Space in Romanian and Hungarian Cinema

Abstract

Space in Romanian and Hungarian Cinema"This book offers an original and innovative framework for considering Hungarian and Romanian cinema. In focusing on the disciplinary spaces of socialist and post-socialist film, Anna Batori sheds light on the ways in which vertical and horizontal planes and lines in cinema can have significant political implications. This is an important work for film theory as well as for wider studies of the region.

Cinema of Rupture: Urbicide, Eastern European Rubble Films, and the Documentary Impulse

“…Initially constructed by communist governments to project order in the social space and to improve living standards for thousands of residents, high-density residential districts-the architectural dispositif of Eastern Europe in the words of Anna Batori-came to serve as prime military targets for terrorizing the local populations. 9 Journalists and researchers relate examples from different conflicts as urbicide through military strategy. Following the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, Western media linked the bombardment of Ukrainian urban centers to the Russian destruction of eastern Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city, in 2016, and the devastation of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya in 1994.…”

Late Modernist Noirs: Béla Tarr’s Damnation/ Kárhozat and György Fehér’s Passion/ Szenvedély

“…What was once meant for dynamic growth and multiplication, what still bore the sign of a nicer and richer future, but was now in an infinitely run-down state, showed only the death of such old illusions" 10 . As Anna Batori notes, the emphasis of the film on locations that are quasi-urban or belong to the countryside is in itself a subtle reversal of a fundamental characteristic of socialist Hungarian cinema in the earlier decades; while Hungarian films from the 60s or 70s tended to view life lived outside major cities as being more authentic and more in line with a certain national spirit, Damnation equates the decomposition of the small towns with the larger social tendency towards societal disintegration and loss on national identity 11 . As for Tarr's indebtedness to film noir (which he, in fact, admits in an interview shot for the Criterion release of Damnation), it is clearly visible in his recreation of noir visual tropes: characters waiting in the rain outside a bar signaled by neon light, smoky rooms in which the indispensable female crooner sings a song, protagonists dressed in trench coats that would have seem out of fashion at the time of the shooting.…”