The acclaimed master of the long take explains to Phil Ballard why his films aren’t bleak, don’t count as cinema and are inspired by Breugel and why Tarkovsky is just “too nice” for him. Béla Tarr views himself as an outsider?both of the trappings of any political or social structure and also of the film community. Starting in the late … Read more

Few Hungarian writers during the first half of the 20th century enjoyed as much popularity and success as Lajos Zilahy (1891 – 1974). He was a man of prodigious literary talents: he wrote poetry, short stories, plays, and novels. Journalism was another area which drew his attention and he served as the editor of several influential periodicals and newspapers. Zilahy … Read more

Hernádi discusses with Graham Petrie why the critics have given his scripts for Jancsó more problems than the Communist regime has and defends their work against accusations of repetitiveness. The novelist Gyula Hernádi first collaborated with director Miklós Jancsó on a script in the early 1960s and he has worked on almost all Jancsó’s films since. In recent years, he … Read more

Jancsó is often perceived of as a very “Hungarian” director, with a love of history and a dislike for montage. The octagenarian director tells Andrew James Horton about his Romanian roots and affinities with Jewish culture, why he gave up on history 20 years ago only to come back to it in his latest film and the reason he no … Read more

Jancsó is a giant of world cinema, yet his works are rarely seen and much of his oeuvre languishes in total obscurity. Andrew James Horton introduces Kinoeye’s special focus on Jancsó with an overview of the director’s stylistic and thematic development. Miklós Jancsó suffers an unusual fate in film history. His name is frequently mentioned in film history books, he … Read more

Szabó, through films such asMephisto, has become not only one of Hungary’s foremost directors but a major international figure in film.Necati Sönmez met him in India to talk about making compromises, why Hollywood is central European and defining European culture. István Szabó in his latest film Taking Sides?Der Fall Furtwängler (2002) follows on in the tradition of his “central European trilogy” of the … Read more

“Who is Béla Tarr?” runs the title of an article in an American film magazine. To the initiated, he is a Hungarian film-maker who has built a growing reputation on the festival circuit with a trio of uncompromising films?Kárhozat (Damnation,1989), Sátántangó(Satan’s Tango, 1994) and Werckmeister harmóniák(Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000), which, particularly with the latter, seem set to mark the first genuine international breakthrough by … Read more

In recent years, the fate of Hungarians living outside Hungary’s borders has been studied by that country’s historians with growing interest. The same interes thas traced the history of Magyar emigrants to Latin America. This research, done mainly by Ilona Varga and by membersof the Latin American History Research Groupat Jozsef Attila University, revealed several important aspectsof the historyof Hungarians living in South America. Now … Read more

There are two very special moments in István Szabó?s oeuvre that call attention to the role of the body in cinematic representation. In the first example, at the end of Szabó?s Love Film (Szerelmesfilm, 1970), a blinding light ?draws? the contours of a female face looking into the camera, at the audience. The character recounts her past some months and, … Read more