New, politically determined big films, such as the one about István Széchenyi , however, attracted considerable parts of the available funds. Participation in international co-productions became an increasingly essential tool for survival. The future of Hungarian filmmaking should also orient itself in this latter direction.

In 2004, 21 films were made in Hungary, compared to 26 in 2005.

literature

  • Gyöngyi Balogh: History of the Hungarian Film from the Beginning until 1945 in Filmkultura.hu 2000 (see web link)
  • Eszter Fazekas: Main Tendencies of Hungarian Film from 1945 till 1979 in filmkultura hu 2000 (see web link)
  • Erzsi Báthory: The Second Great Era of Hungarian Film from the 80s till Today in filmkultura.hu 2000, (see web link)
  • Christina Maria Wagner in Andrew L. Simon: Made in Hungary. Hungarian Contributions to Universal Culture , Internet publication 1998, pp. 98 ff
  • Terézia Kriedemann: The Béla Balázs Studio and the Hungarian New Wave in the 1960s , in Kulturation 1/2003 (online)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ www.fafo.at - Weltfilmproduktionsbericht (PDF) ( Memento from August 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Screen Digest, June 2006, accessed on October 3, 2015.