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Gábor Gelencsér:
Fates of servants. A filmic history of a literary motif
In the
intermediary period of Hungarian filmic history between 1954-1962,
an era of transition between schematism towards modernism, a few
films are connected to each other through a common motif
(additionally to another common feature that they are all adaptations
of literary workds): their main characters are servants, people who
are exposed to their fates materially and/or socially. What connects
theses partly well known, party less known movies, is the fact that
they reflect on the collective Hungarian experience of
the 1950s and the period after the fall of the 1956 revolution.
thanks to the major motif found in the works of classical authors of
the pre-1945 era these movies go beyond explicit political
actualization and social criticism, and rather express the
anthropological essence of the era through the stories of servants.
Based on the above perspective, the paper analyses six films directed
by Zoltán Fábri, János Herskó, Félix ;
Máriássy, Imre Fehér, and Endre Marton.
Full text in Hungarian →
Kiss Attila Atilla: Pages of recollections. Retrology, anatomy and memory in early modern and post-modern English drama
In this paper I introduce
the term retrology to signify the social ideology which compels the
subject to reconstruct and appropriate the past, and employs this
idea of the past to articulate a vision of the future in a
teleological narrative of progress. Both early modern and postmodern
dramas question the possibility of this retrological reconstruction,
and the plays thematize the retrological catastrophes together with
the epistemological and thanatological crisis that are so
characteristic of the two periods. My investigation attempts to
compare how English protomodern and postmodern dramas employ the
traditions of the memory theater and the anatomy theater in mapping
the retrological questions.
Full text in Hungarian →
Anikó
Oroszlán: "What's
in a name?" Johnny English and the Renaissance comic tradition
The
paper examines
the self-legitimising system of gestures that is characteristic of
early modern comic players as well as Shakespearean clowns. As I will
argue, this kind of acting is detectable in the film Johnny
English
(2003) too; what is more, the name of the main character is rich in
early modern theatrical references. Not only the main interluder of
Henry VII, but also the leading actors of travelling troupes were
often called ‘English John'.
Nevertheless,
Johnny English is a parody of another well-known figure of the
popular tradition: as a clumsy national anti-hero, he ironically
represents both secret agent 007 and the English comedian as
‘servants' to the crown.
When
analysing this, it is also interesting to consider that Rowan
Atkinson can be seen as the early modern comedians' successor,
since his private self and the comic image (cf. Mr. Bean) cannot be
separated clearly.
Full text in Hungarian →
Lóránt
Stőhr: Reality cinema in the
digital age. The reinterpretation of fiction and documentary based on
the DVD text of I Am Not Your
Friend
The
new digital technologies challenge the traditional status of
documentary and narrativity in moving picture. Lev Manovich writes on
DV-realism and projects the future of film makers as
interface designers who work with (quasi-)documentary materials. The
DVD is one of the most popular media of films, its simple interface
handles moving pictures, sound tracks, texts and photos arranged in a
database structure. With these features the DVD can change the way we
understand narratives. The paper explores the permanent changes of
interpretation levels of narrative and documentary materials during
the navigation on the DVD intratext. My example is György Pálfi's
I
Am Not Your Friend-project,
a collection of documentaries and improvised fiction film that exist
only on DVD. This case study will focus on different forms and levels
of performativity of the project in order to prove that this DVD
intratext eliminates the border between fiction and documentary, and
works rather as a catalogue of human behavior than a collection of
(fictive and documentary) narratives.
Full text in Hungarian →
Dispute
Miklós
Sághy: The future of film: database or/and (interactive) narrative?
In my
essay, continuing the debate with Zoltán Dragon (Apertúra
Spring 2011), I primarily argue that database structure and
contemporary (digital) film narrative cannot be compared, since they
are completely different entities. Instead of this kind of
comparison, I suggest that we should comprehend the impact of digital
media on filmic storytelling by means of matching interactive
narratives (which we know from video
and computer games) with traditional
narratives.
Full text in Hungarian →
Zoltán Dragon: New
movie, or the whole world is a database. Reply on Miklós Sághy's
reflections entitled The
future of film: database or/and (interactive) narrative?
The paper addresses
questions and issues raised by Miklós Sághy's reflection, "The
Future of Film: Database and/or (Interactive) Narrative?". Besides
providing definitions for the most important terminology deployed in
the essay, the paper tackles different aspects of digital moving
pictures, such as algorithm, database, and code. The logics and
connections of algorithm and database are discussed in relation with
possible ways of representations of the interface. Furthermore, the
study also touches on the latest modes of representation and future
potentials of the digital film, and introduces the term "new movie"
(cf. new media) that covers the surfacing of code in the realm of
representation - an element of the digital that has hitherto been
seen as an underlying organizing aspect.
Full text in Hungarian →
Deleuzeian reading of authorial portraits
Győri Zsolt:
Cracks and fissures: notes on the
oeuvre of John Huston
My
study hopes to introduce a Deleuzeian auterist reading of the oeuvre
of John Huston and thus enrich the study
of his cinema. Although Deleuze takes little time to discuss Huston's
body of works, I am convinced that it is possible to establish a
lively dialogue between the stylistic and narrative features of his
films and the concepts Deleuze discusses in relation to the
action-image, that, is classical Hollywood cinema. In my
understanding Huston made it his primary goal to address 20th
century existence as something closely linked to the feeling of
homelessness and isolation and being enslaved by passions and
anxieties. He always turned towards human miseries and a world of
emptiness with deep humanity and fascination, and likewise made sure
that besides desolation he also captured moments of genesis, the
birth of new sensibilities, values, deeds and ideas. In each film
analyzed I take a close look at psychological realism as a mode of
address and hope to find answers to the following questions: what
makes the active and passive hero, what is the dramatic logic of
conflicts, what types of conflicts does Huston employ and why?
Full text in Hungarian →
Tamás
Soós: "Everything That Shines":
The (Moving) Images of Terrence Malick
The
essay concentrates on the visual,
specifically "filmic" components - pictorial compositions,
editing technique, mise-en-scéne - of the films of Terrence
Malick, taking these elements as constituents of his auteurist way of
visual thinking, which can probably shed new light on his recurrent
themes and motifs. While drawing up the ("transcendental")
Weltanshaung
of Malick's movies, Deleuze's "taxonomy of images" allows us
to systematize the director's narrative and visual techniques. At
the same time my analysis of Malick's oeuvre
proves that Deleuze's film theory, which renders film history into
"classic" (movement-images) and "modern" (time-images)
periods, can be applied to "postmodern" cinema, exemplified by
Malick's more recent films, which rely on movement-images and
time-images alike.
Full text in Hungarian →
Zsóka
Berta: Time Becoming Texture
The
essay addresses the most significant theme of Wong Kar-wai's cinema
- the correspondence of past, present and recollection - through
key concepts of Gilles Deleuze's film theory. My paper also hopes
to explicate the ways the visual image articulates spatiality and
temporality with reference to Wong's use of slow motion. Specific
scenes and sequences containing slow motion and other techniques
associated with the manipulation of time are examined in the films of
Wong Kar-wai. At the same time I also explain why I think these
stylistic techniques form the backbone of Wong's reflections on
social and cultural phenomena. In the focus of my arguments on style
and its rendering of spatiotemporal relations is the conviction that
at the centre of Wong's cinematic vision as an auteurist trait is
the idea according to which human existence is not so much spatial
but embedded in time.
Full text in Hungarian →
Orsolya Böszörményi-Nagy: Buster
Keaton and the Large Form of the Burlesque
My paper hopes to
reveal the "secret" of Buster Keaton through key concepts and
arguments borrowed from the film theory of Gilles Deleuze. In the
first part of my essay I propose an overview of the famous
slapstick-mechanism, while in the next part
I examine if Keaton's feature films directed in the 1920 stand the
test of time and are still valid for the audience of our days. The
Deleuzian interpretation of each movie is indeed legitimate since the
philosopher instinctively pointed out one of Keaton's major
innovations: his ability to mould slapstick into the "large form"
of the action-image, thus giving rise to feature-length slapstick
comedy for the first time in film history.
Full text in Hungarian →
Ádám
Szabó:
The Depiction of Uselessness in the Cinema of Nicolas Winding Refn
My
essay offers an
analysis of useless and dysfunctional characters populating the films
of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. My interpretation is
strongly inspired by key concepts of Gilles Deleuze's film theory.
The Danish auteur
features social outcasts in all of his films whose condition can be
described either as falling down or disintegrating. Deleuze's
concept of the time image - itself a way of giving recognition to
the deteriorating harmony between man and the world - offers an
ideal analytical framework to examine useless people who are
incapable of adapting to the expectations and principles of the
milieu they inhabit. In my study I also use Deleuzeian sound-theory
to describe music as the "archeological, stratigraphic and
tectonic" function of the image, since in my opinion Refn uses his
trade mark, disharmonic noises, to make us not only see but hear the
disintegration of characters. The study also hopes to prove that
besides the aforementioned components the disorientation experienced
by Refnian heroes is a silent explosion", that is, a burst of rage
culminating in unbound and irrational violence, which is very much
different in nature from the useful and rational acts of aggression
characterising the classical hero of the action image. Irrational
violence in my understanding appears in the paradigm of the
time-image as a symptom of the incapability of action and a sign of
uselessness.
Full text in Hungarian →
Book Reviews
Diána Gollowitzer:
Borderline case (Király Hajnal: Könyv és film között.
A hűségelven innen és túl -- Review)
The book of Hajnal
Király was published in the autumn of
2010. It is about adaptation, or more precisely, about the
deconstruction of fidelity criticism in the context of adaptation
theory. The author approaches this recent and urgent problem from
several perspectives and offers a new way to interpret books and
movies.
Full text in Hungarian →
Eszter Ureczky:
The arrival of the Brits? (Zsolt Győri ed. Fejezetek
a brit film történetéből - Review)
Zsolt Győri's
2010 anthology Chapters from the History
of British Cinema provides a new and
long-awaited context for the Hungarian reception of British films.
Including fourteen essays and two interviews, the volume focuses on
various aspects of the British film industry such as
cultural-economic factors, directors, genres and contemporary
theoretical discourses of reading cinematic texts. The anthology is
the first volume of a planned series, and thus it will surely prove a
useful source for researchers of film studies and cultural studies as
well. Among many other questions, the essays explore the relationship
of the British and American markets, the careers of immigrant
Easter-European film makers, the documentarism of John Grierson, the
adaptations of Bernard Shaw's plays, the British movies of the
1930s and 1940s, heritage films, theories of voyeurism (Peeping
Tom. Michael Powell, 1960), class
matters (The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner. Tony Richardson,
1962), Peter Greenaway's The Cook the
Thief His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
and Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave
(1994).
Full text in Hungarian →
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