Inventions of personalness in Hungarian documentary filmmaking

Török, Ervin (2021) Inventions of personalness in Hungarian documentary filmmaking. APERTÚRA, 17 (1). ISSN 1787-7245

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Abstract

The study examines the “personalness” of Hungarian creative documentary films, and compares this new kind of personalness to the one characteristic of Hungarian documentaries from the 1970s. Three traditions of Hungarian documentaries are distinguished: vérité-films, avant-guard experimental films, and tabloid cinema, adapting the heritage of direct cinéma. The argument offers a discussion of diverse interpretive conditions of personalness for each of the three trends. Films in the tabloid cinema tradition make up the decisive trend of Hungarian documentaries, offering a specific attempt at “novelification”, the introduction of a sociological sensitivity, an attempt at representing social relationships in an objective way, as well as an ambiguous flirting with forms of fiction films. With the rhetorical structuring of the theme, the countrapuntal and dialogical representation and diverse stylization techniques, contemporary documentaries shift the sociological perspective of the documentaries from the 1970s, and point to its frequently limiting nature. They change the point of departure of films close to or continuing the tradition of verité-films: the “singularity of the witness” in these films takes over the fiction of neutral/objective observation dominant in the films of the 1970s. As a result, the documentary nature of the film image is fundamentally rethought in these films.

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