A choice setting
Hungary was immediately infatuated with the invention of the Lumière brothers, which was presented to it as early as 1896. Screenings in the city's abundant cafés and the messy openings of cinemas and studios testify to the appeal of cinema. If the war temporarily put an end to this momentum, the pearl of the Danube represented at the time a kind of ultimate sophistication of Central Europe and inspired filmmakers around the world. The first German talking film was shot there, Melody of the Heart (Hanns Schwarz, 1929), a melodrama whose heroine was a young country girl who had gone to try her luck in the Hungarian capital. Reconstructed in the studio for Rendez-vous (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940), adapted from a Hungarian play or not, it serves as a set for one of the classics of Hollywood comedy. Let us also mention famous ambassadors: Béla Lugosi, who gave a mythical interpretation to Dracula, before Michael Curtiz signed one of the greatest classics in the history of cinema, Casablanca (1941). At home, due to the unfavourable context, production is no longer the same as in the early days, but comedies follow one another like pearls, such as the delicious Hippolyte, the Jack (István Székely, 1931), which is also the second Hungarian talking film. Paradoxically, it picked up steam during the war, reaching a record 54 releases in 1942. Among them, a film that remained famous, The Mountain Men (István Szőts, 1942), a splendid pastoral epic shot in the mountains of Transylvania.
Rich hours
In 1948, cinema was nationalized: obeying the canons of socialist realism in force became highly recommended. A few films were exceptions, such as Professor HannibaI (Zoltán Fábri, 1956), which deals with the Horty dictatorship in a subtle way. Its release coincided with the Budapest uprising, which led to severe repression in culture and elsewhere. Talent escape again: László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond then flee. At the beginning of the 1970s, they were among the most sought-after cinematographers in Hollywood. The Béla Balázs studio, founded in 1959, brought together avant-garde directors such as Miklós Jancsó who, after studying in Budapest, kept their distance, perhaps far from the surveillance of the regime. Jancsó's work, recognizable by his predilection for long, carefully composed sequence shots, heralds that of Béla Tarr. Father (István Szabó, 1966) tells the story of a boy who has lost his father, whose imaginary heroic exploits he fantasizes about in post-war Budapest. A love film (1970) by the same author delves into these recollections, this time focusing on young adults and their sentimental procrastination. Another great innovator, Karol Makk, who made Amour (1971): a sort of chamber film, he nevertheless tackles head-on the disillusions dragged behind him by the communist regime. Szindbád (Zoltán Huszárik, 1971) is the quintessence, to the point of excess, of what Hungarian cinema can produce that is refined and heady. It is this modernist cinema that has exported itself the best, while popular and genre films experienced a similar revival. Inventiveness, singularity and ambition continued unabated in the 1970s, at the same time as a documentary movement emerged. Budapest ballade (Jeles András, 1979) and Diary to my children (Márta Mészáros, 1984), the first part of a trilogy, are but a few examples. With Mephisto (1981), adapted from Klaus Mann's eponymous novel, István Szabó won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Suspended Time (Péter Gothár, 1982), which adopts the retrospective gaze so characteristic of Hungarian cinema during the Soviet era, is still an opportunity to evoke the - eternally - disappointed dreams of youth. A phantasmagorical and lyrical vein marries the most outstanding films of the end of the communist era, such as A Hungarian Fairy Tale (Gyula Gazdag, 1987) and My 20th Century (Ildikó Enyedi, 1989), which opens in late 19th-century Budapest, the umpteenth visual achievement - in black and white - that deserves an express rediscovery.
Inheritance
Paradoxically or not, the liberal transition marked a halt for the film industry, whose financing was no longer guaranteed by the State. Béla Tarr became one of the darlings of auteur cinema. In his 14-hour film Tango de Satan (1994), as in Damnation (1988) and The Harmonies of Werckmeister (2000), he depicts a rural and apocalyptic world in long sequences. Comme un peu d'Amérique (Gábor Herendi, 2002), a cult generational comedy of the 2000s, is in stark contrast to what is usually known about Hungarian cinema. Internationally, Hungarian cinema continues to stand out for a kind of baroque excess, a taste for experimentation and technical virtuosity. It is Taxidermia (György Pálfi, 2003), with its extravagant inspiration, not shying away from any excess. It is the cinema of Kornél Mondruczkó, who dares a contemporary opera(Johanna, 2005), a dystopian tale to which a horde of dogs in flesh and blood offer striking visions(White God, 2014), or an auteur superhero film that evokes the migration crisis, Jupiter's Moon (2017). It is also the shock caused by immersion in an extermination camp with László Nemes' Son of Saul (who is the son of András Jeles), before Sunset (2018) about the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nimrod Antal, who had obtained his sesame for Hollywood with Kontroll (2003), a dive into the underground world of subway controllers, is into quality popular cinema, as recently proved by his return to the country with Whisky Bandit (2017), inspired by the rocambolic trajectory of a famous robber. Like its Prague neighbor, Budapest has been attracting foreign productions, especially Hollywood ones, who have come to take advantage of its low prices and its architectural abundance, which can be compared to other European cities. Woody Allen was a pioneer when he came to shoot his parody of Tolstoy, War and Love, in the Budapest Opera House in 1975. Under the impetus of a new National Film Fund, production has boomed in recent years with the multiplication of crowd pleasers, popular successes. Budapest plays a leading role in Gábor Reisz's slightly offbeat comedies, For Inexplicable Reasons (2014) and Bad Poems (2018).
