A choice setting
Hungary was immediately infatuated with the Lumière brothers' invention, which was introduced to the country as early as 1896. Screenings in the city's abundant cafés, and the opening of a host of cinemas and studios, testify to the appeal of cinema. Although the war put a temporary halt to this momentum, the Pearl of the Danube represented a kind of nec plus ultra of Central European sophistication at the time, inspiring filmmakers from all over the world. The first German talkie was shot here, Melody of the Heart (Hanns Schwarz, 1929), a melodrama about a young country girl trying her luck in the Hungarian capital. Reconstituted in the studio for Rendez-vous (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940), adapted from a Hungarian play or not, it serves as the setting for one of the classics of Hollywood comedy. Other famous ambassadors include Béla Lugosi, who gave a mythical performance to Dracula, before Michael Curtiz signed one of the greatest classics in the history of cinema, Casablanca (1941). In Hungary, the unfavorable climate meant that production was no longer at its peak, but comedies followed one another like pearls, such as the delightful Hippolyte, le valet (István Székely, 1931), which was also the second Hungarian talking film. Paradoxically, it picked up again during the war, reaching a record 54 releases in 1942. These included the still-famous Men of the Mountain (István Szőts, 1942), a splendid pastoral epic shot in the mountains of Transylvania.
Rich hours
In 1948, cinema was nationalized: obeying the current canons of socialist realism became strongly recommended. A few films were exceptions, such as Professor HannibaI (Zoltán Fábri, 1956), which dealt subtly with the Horty dictatorship. Its release coincided with the Budapest uprising, which led to severe repression, in culture as elsewhere. Another escape for talent: László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond went on the run. By the early 1970s, they were among Hollywood's most sought-after cinematographers. The Béla Balázs studio, founded in 1959, brought together avant-garde directors such as Miklós Jancsó who, having studied in Budapest, kept their distance, perhaps far from the regime's surveillance. Jancsó's work, recognizable by his predilection for long, carefully composed sequence shots, foreshadows that of Béla Tarr. Father (István Szabó, 1966) tells the story of a boy who has lost his father, whose heroic exploits he fantasizes about in post-war Budapest. Un film d'amour (1970) by the same author deepens these reminiscences, this time focusing on young adults and their sentimental procrastinations. Another great innovator is Karol Makk's Amour (1971), a kind of chamber film that tackles head-on the disillusionment of the Communist regime. Szindbád (Zoltán Huszárik, 1971) is the quintessence, to the point of excess, of the refined and heady Hungarian cinema. It was this modernist cinema that was best exported, at a time when popular cinema and genre films were enjoying a similar revival. Inventiveness, singularity and ambition continued unabated through the 1970s, at the same time as a documentary trend emerged. Budapest ballade (Jeles András, 1979) and Journal à mes enfants (Márta Mészáros, 1984), the first part of a trilogy, are just a few examples. Mephisto (1981), adapted from the novel of the same name by Klaus Mann, won István Szabó 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, again evokes the - eternally - disappointed dreams of youth. A phantasmagorical, lyrical vein marbles the most striking 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 begins in late19th-century Budapest, the umpteenth visual achievement - in black and white - that deserves express rediscovery.
Inheritance
Paradoxically or not, the liberal transition brought the film industry to a halt, with the state no longer providing funding. Béla Tarr became one of the darlings of auteur cinema. In his 14-hour film Le Tango de Satan (1994), as in Damnation (1988) and Les Harmonies de Werckmeister (2000), he depicts a rural, apocalyptic world in long sequence shots. Comme un peu d'Amérique (Gábor Herendi, 2002), a cult generational comedy of the 2000s, is a light-hearted departure from the usual Hungarian cinema. Internationally, Hungarian cinema continues to stand out for a kind of baroque excess, a taste for experimentation and technical virtuosity. It's Taxidermia (György Pálfi, 2003), extravagantly inspired, never shying away from outrageousness. It's the cinema of Kornél Mondruczkó, who dares a contemporary opera(Johanna, 2005), a dystopian tale to which a horde of flesh-and-blood dogs offer startling visions(White God, 2014), or an auteur superhero film that evokes the migratory crisis, Jupiter's Moon (2017). László Nemes' Son of Saul (the son of András Jeles), before Sunset (2018), about the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is also a shocking immersion in an extermination camp. Nimrod Antal, who earned his ticket to Hollywood with Kontroll (2003), a dive into the underground world of subway controllers, is a quality popular filmmaker, as demonstrated by his recent return to the country with Whisky Bandit (2017), inspired by the incredible story of a notorious bank robber.
Like its neighbor, Prague, Budapest has been attracting foreign productions for some time now, especially from Hollywood, who have come to take advantage of the city's low rates and abundant architecture, which are on a par with other European cities. Woody Allen was a pioneer when he came to shoot his Tolstoy parody War and Love in the Budapest Opera House in 1975. Spurred on by a new National Film Fund, production has boomed in recent years, with the multiplication of crowd pleasers and popular successes. Budapest plays a starring role in Gábor Reisz's slightly offbeat comedies Pour des raisons inexplicables (2014) and Bad Poems (2018).
