During the lenient Kádár regime the function of Hungarian films had been obvious: to lay bare the contradictions of the system as far as they were able and to extend the limits of free speech. However, this role as an opponent of the regime became obsolete after freedom suddenly appeared. It became clear that proliferating the liberal image that was so important during the Kádár regime was no longer the task of Hungarian film art, while stepping again into the role of providing entertainment for the masses – which had really only been an important one between the two wars – proved difficult as audiences had already got used to the cinema as a medium of popular entertainment showing almost exclusively foreign films. Moreover, these films were made with big budgets and world famous stars. 

Nevertheless, Hungarian film again tied both roles.

Firstly, it tried to continue to be a kind of “Independent Paradise” by remaining an oasis for art films, of course building on the existing traditions, but now freed of political censorship it was no longer necessary to employ artistic manoeuvring and constantly bypassing restrictions.

Secondly, it tried to resurrect the traditions of cabaret culture inherited from the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy and the values of comedy, which were “exported” to Hollywood by Hungarian émigrés, and which even enriched the Italian “white telephone comedies” at the time and furthermore temporarily raised Hungary to the status of a first class exporter of films in the Balkans.

Establishing a foundation system was equally important in regard to realising both aims. This made film financing independent from the state and made it possible for professional bodies to make apolitical decisions on granting financial support for films. In 1991 the institution called the Hungarian Moving Pictures Foundation (MMA) – a system operated by local governments and based on professional organisations – was established for the distribution of state support, a task it has continued to carry out ever since.

The second task of the nineties was to create realistic conditions for producers to work in Hungary. What the film industry in the west had taken for granted had been lacking in Hungary for close to half a century, but in the new system studios and film entrepreneurs were free to seek funding to realise their film plans, whether these were productions made for entertainment or art films. Funding came not only from foundations, but also from co-producers, foreign investors, credit from banks, sponsorship, their own resources and international tenders. Of course this did not crystallise at once in practice: in the early years of the nineties all of this came along with the bankruptcy of the old studios and filmmaking workshops and the selling off of state property.

Luckily, however, the new producers and new or renewed studios of the time were soon able to find their new role and established connections with the new, young artists. The new generation (Ildikó Enyedi, Árpád Sopsits, Attila Janisch, János Szász, and Zoltán Kamondi) started their careers in a difficult period: their new careers were definitely made more difficult by the lack of funds (the amount of state sponsorship available from the MMA had not increased for ten years!). It was to no avail that this new generation – the living icons of Hungarian film – found their new role since they too had to rely on foreign funding in order to make films. Károly Makk continued to work on international productions. After the change in the political system István Szabó also made several films with a fair chance of winning an Oscar, which were generally foreign productions but he also involved Hungarian partners, especially crews and actors. The enigmatic world, radical message and new desire to address the audience was difficult to reconcile in Miklós Jancsó’s case. Finally, towards the end of the nineties humour and playfulness introduced into his films turned out to be the most appropriate solution for him: his films, which were neo-Dadaist travesties introducing an entirely new atmosphere and stretching the limits of even Jancsó’s own stylistic traditions, attracted a popular cult following and collected a camp of fans from amongst the youngest circles, to the genuine surprise of the old master filmmaker in his eighties. The old generation of filmmakers represents continuity in Hungarian film although luckily in the one and a half decades following the change in the political system newly discovered talent kept popping up from the new generation even if the world’s attention was not as focused on Hungary as it had been when Hungarian film artists had sent messages from the hidden world behind the iron curtain during the sixties. Béla Tarr began his career at the end of the seventies and already had a European reputation by the eighties, yet, despite this, he only really was in the limelight in the nineties with his epic nearly eight-hour-long film entitled Satan’s Tango, which soon assumed the status of a legendary cult film, and even more so with his Werkmeister Harmonies, made after the turn of the millennium. Tarr’s success proved that there is something that – even though it might not be characteristic of only this part of the world – is most genuine if rendered through Eastern Europe: people hopelessly going round in circles in time slowing down into a hover, performing the cosmic rituals of misery. Moreover, the success in America of Werkmeister Harmonies coincided with the September 11 attack on the twin towers and opinion was virtually unanimous: the image of the universe visited by Satan depicted in Tarr’s film a year earlier had predicted the global anguish with which mankind entered the 21st century in the year of 2001. It is no surprise that definitive western thinkers, among them the late leader of this group, Susan Sontag, regard Tarr as the number one emblematic directors of our age.

Tarr has no easily identifiable adherents but there are some young rivals who have a chance of getting into the European circles of cult films. At the turn of the millennium the class of the great film director-teacher Sándor Simó graduated from the Budapest Academy of Drama and Film, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the starting careers of these young artists in itself represent a new era. They were soon joined by other film students (Kornél Mundruczó) and young people who are not college graduates (Benedek Fliegauf). These are people in their twenties who despite being so young are already accumulating acclaim at one festival after another. Their style varies between Benedek Fliegauf’s bizarre passion Dealer about a drug addict, or Kornél Mundruczó’s post-modern opera film Johanna, or Szabolcs Hajdu’s lyrical films (Sticky Matters, Tamara) were followed by a gloomily realistic sporting- and career story (White Palm), which brought him international recognition, or in the case of Bálint Kenyeres, whose single-sweep minimalist short film Before Dawnraked in ten important festival awards in the space of one and a half years. György Pálfi is different from all of these and perhaps the most successful: however, his formula very closely resembles that of Béla Tarr of the preceding generation. There is Eastern Europe and within it Hungary, which is more suitable than any other place to be a miniature model for a world wracked by anguish, i.e. the “Whole” lurks in the “Part” allowing for this Hungarian “Part” to appear in many different ways: the possible depictions are adjusted to the genres of horror films, psycho-thrillers, absurd farces or sad sports films using tools conjuring up the idiosyncratic style of each author. Pálfi’s film Hukkle is peculiarly Eastern European – funny and at the same time spine chilling, a micro and macro cosmos of the “film fatale”, and when this formula was deciphered it became the favourite at dozens of festivals on almost every continent of the globe. What is more, his second feature film Taxidermia, which is an even more shocking continuation, has every chance of surpassing the success of the first.

Popular-entertainment films in Hungary have seen a recovery verging on the miraculous. They had a difficult start just like art films, although after the change in the system these lost their purely political message and guaranteed financial backing, but their continuity remained in that they bridged the period of agonising last years of socialism and the nineties. However, entertainment films, as we already mentioned, had to make a giant leap back in time right back to the thirties in order to retrieve their successful traditions. Thus, it is a wonder they were able to make a comeback. It was initially the actors – and especially comedy actors who won back their respect – which it seemed had been lost for good after the sixties, which was dominated by special effects films. Some popular comedians, such as András Kern and Róbert Koltai, who had the courage as actors to undertake film directing, made an especially worthy contribution, and in partly drawing on their own popularity their films went on to enjoy success in the nineties. Since the onset of commercial television in Hungary was accompanied by the making of “national stars”, a new opportunity arose in filmmaking to base local success on local celebrities. While international distributors are now introducing the latest Hollywood hit films onto the market almost at the same time as their world premières, in recent years some Hungarian comedies with popular Hungarian stars have done better at the box offices of multiplex screenings than American super productions which cost a hundred times as much to make. Fifteen years ago this would have been unimaginable. It is edifying to see that encouraged by the success of the aforementioned comedies directed by actors filmmakers, among them many young directors, are trying their hands at other new genres of entertainment films.

In Hungary these days an audience of one hundred thousand counts as a lot. Thrillers, adaptations from novels, action films, and films on national nostalgia, have achieved this figure in addition to comedies, and recently even two cult-cinemas, for which nobody would have predicted a multiplex future, have managed the same thing. All the more surprising when one of them takes the tunnels of the Budapest metro as its setting with its protagonists not even coming up to the surface, and the other one is an animation film, a romantic travesty set in a slum area of the capital with the worst reputation. These two films, Antal Nimród’s Kontroll and Áron Gauder’s The District, went against all expectations including the one that a successful popular film cannot attain success at festivals, or that the young generation of directors can only join the list of Hungarian film masters as creators of art films, since it is only the old generation that knows the ropes that can attract crowds into cinema halls. Kontroll and Nyócker did not make compromises on their fastidiousness yet they still managed to fill the multiplexes.

Hungarian film is one hundred and ten years old. Perhaps it is the tradition of these one hundred and ten years or the sudden sparkle of the last decade that has attracted investors’ attention. As far as traditions are concerned, Adolf Zuckor, the founder of Paramount Pictures, was born in Hungary, as was Vilmos Fuchs, the first owner of Twentieth Century Fox. With a slight exaggeration we could say Hollywood was actually dreamt up here in Eastern Europe. Andy Wajna, an American producer of Hungarian origin, is now returning here and will soon build a motion picture studio near Budapest matching the scale of its American counterparts. He knows what he is doing: he is counting on sound prices, disciplined, well qualified crews used to hard work, good European connections and mainly a great deal of talent – and perhaps even on the mysterious spirit of the place, since over the last one hundred and ten years it has been proven numerous times that Hungarian creativity and motion pictures are a fruitful combination.

Tibor Hirsch