2 results
1 - Intermedially Emotional: Musical Mood Cues, Disembodied Feelings in Contemporary Hungarian Melodramas
- Edited by Ágnes Pethő
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- Book:
- Caught In-Between
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2020, pp 27-44
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Summary
A NEW AGE OF WOMEN's PICTURES
Contemporary Hungarian cinema presents a growing number of films that can be called melodramas in terms of their plot and formal excess compensating for the few dialogues and passivity of the protagonists. Many of these films belong to feminine sub-genres, more specifically maternal melodramas or the melodramas of single women. However, these films are not domestic melodramas in the sense that family and a home are invariably missing from them. Home ceases to be a place where these characters can make themselves understood without much difficulty, which triggers the typical melodramatic paradox scenario that they cannot be at home and be themselves at the same time (see more about this in Király 2015: 178). In contrast with the classic melodrama where the milieu appeared as an imprint of the character's psychological condition, the decor of the places they move in or away from does not or only partially reflects their state of mind, which calls for other expressive, often aural solutions. Additionally, in the Eastern European context, work-related mobility and post-communist disorientation leads to changing constructions of ‘womanhood’, of the ‘maternal’ and the ‘feminine’. With the opening borders after the change of regime and EU membership, many Eastern European women – single or married – chose to leave the country and their homes for varying lengths of time, attracted by a better labour market in Western European countries. This new, work-related mobility creating a similarly mobile notion of home challenges the traditional roles of womanand motherhood that were still valid under communism.
There are seven films that I will be referring to in my analysis, three of which are maternal melodramas: Ágnes Kocsis's Fresh Air (Friss levegő, 2006), Peter Strickland's Katalin Varga (Varga Katalin balladája, 2009), Szabolcs Hajdu's Bibliotheque Pascal (2010), and four are single woman-melodramas: Kornél Mundruczó's Johanna (2005), Ágnes Kocsis's Adrienn Pál (2010), Károly Ujj-Mészáros's Liza, the Fox Fairy (Liza, a rókatündér, 2015) and Ildikó Enyedi's Of Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről, 2017). What is intriguing about these films is their general lack of emotion: not only that violent emotional outbursts are completely missing, but (despite the huge pressure of their social circumstances) the female protagonists remain expressionless, moving around with blank faces and minimal gestures, almost speechless.
9 - Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions
- Edited by Louis Bayman, University of Southampton, Natalia Pinazza, University of Exeter
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- Book:
- Journeys on Screen
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2018, pp 147-164
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Summary
Introduction
In the past ten years or so, Hungarian and Romanian films have attracted considerable attention at international festivals as representatives of postnational cinemas. These co-productions accurately depict, even down to their production process, a socio-economic crisis that characterises the two countries ever since the fall of the communist régimes. Intriguingly, the arthouse cinemas of the two countries adhere to different film historical paradigms: while New Romanian Cinema (also called the Romanian New Wave) starts from a neo-realist background and has in the last few years moved towards a taste for experimentation and conceptualisation (represented most eloquently by the films of Corneliu Porumboiu), Hungarian films seem to continue the modernist tradition with their preference for a poetic figurative quality. However, despite their stylistic differences, contemporary Hungarian and Romanian films show striking similarities in representing journeys that are aborted, delayed, interrupted, with protagonists ending up in situations of entrapment. Films depicting female mobility enrich the topic of the impossible journey with further meanings that call for a gendered, cultural interpretation of this phenomenon that would contribute to the discourse on films representing transnational mobility and various types of border crossings – either geopolitical or social – triggered by three major sociopolitical events: the change of régime in 1989, the two countries’ joining of the EU in 2004 and 2007 respectively, and the economic crisis beginning in 2008. Relying on recent debates on the cinematic representation of European mobility, I propose to reveal some socio-cultural specificities of Eastern European female journeys through an analysis of three films – Iszka utazása/Iska's Journey (Csaba Bollók, 2007), Varga Katalin balladája/Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009) and Bibliothèque Pascal (Szabolcs Hajdu, 2010). Each of these films represents the incomplete, fragmented journey of a female protagonist of a different age, but with similarities that enable them to be taken together as a single, representative narrative of a quest for a home and identity, endangered by betrayal and physical or psychological aggression. Moreover, the three films appear as variations of the topic of female victimisation, involving a second-wave feminist critical discourse on a traditional, patriarchal society on the one hand and a post-colonial approach to Eastern European (female) subjectivity, affected by a Western colonising gaze, on the other.