Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival is an unique event combining a feature film festival with the sub-festivals of animated films, student films and children/youth films. The festival aims to present Estonian audiences a comprehensive selection of world cinema in all its diversity with the emphasis on European films, providing a friendly atmosphere for interaction between the audience, Estonian filmmakers and … Read more
Film Criticism
Interview with Mari Törőcsik
Ever since her first screen role inKörhinta (Merry-Go-Round, 1955), which brought her immediate international recognition at the Cannes Film Festival, Mari Törőcsik (born 1935) has been the leading Hungarian screen actress. She received the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1971 for her role in Love (Szerelem; directed by Károly Makk) and again in 1976 for Déryne, hol van? (Mrs Déry, Where Are You?; directed … Read more
Comparative analysis of the films by Jancsó and Wajda
Hungary and Poland, to a large degree, have parallel and interlocking histories. Krzysztof Rucinski looks at how the two film masters of these nations have presented the past and themes of oppression in their early masterpieces. A parallel history of two nations “Pole, Hungarian: dear kin / Both, to saber and to drink!” claims an old bilingual proverb that encapsulates … Read more
Exploited Heterotopias
As the title suggests, I make an attempt to study spaces in which our roles are not determined, ?pre-determined’ – which is obviously problematic, since the function of a given space also suggests the role we are supposed to take when we enter it – for example in a cinema we are expected to be spectators, while in a shop … Read more
Metropolis
Metropolis, a Hungarian journal of film theory and film history, was founded in 1996 upon the initiative of a handful of students at what was then called Moving Image Theory and Pedagogy program at the Humanities Faculty of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest. (This course of study has since metamorphosed into ELTE?s Film Theory and Film History BA and MA … Read more
Hitler, His Cult, and the Films
In this essay I approach the concept of “cult film” in a way that diverges from customary approaches. I will examine not the notion of cultic films or its various forms and mechanisms, but the connection between real, historical cults and their representation in cinema. In other words my use of the concept “cult” is not attached to certain films … Read more
Cinematic Immersion at the Turn of a Millenium
The most vital characteristic of cinema is probably its persuasive force, to withdraw its viewers from their everyday experience and envelop them in an audiovisual stream. On top of this, technological evolutions and developments in the visual language of cinema always seem to focus on finding new ways to submerge the experienced audience in a new cinematographic experience, through which … Read more
Roles of the Grotesque in Contemporary Visual Arts
In order to find out the roles of the grotesque in contemporary visual arts, I introduce four recent critical books on this topic. These critical writings prove that the grotesque is supported by notions borrowed from other disciplines. For example we meet Kristeva’s abject from psychoanalysis and most often Bakhtin’s grotesque realismfrom the socio-cultural discourses. These terms are all productive in describing the … Read more
The Visuality of the Other of the Subject in the Theaters of Anatomy
A complex thanatological process reached its climactic point in the history of critical theories in the mid-1990s when, after the death of God, the death of the author and the death of the human as we knew it, the long-anticipated theoretization of the death of character also downed on poststructuralist critics. By then, the subject had been subjected to a penetrating … Read more
Kant’s “Mother Wit” in Aesthetic Reflection, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema
The essay traces conceptual connections between key aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, especially aesthetic reflection, and basic psychoanalytic concepts that have figured prominently in the European film theory of the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, the essay proposes a reevaluation of the phallic economy of signification in placental-umbilical terms. Introducing the ephemeral materno-foetal organ of the placenta into psychoanalytic film … Read more
