What is this research about?
Balázs Varga
The research presented on our website focuses on the question of how the themes of individual and community agency and success are represented in popular Hungarian films and television series of the past decades. What kinds of communities and what sorts of community values characterize Hungarian films and series? Do they reflect individual and community well-being and success, and if so, how? Are there narratives of success – and if so, what motivates advancement: hard work, social belonging, relationships, cleverness, or pure luck? How do individuals and communities assert themselves in Hungarian comedies, crime, and historical films of the past decades?
The value system and myths of a community often articulate themselves through works of popular culture. The starting hypothesis of the project is that different genres provide specific dramatic-visual-narrative formulas for representing various social issues and different questions related to individual and community agency.
Individual and collective agency and actions
The background of the current research is the collective research project titled The Social History of Hungarian Cinema, conducted at the Department of Film Studies at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE BTK) between 2015 and 2020, led by András Bálint Kovács. During this research, while examining modern and contemporary Hungarian cinema, I was sharply confronted with the trend that Hungarian auteur films have frequently turned – and continue to turn – towards nonconformist heroes.
I define nonconformist heroes as characters who follow their own path, do not rebel (or not clearly) against societal norms, but keep a distance from them – roughly describing the behavioral mode Robert Merton referred to as a retreatist attitude, combining weak social integration with individual behavior. In the context of Hungarian cinema, Gábor Gelencsér raised this issue in relation to Hungarian films of the 1970s. However, I believe this tradition of social outsiders has well outlived the regime change and characterized Hungarian auteur films at least until the 2010s.
Overall, this fairly general hypothesis about nonconformist heroes (and the destructive, everyday experience of contemporary social anomie) initiated the line of questioning that shaped this research: examining the relationship between individual and social behavior and the storytelling repertoire of Hungarian popular screen culture. The basic questions of the research are the following. How do Hungarian films and television series think about success, individual and community success? How does the logic of ‘social capital’ based on cooperation and trust (a concept introduced by David Putnam) manifest, and in what variations, in Hungarian films and series? What positive models and values do they present? What kind of heroes do they depict, and how is the domestic storytelling repertoire organized? What kind of agency, capabilities, and individual and collective value systems characterize Hungarian screen culture – particularly its popular register?
In popular culture, agency and goal-oriented behavior are central elements of storytelling repertoires and hero typologies. This research formulates the question whether this is mainly applicable to Hollywood and primarily classical Hollywood films – what are the differences (and parallels) in between mainstream and non-mainstream screen culture, regarding story and hero types, agency and success narratives? Since my interest has for some time turned toward Hungarian and broader Eastern European popular film culture, the challenge arose to deal with representations of agency and success in modern and contemporary Hungarian popular film culture.
Research corpus: the fantastic universe of modern
and contemporary Hungarian popular films and television series
An important methodological addition and remark to the basics and background of the project is that defining the research topic and corpus also seeks to reflect on the problem of from what position and in what contexts the analysis of domestic screen culture, and within it the tradition of domestic auteur films, is possible and relevant. The research significantly reframes (and expands) the usual thematic framework for studying Hungarian and Eastern European cinema (and screen culture) in three important dimensions. First, it extends the scope to include not only auteur films but also popular film culture and television series. Second, it moves beyond Hungarian films to explore local screen culture within the context and interconnectedness of regional film cultures. Third, it situates its analysis within both the socialist decades and the post-socialist era, offering novel frameworks for examination. The goal is to provide a longitudinal, transnational discussion of local and regional genres within popular screen culture, combining the analysis of popular and auteur films with television series. In other words, this research attempted to examine the trends of Hungarian film culture using expanded and reframed, broader contexts.
The broadening of the perspective with transnational connections (Central and Eastern European contexts) and the longitudinal discussion of socialist-post-socialist decades may require less commentary, but it is worth explaining why the project considered the parallel examination of popular film culture and television series productions crucial. The assumption here is that Hungarian popular film culture is in close mutual relationship – both institutionally, in terms of filmmakers, genres, and reception – with domestic television culture. Furthermore, in recent decades, domestic screen culture has been the subject of very limited academic analysis and discussion. However, among the productions of television culture, this research only focused on television series; that is, television dramas were not part of the research corpus. This has practical reasons: the examination of television dramas would have exceeded the quantitative limits (especially since a large number of Hungarian television dramas were produced in the 1970s and 1980s, many of which are currently not even accessible – unlike the manageable corpus of a few hundred Hungarian television series).
Besides practicality, another important reason is methodological, concerning the direction and approach of the analysis. Television series and popular films can be analyzed within a unified genre framework – while television dramas are so diverse in terms of genre, themes, and style that establishing such a system would have been much more challenging.
The relationship between screen genres and social issues
Another fundamental topic of the project is its genre-based approach. The premise of the research is that the works of Hungarian popular screen culture can be viewed and investigated within a flexible and unified genre analysis framework. This research builds its approach to genres on various, sometimes not easily reconcilable ideas from (post)structuralist literary and cultural studies, as well as film studies (linking back to former theoretical approaches, such as those of John G. Cawelti, Thomas Schatz, and Rick Altman, and in Hungarian film studies, Jenő Király’s oeuvre). The project investigates genres as cultural patterns or formulas through which social issues can gain vivid, dramatic representation. Thus, the emphasis is not on archetypal, mythological dimensions but on the discursive mechanisms and frameworks of cultural-social self-awareness.
The research’s starting hypothesis (returning to the connection between corpus and problem) is that different genres provide dramatic-visual-narrative formulas for representing various social issues and differing questions of individual and community agency. The research identifies six such genre formulas and assumes that the works of Hungarian popular film and television series cultures can be analyzed within these frameworks – and that these frameworks are particularly suited to presenting different patterns and problems of agency and success. These six genres are: comedy, melodrama, crime, historical, adventure, and fantasy. These genres are treated as groups of research-specific topics, conflicts, and narrative structures: a given genre formula can represent the relationship between individual and community, different variations of individual and community agency.
In this sense, comedy (heavily relying on Thomas Schatz’s approach) carries the narratives of social integration (success, assimilation); the crime genre group represents the norms organizing social order (stories of lawful and unlawful success). While comedy and crime films focus on the narratives of success, elevation and achievement, melodrama serves as the genre for unfolding stories of failure (where the hero’s or heroes’ agency is insufficient or restricted for success). The group of historical films and series is interpreted by the research as stories of community values and the organization (foundation myths) of community (success or failure of the community and its causes), while adventure stories unfold variations and components of individual heroism. Finally, the fantasy genre (not very frequent in Hungarian screen culture), according to the criteria established by the research, is interpreted as stories of the boundaries of the community, more precisely as tales of encounters with the ‘Other’ (or, other worlds).
These formulations, in themselves, remain very general, and overlaps and exceptions are easily conceivable. Genres, therefore, are not conceived as fixed and mandatory guidelines but as flexible formulas that give shape and structure to stories, themes, and values. Genres, widely used and understood cultural patterns, nonetheless create opportunities to highlight local variations, such as the specificities of Hungarian crime narratives. (The research, in this regard, bases on the assumption that Hungarian crime fiction during the socialist era frequently addressed the issue of the incapacity of investigator-police characters, even within a regional context. This phenomenon can be interpreted in various ways, including as the mythology of the ‘human-faced policeman’ of the Kádár era.)
An important tool and background of the research: the database
In contrast to Hungarian film history, whose basic research-level exploration and discussion have long been active (although naturally with varying depth and intensity across different areas, along with continuous revisions), the history of domestic television is much less explored. For this reason, the very first step of the research was to review the corpus of Hungarian television series and describe it, starting from the filmographic level. This initial list-filmography contains slightly more than three hundred entries. To structure and review the corpus, as well as identify trends and patterns, the research relied on database processing – like the aforementioned The Social History of Hungarian Cinema project. The database covered both feature films and television series data. The starting list and basic data set for feature films were drawn from the database created during this earlier film social history research. In addition to live-action series, animated series (e.g., The Mézga Family) also featured in this context, though their systematic analysis was part of the research.
In addition to the filmographic data sets (producers, filmmakers, genres, and subgenres, etc.), the thematic categories used there (conflict, milieu, time and place of action, characters’ occupations, social and economic status) were also relevant to the current research. However, it was important to refine some of these categories and supplement them with new aspects (thus, for instance, a more detailed, expanded category set for the location and milieu of the action, as well as the characters’ occupations, was developed). Beyond all this, due to the main focus points of the current research, both the thematic description of the films/series and the characterization of the protagonists required a level of detail and categorization different from anything previously attempted.
During the project, several academic studies were published (in both Hungarian and English) in domestic and international journals. Furthermore, shorter, more accessible versions of the project’s results are presented here on this site.
Project description
Title: Hungarian Popular Cinema and Television During and After Socialism supported by the NKFI (National Research, Development and Innovation Office) project ID: FK 135235.
Principal investigator: Balázs Varga (ELTE BTK Department of Film Studies).
Doctoral Researchers: Kristóf Bánszki and Attila Bátorfy.
Student Participants: Eszter Bajomi, Nóra Hurtik, Balázs Kormos, Eszter Lázár, Dávid Lubianker, Patrik Mravik, Eszter Nagy, Karolina Rigó, Boróka Vajda, and Fruzsina Vajda.
The research began in the fall of 2020 and lasted until the end of 2024.