Hungarian cinema has often been forced to tread a precarious and difficult path. Through the failed 1919 revolution to the defeat of the 1956 Uprising and its aftermath, Hungarian film-makers and their audiences have had to contend with a multiplicity of problems. In the 1960s, however, Hungary entered into a period of relative stability and increasing cultural relaxation, resulting in an astonishing growth of film-making. Innovative and groundbreaking directors such as Miklós Jancsó (Hungarian Rhapsody, The Red and the White), István Szabó (Mephisto, Sunshine) and Márta Mészaros (Little Vilma: The Last Diary) emerged and established the reputation of Hungarian films on a global basis. This is the first book to discuss all major aspects of Hungarian cinema, including avant-garde, animation, and representations of the Gypsy and Jewish minorities.

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 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.

"... excellent... " --Slavic Review "... displays a depth of scholarship and breadth of research which in the main is distilled into a fascinating read. At last Mészáros is getting the attention she deserves." --Sight and Sound "Drawing on personal reminiscences, interviews with Meszaros, and critiques of individual films, Portuges delineates in detailed and convincing fashion the cultural contradictions surrounding Meszaros and her art." --Signs "This book provides engaging insight to works by one of Hungary's best contemporary filmmakers, Márta Mészáros." --Canadian Slavonic Papers A fascinating exploration of the culture of post-Stalinist Eastern Europe through a detailed study of the achievements of its foremost woman director--and revealing interviews with the filmmaker and her collaborators. Márta Mészáros's visual representations of youth, sexual difference, and class conflict challenged official socialist versions of gender, family relations, and workers' lives. Her films include documentaries and features and the recently completed Diary of My Father and Mother.

Between 1929 and 1942, Hungary's motion picture industry experienced meteoric growth. It leapt into Europe's top echelon, trailing only Nazi Germany and Italy in feature output. Yet by 1944, Hungary's cinema was in shambles, internal and external forces having destroyed its unification experiments and productive capacity. This original cultural and political history examines the birth, unexpected ascendance, and wartime collapse of Hungary's early sound cinema by placing it within a complex international nexus. Detailing the interplay of Hungarian cultural and political elites, Jewish film professionals and financiers, Nazi officials, and global film moguls, David Frey demonstrates how the transnational process of forging an industry designed to define a national culture proved particularly contentious and surprisingly contradictory in the heyday of racial nationalism and antisemitism.

Analysis of 24 films including: People of the mountains, Ashes and diamonds, Knife in the water, A shop on the high street, Closely observed trains, Daisies, Man of marble, Colonel Redl, The decalogue (Dekalog), Satantango, The garden, Alice (directed by Jan Svankmajer).

This work maps the rich, varied cinema of Eastern Europe, Russia and the former USSR. Over 200 entries cover a variety of topics spanning a century of endeavour and turbulent history from Czech animation to Soviet montage, from the silent cinemas dating back to World War I through to the varied responses to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. It includes entries on actors and actresses, film festivals, studios, genres, directors, film movements, critics, producers and technicians, taking the coverage up to the late 1990s. In addition to the historical material of key figures like Eisenstein and Wadja, the editors provide separate accounts of the trajectory of the cinemas of Eastern Europe and of Russia in the wake of the collapse of communism.