Original scientific paper
Sites of Undoing Gender Hierarchies: Women and/in Hungarian Cinema (Industry)
Beata Hock
; Department of Gender Studies, Central
Abstract
The article engages Hungarian film production between 1945 and 2005 from a
twofold perspective. It surveys women’s inclusion in the film-making profession
and assesses the representation of women in Hungarian cinema. The
study seeks answers to the questions whether state-socialist emancipation
rhetoric and policies targeting women’s employment and social inclusion have
also affected 1) the domain of creative work; and 2) the kinds of representations
of women circulating in visual culture?
The author argues that both women’s representation and women’s participation
in cinema production have presented an overall more favourable picture
in the decades of state-socialism than during the period following the system
change. To indentify assessment criteria for “a favourable picture”, the insights
of feminist film studies are consulted. The survey concludes that beside
some pieces by engaged women filmmakers, a good proportion of complex
portrayals of women came from male directors. At the same time, the author
interrogates to what extent, and with what sort of qualifications, (Western)
feminist film criticism may prove to be a viable tool of analysis to account for
developments within an arguably different historical/social context and production
environment. The starkly different production environments of mainstream
Hollywood cinema (the foundational “research animal” of British-
American feminist theory), its state-funded equivalent in socialist Hungary and
the subsequent re-arrangement of the industry in the new market economy entail
both material kind and film text-related consequences. The article proposes
that the political economy of cultural production in state-socialist Hungary allowed for a kind of transformation of signifying practices that is appreciable
from a feminist perspective.
Keywords
Hungarian cinema; socialist Hungary; women; socialism; cultural production; feminist perspective
Hrčak ID:
58281
URI
Publication date:
25.7.2010.
Visits: 2.992 *