This book investigates the formations of masculinity in Hungarian cinema after the fall of communism and explores some of the cultural phenomena of the years following the 1989 regime change. The films explored offer a unique perspective encompassing two entirely different worlds: state socialism and neoliberal capitalism. The films suggest that Eastern Europe is somehow different than its western counterpart and that its subjects are marked by what they went through before and after 1989. These films are all remembering, interpreting, picturing, marketing and trying to come to terms with this difference—with the memory and effects of state-socialism. In looking closely at the films’ male figures, one may not only get a glimpse of the dramatic changes Eastern European societies went through after the fall of communism but also see the brave new world of global neoliberal capitalism through the eyes of the Eastern European newcomers.

This volume offers a unique exploration of how ageing masculinities are constructed and represented in contemporary international cinema. With chapters spanning a range of national cinemas, the primarily European focus of the book is juxtaposed with analysis of the social and cultural constructions of manhood and the "anti-ageing" impulses of male stardom in contemporary Hollywood. These themes are inflected in different ways throughout the volume, from considering how old age is not the monolithic and unified life stage with which it is often framed, to exploring issues of queerness, sexuality, and asexuality, as well as themes such as national cinema and dementia. Offering a diverse and multifaceted portrait of ageing and masculinity in contemporary cinema, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film and screen studies, gender and masculinity studies, and cultural gerontology.

This book explores the cinematic representations of the pervasive socio-cultural change that the 21st century brought to Europe and the world. Discussing films such as I, Daniel Blake, Cold War and Jupiter’s Moon, it puts distinctively “post-crisis”, gendered representations in a complex, theoretically informed and socially committed interdisciplinary perspective that maps the newly emerging formations of masculinity at a time of rapid socio-economic transition. Kalmar argues that the series of crises that started with the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed some of our fundamental expectations about history, debunked many of our grand narratives, and thus changed the cultural logic of our (thoroughly globalized) civilization. The book focuses on the ways cinema reflects, interprets and shapes a rapidly changing world: the hot issues of the times, the new formations of identity, and the shifts in cinematic representation. This is an interdisciplinary research that is equally interested in what new the 21st century brought about, most specifically to Europe and to its white men, as in film and its responses to these socio-cultural changes.

This book examines the structuring of space in Romanian and Hungarian cinema, and particularly how space is used to express the deep imprint of a socialist past on a post-socialist present. It considers this legacy of the Eastern European socialist regimes by interrogating the suffocating, tyrannical and enclosing structures that are presented in film. By tracing such paradigmatic models as horizontal and vertical enclosure, this book aims to show how enclosed spatial structuring restages the post-socialist era to produce an implicit and collective form of remembrance. While closely scrutinizing the interplay of location and image, Space in Romanian and Hungarian Cinema offers a new approach to the cinema of the region, which unites the filmic productions under a defined, post-socialist Eastern European spatial umbrella. By simultaneously portraying the gloom of a socialist past, while also conveying a sense of longing for a pre-capitalist era, these films convey how sense of unity and also ambivalence is a defining hallmark of Eastern European cinema.

This book offers an analysis of values in Hungary. Following the proposition that civic values are crucial to liberal democracy and conducive to international peace, this book examines the extent to which these values are respected and practised in a number of policy spheres, with chapters devoted to the political system, the media, religion, relations with the European Union, history textbooks, cinema, Roma, and the attitudes of Hungarian women voters. The book also charts how, under Prime Minister Orbán, Hungary has gravitated away from the civic values spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of the European Union. This book will prove to be of great use to scholars and students of democracy, East Central Europe, minorities, Hungarian contemporary history and politics, civic culture, gender studies, nationalism, human rights, and more broadly the social sciences.

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern bloc. As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema's relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society. Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. The diverse theoretical approaches that unravel this in-betweenness contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole.

This volume examines the various forms of mobility in the cinema of the Visegrad countries and Romania, bringing together the cross-disciplinary research of mostly native scholars. Divided into four thematic sections, it expands the reader’s understanding of the political transition and the social changes it triggered, the transforming perceptions of gender roles and especially masculinity. The spaces of “in betweenness” and contact zones, whether geographical, interethnic or communicative, (im)mobility and transmedial encounters of Eastern European subjectivity are recurring figures of both cinematic representations and their theoretical analyses. In-depth and transcultural in their nature, the investigations gathered in this volume are informed by political, social and cultural history, genre, gender and spatial theory, cultural studies, sociology and political science, and, of equal importance, the rich personal experience of the authors who witnessed many of the discussed phenomena in “close-up”.