Pirnát Antal: „Az erdélyi szentháromságtagadók ideológiája az 1570-es években" c. kandidátusi értekezésének vitája

A vitát összefoglalta Nemeskürty István

An introduction to Elinor Glyn : her life and legacy

This special issue of Women: A Cultural Review re-evaluates an author who was once a household name, beloved by readers of romance, and whose films were distributed widely in Europe and the Americas. Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) was a British author of romantic fiction who went to Hollywood and became famous for her movies. She was a celebrity figure of the 1920s, and wrote constantly in Hearst's press. She wrote racy stories which were turned into films—most famously, Three Weeks (1924) and It (1927). These were viewed by the judiciary as scandalous, but by others—Hollywood and the Spanish Catholic Church—as acceptably conservative. Glyn has become a peripheral figure in histories of this period, marginalized in accounts of the youth-centred ‘flapper era’. Decades on, the idea of the ‘It Girl’ continues to have great pertinence in the post-feminist discourses of the twenty-first century. The 1910s and 1920s saw the development of intermodal networks between print, sound and screen cultures. This introduction to Glyn's life and legacy reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Glyn by film scholars and literary and feminist historians, and offers a range of views of Glyn's cultural and historical significance and areas for future research

Somewhere in Europe (1947): locating Hungary within a shifting geopolitical landscape

Somewhere in Europe/Valahol Európában (Radványi, 1947) was one of the first films made in Hungary after 1945. Financed by the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP), it loudly proclaimed a broad European pertinence in an effort to privilege the universal narrative of childhoods disrupted by the war over narrowly national political concerns. The film’s story of a gang of half-starved children battling for survival in a bombed-out Central European landscape places it squarely within a transnational post-war film-making tradition. Similarities with both Italian neorealism and Soviet socialist realist cinema indicate a shared European experience of the war, but is also attributable to the international training and experience of the film’s personnel. The director Radványi had worked in the Italian industry, while the scriptwriter was the well-known film theorist Béla Balázs, who had worked in Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia. This article argues that in spite of its ostensible commitment to a communist and humanist ideology, the film gives an insight into the Hungarian national obsession with territorial integrity. Hungary’s participation in World War II on the side of the Axis, and its position as a defeated nation under Allied occupation, are seen to complicate the film text. This article contends that in spite its transnational flavour, the film’s focus on lost children wandering a borderless Europe suggests a preoccupation with the country’s uncertain position within a shifting geopolitical landscape. In turn, the film’s official reading by Nemeskürty shows an eagerness to accept the film’s representation of Hungary as a blameless victim of the war, and gives evidence of a need to insert a (false) break between the country’s wartime past as a member of the Axis, and the country’s 1968 present as a member of the Communist world order

Women directors in Hungarian cinema 1931–44

Virtually nothing has been written about Hungary's three pioneering women film directors in English or Hungarian. The only mentions of the three directors and their films are found in throwaway comments in Hungarian works of film history, in an incorrect entry in a national filmography (Varga 1999), and in a dismissive article of 1985, which ignores one of the three films altogether. This article seeks to make up for this critical and historiographical oversight. This article asks why did these filmmakers succeed; and why and how did they succeed in an industry so utterly dominated by men? The other aim of this article is to move beyond discovery, and read the films in their context to assess the contribution they made to national cinema and the dominant nationalist discourse in interwar and wartime Hungary

Among the PALMs1

Born out of the convergence of intellectual traditions and owning a borrowing capacity analogous to the one that engenders creole languages, the study of folklore, or folkloristics, claims the right to adapt and remodel political, psychological, and anthropological insights, not only for itself but for the humanities disciplines of philosophy, art, literature, and music (the “PALM” disciplines). Performance-based folkloristics looks like a new blend, or network, of elements from several of those. What looks like poaching, which is a common practice for folksong and folk narrative, can be examined in the PALM disciplines under names like intertextuality and plagiarism. Nation-oriented traditions of folklore study have convergence, borrowing, and remodeling in their history which are also discoverable in other disciplines. Linguistic and cultural creolization—what happens when people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds are forced together to learn from one another—lies at the center of folklore; its study opens paths for research in all humanities fields. The study of folklore, while remaining marginal in universities, is undergoing a self-transformation which should lead to the acceptance of its methods and findings in the PALM disciplines

The invention of prestige: 'People on the mountain' and the politics of the national

People on the Mountain (Szőts, 1941) enjoys special standing in Hungarian film historiography: critics have hailed its use of real locations, deep humanity and sympathy for the downtrodden, and saw in it a precursor of Italian neorealism. This article argues that celebrations of the film’s humanity and claims of its position apart from the ideologically inflected films of the period are misplaced, and that such critical readings are simply not justified by the historical context. The article shows that People on the Mountain is the product of a state-controlled film industry, and that claims of the film’s kinship with neorealism are greatly overstated. The article further shows that contrary to accounts of unfavourable official reception, the film was very well received by industry bosses and state officials. Finally it argues that People on the Mountain makes use of a radical nationalist discourse which claimed for Hungarians precedence in Transylvania