The ‘invisible’ museum of Hungarian films
Hungarian cinema does not have a museum
MúzeumCafé 15.
The Hungarian National Film Archive was founded more than 50 years ago and this gives good reason to be thinking about why Hungarian cinema does not have a museum. That is, it has one and yet has none. Although several temporary exhibitions covering different periods in cinematographic history have been held – such as the 100 Years of Hungarian Film or Hungarian Film Posters – Hungary has no permanent museum of film and cinema culture. Hungary’s national film treasures can be found in the Hungarian National Film Archive. According to cinema historians, about 600 silent films were made in Hungary, though only 10 per cent survived. For example, Alexander Korda’s The Man of Gold made in 1918 was regarded as one of the period’s great successes. The film, adapted from a novel by Mór Jókai, was made by the Corvin Film Studio founded by Korda in 1917. The film’s editing technique as well as the naturalistic acting of Oszkár Beregi and Margit Makai are especially noteworthy. Yet in that period the conservation of films was not important for either manufacturers or distributors, and not even for film directors. Strangely enough, sound films were launched in 1929, coinciding with the world economic crisis. In Hungary the first sound film, The Singing Fool, was shown in the Fórum Cinema on 20 September 1929 and with that a new era began. The premiere cinemas started to be converted for sound films in 1930 and a year later such films could be screened throughout the country and the Hunnia Film Studios were established to record in sound. “There is London, Paris and there is Constantinople, but all in vain because for me there is only Pest”. These words can be heard in the first Hungarian ‘talking movie’, A Blue Idol – in the leading roles Pál Jávor played a failed nobleman and Gyula Gózon performed the lyrics of the feature song by Imre Harmat. All this could be first seen and heard in the Royal Apollo Cinema on Budapest’s Great Boulevard on 25 September 1931. The second Hungarian talkie, Hyppolit, the Butler (1931) immediately became the most successful film of all times. It was directed by István Székely, who was called back from Berlin, and interestingly it was the film which set the tone for Hungarian middle-class comedy up to the period of the new wave in the 1960s. Digitalisation of Hyppolit, the Butler was undertaken by the Hungarian National Film Archive in 2008 with sponsorship from the Hungarian Development Bank. Between 1931 and 1945 a total of 365 Hungarian feature films were made, of which 90 per cent are held by the Archive. Unfortunately the situation is not as good in terms of pre-1945 documentaries – the majority were destroyed during the war. For safe-keeping the collection of newsreels and documentaries formerly owned by the Hungarian Film and Video Company as well as the films of the Béla Balázs Studio Foundation were acquired by the Archive. A significant increase in the collections was assisted by government decrees of 1972 and 1998 concerning compulsory copies of media products. The latter stipulates that film producers are obliged to hand the Archive a good quality positive copy, a negative and a dupe-positive. Foreign films began to be collected by the Hungarian National Film Archive in the 1950s. Most importantly it supplied the Filmmúzeum cinema, which represented the main source of its income. With the new wave, the cinema began to include contemporary art films in its programme, which played a decisive role in the birth of a modern approach to film. A decree of 1961 entitled the Archive to purchase foreign films, though currency resources were rather limited. Nevertheless, some of the most important and influential films of the French, Italian, British and Swedish new wave were screened in Hungary, and they could be seen not only in the Filmmúzeum but in select film clubs where they were interpreted and analysed late into night. The tradition of film clubs with post-film discussions has revived in the past five years, due partly to Tamás Perlaki who has been running such clubs for 40 years and partly to Miklós Csejk, who has hosted film clubs for 15 years. The fact that a traditional cinema is completely different from a multiplex must also be taken into account. What is the difference? While a cinema has a building, the multiplex is a shop window, one of many with no building of its own. The cinema has been about the soul and the community with its rather uncomfortable seats, while the multiplex is about the body. You pamper your body in comfortable armchairs, eat and drink using practical plastic holders fixed to the seat, and in order that all your sensory organs are stimulated maddeningly loud sound effects can be heard and images follow one another so fast that you don’t have time to see them, which is OK since they were not made to be looked at, as then the lack of fantasy would quickly become apparent. Hence for the generation which goes to the multiplex and perhaps has never been to a ‘traditional’ cinema, in this sense the latter functions as a museum. That is why no more traditional cinemas should be closed, since only a few are still operating. The photographic and poster collection of the Hungarian National Film Archive is also a treasure trove. It includes approximately 200,000 photographs, picture postcards, prints and reproductions, as well as more than 50,000 Hungarian and foreign film posters. In 2008 the Archive purchased the valuable photographic collection of silent film production undertaken in Cluj. So far finances have facilitated the restoration of 200 early film posters. Of course, there are also some real gems among the later film posters, such as that of Love (1970), directed by Károly Makk and adapted from a short story by Tibor Déry. Apart from the credits it shows a huge photo of the two leading characters played by Iván Darvas and Mari Törőcsik embracing with Darvas kissing Törőcsik’s hand. Quite a lot of the collection’s invaluable items were displayed at the exhibitions Hungarian Film Posters and 100 Years of Hungarian Films in early 2008.