This new volume in the Twenty-Four Frames series focuses on twenty-four key Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish films from the twenties to the present. Between the wars the cinemas of Hungary, Poland, and the former Czechoslovakia each claimed their pioneers of early cinema and attained significant levels of production. They first attracted international attention in the 1930s, confirming this status with a succession of politically and aesthetically challenging films from the 1950s to the present. The work of directors such as Andrzej Wajda, Miklós Jancsó, Jirí Menzel, István Szabó, Márta Mészáros, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jan ??vankmajer, and Béla Tarr are discussed. There are in depth studies of films such as Ashes and Diamonds, The Round-Up, The Shop on Main Street, Closely Watched Trains, Alice, The Decalogue, and Satantango.

Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film is a comprehensive study of the cinematic traditions of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia from 1945 to the present day, exploring the major schools of filmmaking and the main stages of development across the region during the period of state socialism up until the end of the Cold War, as well as more recent transformations post-1989. In encouraging a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of European cinema, much needed for the new unified Europe `enlarged' towards its Eastern periphery, this book maps out the interactions, key concerns, thematic spheres and stylistic particularities that make the cinema of East Central Europe a vital part of European film tradition. Cinema of the Other Europe is thus a timely appraisal of Film Studies debates ranging from the representation of history and memory, the reassessment of political content, ethics and society, the rehabilitation of popular cinema, and the rethinking of national and regional cinemas in the context of globalisation.

This book investigates the formations of masculinity in Hungarian cinema after the fall of communism and explores some of the cultural phenomena of the years following the 1989 regime change. The films explored offer a unique perspective encompassing two entirely different worlds: state socialism and neoliberal capitalism. The films suggest that Eastern Europe is somehow different than its western counterpart and that its subjects are marked by what they went through before and after 1989. These films are all remembering, interpreting, picturing, marketing and trying to come to terms with this difference--with the memory and effects of state-socialism.  In looking closely at the films' male figures, one may not only get a glimpse of the dramatic changes Eastern European societies went through after the fall of communism but also see the brave new world of global neoliberal capitalism through the eyes of the Eastern European newcomers.

Hungarian cinema has often been forced to tread a precarious and difficult path. Through the failed 1919 revolution to the defeat of the 1956 Uprising and its aftermath, Hungarian film-makers and their audiences have had to contend with a multiplicity of problems. In the 1960s, however, Hungary entered into a period of relative stability and increasing cultural relaxation, resulting in an astonishing growth of film-making. Innovative and groundbreaking directors such as Miklós Jancsó (Hungarian Rhapsody, The Red and the White), István Szabó (Mephisto, Sunshine) and Márta Mészaros (Little Vilma: The Last Diary) emerged and established the reputation of Hungarian films on a global basis. This is the first book to discuss all major aspects of Hungarian cinema, including avant-garde, animation, and representations of the Gypsy and Jewish minorities.

What does it mean for someone or something to be Hungarian? People in Hungary grappled with this far-reaching question in the wake of the losses and transformation brought by World War I. Because the period also saw the rise of cinema, audiences, filmmakers, critics, and officials often looked at films with an eye to that question, too. Did the Hungary seen on screen represent the Hungary they knew from everyday life? And-crucially-did the major role played by Jewish Hungarians in the film industry make the sector and its creations somehow Jewish rather than Hungarian? Jews, it was soon decided, could not really be Hungarian, and acts of Parliament soon barred them from taking major roles in cinema production. This book tells the troubled story of that period in Hungarian cinematic history, taking it up through World War II.

Between 1929 and 1942, Hungary's motion picture industry experienced meteoric growth. It leapt into Europe's top echelon, trailing only Nazi Germany and Italy in feature output. Yet by 1944, Hungary's cinema was in shambles, internal and external forces having destroyed its unification experiments and productive capacity. This original cultural and political history examines the birth, unexpected ascendance, and wartime collapse of Hungary's early sound cinema by placing it within a complex international nexus. Detailing the interplay of Hungarian cultural and political elites, Jewish film professionals and financiers, Nazi officials, and global film moguls, David Frey demonstrates how the transnational process of forging an industry designed to define a national culture proved particularly contentious and surprisingly contradictory in the heyday of racial nationalism and antisemitism.

Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe explores the interlocking complexities of two liminal concepts: magic realism and East Central Europe. Each is a fascinating hybrid that resonates with dominant currents in contemporary thought on transnationalism, globalisation and regionalism. In this critical and comprehensive survey, Aga Skrodzka moves the current debate over magic realism's political impact from literary studies to film studies. Her close textual analysis of films by directors such as Jan Svankmajer, Jan Jakub Kolski, Martin Sulík, Ivo Trajkov, Dorota Kędzierzawska, Ildikó Enyedi, Béla Tarr and Emir Kusturica is accompanied by an investigation of the socio-economic and political context in order to both study and popularise an important and unique tradition in world cinema. The directors' artistic achievements illuminate the connections between a particular aesthetics and the social structure of East Central Europe at a precise moment of contemporary history. Provides the first comprehensive analysis of magic realism in cinema Offers an examination of the post-socialist cinema as representative of the hybridised space and consciousness of East Central Europe Gives chronological overview of the existing theories of magic realism to the extent in which they apply to globalised visual cultures Considers the cinema of East Central Europe in the context of transnationalism and postcoloniality

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

World Cinema is a detailed, historical, critical, and appreciative account of the Hungarian cinema from its early days to the transforming 1990s. It provides an extended analysis of some fifty directors and their key films.