Space in Romanian and Hungarian Cinema

Anna Batori

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319759500
• eBook ISBN: 9783319759517
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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 ofunity and also ambivalence is a defining hallmark of Eastern European cinema.

© The Author(s) 2018

Anna BatoriSpace in Romanian and Hungarian Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75951-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Anna Batori¹

(1)

Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

End Abstract

What Is Eastern Europe?

In his study on twenty-first-century European cinema , Thomas Elsaesser (2015) identifies three contemporary traumas that all ‘served as a resource for European cinema’ (Elsaesser 2015, 25) and, as exploitative topics, created various tendencies within European film-making. These three pillars are the trauma of the Holocaust, the confrontation with Islam, and finally Europe’s bio and body politics: that is, ‘ageing, (…) lack of reproduction, the obsession with wellness and health-care’ (Elsaesser 2015, 23) on screen . Interestingly, while scrutinising these categories and matching them with various European national cinemas , Elsaesser does not mention the politico-historical trauma of Soviet colonialism¹ and its representation in Eastern European² or international screen (or both)—although the topic itself has been central to the national cinemas of the region (Imre 2012). Correspondingly, questions arise: Do we consider the region to be part of the collective European identity and Eurocentric ideas? Or are the post-socialist³ states to be treated as parts of a semi-independent unit that, though part of the European Union and the Schengen states, does not fit into the homogenous discourse with/on the West? Where does Eastern Europe stand and what does it stand for?

In the contemporary socio-critical discourse, the Eastern region has often been referred to as ‘Western Europe’s Other’ (Gott and Herzog 2014) which stands for an underrepresented, peripheral, uncanny territory (Skrodzka 2012) that evokes misconceived ideas, pejorative signals and false images of the southern countries (Iordanova 2001). As stated by Dina Iordanova (2013), despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the information about and acquaintance with the peripheral post-socialist era still seem to be defective:

Still less of the culture of the Eastern Bloc was known in the West and a high proportion of the features that were known had been highlighted selectively for ideological considerations. (…) What is more worrying, however, is that after the West won the propaganda battle over the hearts and minds of the people of Eastern Bloc, the culture of the East remains as little known in the West as before. The resulting situation is that more than a decade into the post- 1989 transition, many of the Cold War-era clichés about East Central European culture and cinema remain unchallenged (…). (Iordanova 2003, 16)

The lack of information refers to not only the cultural positioning of the area but its geographical confines as well. Eastern Europe is often negotiated as the unprotected side of the limes (Kiss 2013), a territory of ‘lands in-between’, a frontier region ‘between Russia and Germany, Europe and Asia, East and West’ (Batt 2013, 7) that, lacking natural borders, cannot be defined accurately (Imre 2005). This position of the middle is the crucial feature that makes up the core of the very character of Eastern Europe. The region seems to get stuck between two histories, two ideologies, two generations and two landscapes that define its very identity. The socialist past and the capitalist present live simultaneously in the cityscapes of the region while people commute between past and present and East and West.

The massive migration to the wealthy European states after and since the political change in the system only sharpened the in-between situation of the region and its people. Although the end of the socialist regimes and the abolishment of the Iron Curtain united Europe in one ideology and economic model, the socio-cultural fusion of the countries has fallen through irrevocably. While several post-socialist countries have joined the European Union, Eastern Europe is still more evocative of appalling images than an alluring place to know more about. The media’s negative portrayal of eastern migrants living and working abroad only strengthens the stereotype of a corrupt and larcenous aggregation, where the gap between the western and eastern part of Europe gets more and more broad (Outhwaite and Ray 2005).

What Is Eastern European Cinema?

An additional obstacle in having an up-to-date picture on Eastern Europe is the lack of the post-socialist era’s deep socio-historical analysis that would subdue the above-mentioned misinformation and lack of knowledge. Although several studies have been written on the politico-historical and social aspects of the socialist institution of Eastern Europe, one has to point out that, as Kürti (2002) emphasises, the region ‘has rarely been theorised from within (…) [and] the concept [of] postsocialism may be seen as an imposition from the West in the postcommunist world’ (Kürti 2002, 6). That is, except for some precise and detailed Eastern European politico-historical investigation,⁴ the region’s scholarship is less engaged with its own position in the post-socialist European context. What is more, most investigations focus on the periphery’s historical-political analysis and only a few have attempted to examine the area from a historical-cultural context with special emphasis on filmic representation.

Also missing is the region’s analysis of cinematic texts, especially those focusing on the area’s post-socialist film-making practises and representational methods. Although, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars have started examining the Eastern European corpus, many of the analyses avoided touching upon post-socialist actualities. Instead, turning their attention to the socialist past, film studies have focused mainly on the movies’ connotative language, whereby cinematographers expressed themselves on screen. That is, the indirect innuendo about socialism has been negotiated in several Eastern European narratives. Although there are numerous analyses to be found on the connotative significance of the narratives, the examination essentially included works focusing on the classic socialist period (1960–1989) and few academics have touched upon films made during, or after, the system change.⁵

The Lack of Spatial Studies in Eastern European Cinema

One of the main shortcomings of the studies on Eastern European cinema is that, as Ewa Mazierska (2014) notes, many of them approach the cinema of the region from a literary point of view. This overlooks cinema as a visual medium, and little or no attention is ‘devoted to questions such as the representation of specific cities or the city-countryside dialectic or even the problems of mise-en-scène and camerawork: framing, point of view, set design’ (Mazierska 2014, 12). For this reason , Mazierska emphasises the need for spatial research in Eastern European cinema that, instead of focusing on thematic concern, would reflect on the representation of space in film. As she argues, this approach has been neglected for three main reasons in the academic discourse on Eastern European cinema. On the one hand, the Soviet cultural discourse considered space as dead and static (Mazierska 2014, 12). On the other hand, the directors’ focus on national history—whether as the tool of criticism or socialist propaganda—overshadowed the contemporary narratives and spatial approach to cinema.⁶ Another reason is that, in the pre-1989 cinema, space was used to subvert the dogmatic ideology of the socialist political context that questioned the social, political and cultural homogeneity of the satellite states. The censorship’s main focus on the script enabled film-makers to use space as a tool for political criticism, as many well-known examples from the Czech and the Hungarian New Wave illustrate (Gelencsér 2002). Certainly, a spatial discourse that would investigate the location, visual patterns and compositional arrangement that refer to the tyrannical structure of state socialism could not evolve in the socialist scholarship on Eastern European cinema. However, in the new, post-1989 context, these limits no longer exist. Thus, researching space in the films of the socialist era can be ‘a way to find gaps, fissures and contradictions in the official history of Eastern Europe and its cinematic representation and produce an alternative history of this cinema’ (Mazierska 2014, 13). Moreover , the investigation that concerns the representation of space in the post-socialist cinematic corpus could contribute to a better understanding of how space has transformed in the films (that is, what differences one can observe when it comes to the contemporary cinema of the region). Has state socialism left its mark on the spatial structure of the films? Is there a continuity between the socialist and post-socialist aesthetics when it comes to the representation of space? Furthermore, how and when did the spatial allegories and parabolic narratives disappear, or, if the connotative language is still present in the cinema of the region, how is it embedded in the textual form of the productions? There are several questions that the scholarship on Eastern European cinema must take into account and investigate, for what spatial studies provides is a fruitful, refreshing base.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Socialist Production of Eastern European Space
• 3. The Socialist Cinema of Romania
• 4. The Romanian Films of the Transition Period
• 5. Romanian New Cinema
• 6. The Cinema of Cristi Puiu
• 7. The Cinema of Corneliu Porumboiu
• 8. Horizontal Enclosure in the Post-socialist Cinema of Hungary
• 9. Space in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema
• 10. Films of the Cursed Hungarian Landscape
• 11. Conclusion
• Back Matter