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

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

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

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

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

The aim of this paper is to address the interrelated fields of politics, nation and cinema in the period of the Second World War, in short to reflect upon the uses and abuses of political cinema. The study of British propaganda cinema is by no means a groundbreaking topic, it has been discussed to varying degrees and depths by several … Read more

This text is searching for representations of the cinematic screen in film theory. I do not intend to touch the realm of other screens, for example the television screen. In a second step I will try to show the ways in which specific art performances approximate the screen. My assumption thereby is that the screen in the cinema is – … Read more

The paper deals with the problem of representability of entropic change, such as extreme violence or death by means of motion, i.e. moving pictures. It argues that film or moving images by nature are not capable of expressing or meaning once-for-all changes, contrary to the photograph. Moving images trigger a sense of continuity in the viewers, a feeling that takes … Read more

Presupposing that historical and generational resemblances allow for a joint reading of their ?lms, postcommunist Hungarian and Romanian (also nicknamed ?New? and ?New Wave?) directors? ?lms are examined (Radu Muntean, Szabolcs Hajdu, Attila Gigor). The proposal of allegorical reading is made, with speci?c ?lmic locuses highlighted as creating cinematic allegories out of (graphic) isolation and intermedial mixes.       … Read more