You cannot be Sirius! Hungarian nationalist science fiction

ABSTRACT

This study of the Hungarian science fiction film Szíriusz/Sirius seeks to show that stifling state control and central oversight of production practices impacted on the aesthetics of Hungarian cinema. Hungarian films of the 1940s, shot on state-owned sound stages using identikit sets and costumes, offered audiences visions of a glorious past characterized by interiority and drabness that pointed to a limit to the nostalgic imagining of Hungary's past.

KEYWORDS:

• Hungary
• science-fiction
• popular cinema
• anti-semitism
• second world war

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The poem's first verse was later adopted as Hungary's national anthem.

2. The office of the censor was a legacy of Habsburg rule. For well over a century, freedom of speech had been restricted in Hungary.

3. See Záhonyi-Ábel (2013, 14–27) for a recent scholarly account of censorship and the organization of the Hungarian film industry.

4. For a report of the national film committee ONFB meeting to decide the production schedule, see ‘A történelmi és társadalmi filmek vannak többségben az 1943-44-es évad gyártási programjában’ in Magyar Film (1943, July 28, 3.)

5. See for instance the editorial ‘Our Mission’ in the first issue of Magyar Film (1939b, February 18, 1.).

6. She was also a target for vicious abuse by the then dominant radical rightwing press. Her dangerous liaison with a senior secret service officer led her to a Nazi torture chamber. Her exceptional courage in rescuing 20 Jewish Hungarian children as they were being marched to the Danube for machine-gunning by the Hungarian Nazis earned her the recognition of Yad Vashem. She is one of just two Hungarian film industry figures to be named ‘Righteous among the Nations’.http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId=4438766

7. After the war, he was rumoured to have participated in the mass murder of Jewish Hungarians perpetrated by the Arrow Cross. His apologists have shown this charge to be likely to be untrue, but conceded that he did participate in the coup that installed the fanatical anti-Semite Ferenc Szálasi in the final bloody months of the war. ‘A Szilassy ügy’ (The Szilassy Case) by Péter Ábel is available at http://www.sze.hu/∼kallay/letolt/2011/februar/Szilassy/A%20Szilassy%20%C3%9Cgy.doc. Accessed on 5th September, 2016.

8. This last was one of the criteria by which the Hungarian censor adjudged each film submitted to it for consideration. See Bingert (1928, 54).

9. See Gyurgyák (2007, 46–53) on Széchenyi and (2007, 28–30) on Wesselényi in the Hungarian. For an assessment of Széchenyi's work in English, see Gerő (1995, 60–70). For a general discussion in English, see Hungary's Long Nineteenth Century (Péter 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [ECF-2012-290\5].

Notes on contributors

Gábor Gergely

Gábor Gergely is a lecturer in film studies at the University of Lincoln. His book, Hungarian Film 1929--1947: National Identity, Anti-Semitism and Popular Cinema is due to be published in 2017 by Amsterdam University Press. In addition to his work on interwar and wartime Hungarian cinema, he has published on émigré actors in classical Hollywood (Foreign Devils, Peter Lang, 2012) and the production of space in the MGM Tarzan films of Johnny Weissmuller. He is currently working on foreignness, the accent and the Schwarzenegger scream.