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
Film Criticism
About Hungarian New Wave
Hungarian cinema rose to prominence in Western eyes on the back of the 1960s New Wave. Now, thirty years later, the term New Wave is being resuscitated to describe the Hungarian cinema of the 1990s. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, in honour of some of this decade’s most recent films, organised a mini-retrospective of Hungarian New Waves … Read more
Studies in Eastern European Cinema
In the years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the political changes of 1989/90, there has been a growing interest in the cinemas of the former countries of the Eastern Bloc. There is a growing community of scholars, including a number of students working for post-graduate qualifications, who are engaged with film but also media, culture, and art … Read more
Apertúra
The aperture is the exposed part of the camera lens, the opening through which beams of light slash to reach the celluloid. Its analogy with the human eye is only partial: apart from modelling human vision and complementing our perception, the camera radically transforms our way of seeing. The narrow focus of the journal Apertura is to explore the cinematic … Read more
Zoltán Dragon: The Spectral Body – Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó
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
The History of Film in Hungary
Hungary has always loved film. Their history is long and varied. Film in Hungary started but a few short years after it did in the US. June 13, 1896 marked the first showing of a film in a converted hat-shop. One Arnold Sziklai hired a mechanic named Mamoussen to run the projector. So started film in Hungary. Sziklai and Mamoussen … Read more
