Film Review - Beanpole (2019)

2017

, 2001) 1 György Kalmár "We used to wait for the party addresses on Moscow Square each Saturday night. Everybody who considered himself even a tiny bit cool in the neighbourhood gathered there. The only thing that made that day special was that it was my eighteenth birthday. I remember that I wanted to have the same kind of hand-sewn West-Coast boots as Royal had. Chicks really dug that. And I never had a girlfriend before. So that's where the story begins: it is the 27 th of April, 1989." Moscow Square (2001), the first feature film of Ferenc Török starts with the recording of the precise time and place: Budapest, Moscow Square, 27. April, 1989. This evocation of the fall of communism and Petya's coming of age has become the emblematic moment of the cinematic regime change in Hungary, a mythical moment in the history of cinema as well. The 2001 Budapest Film Festival, the reviews following it and the ticket sales all made clear that roughly a decade after the political regime change a new generation of Hungarian filmmakers came of age (Varga 13, Gelencsér 321). This was Török's diploma work, who graduated from the famous Simó class of the Budapest Academy of Theatre and Film Art, together with such other directors as Szabolcs Hajdu or György Pálfi (Hajdu's first feature film, Macerás Ügyek, was also shown at this festival). Moscow Square did not only win the best first film prize of the jury at the festival, and "marked the long-awaited generation change" (Erzsébet Bori), but it also quickly turned into a cult piece of post-1989 Hungarian cinema, and has been a constant item on Hungarian top film lists ever since. One possible cause of this rarely seen cultural influence is probably the theme of the 1989 regime change, the cinematic representation of one of the key episodes of recent Hungarian history, which was a formative experience for most generations, not only that of Petya (and Török and myself), who graduated from secondary school in those years. Another cause may be the way the film renews Hungarian cinematic traditions: Moscow Square was often praised for its new film language, for example for its unaffected, documentarist hand-held camera work, its combination with music video style editing and modest but compact visual symbols, for its lack of pathos and mannerism, for its fresh and personal tone (see the reviews of Judit Szász and Erzsébet Bori). One of the recurrent motifs of reviews and audience responses was the pleasure felt over the fact that finally there was an enjoyable, likeable Hungarian film, not "sick", not about the depths of Eastern European misery, a film that surprisingly fails to inspire anyone to cut up one's veins. These kinds of responses are significant for the present study as well: in the context of the identity formations and masculinities of Hungarian auteur cinema, Moscow Square is a special case. It is one of the few auteur films that feature characters who are actually able to shape their lives in an active manner (that is, they are not hopeless antiheroes), whose dreams and lives are not crushed by historical circumstances. It is a film in which social issues are less important than private life, in which irony and reflexive playfulness are stronger than fate or doom, and the story does not end with the tragic (or miserable) defeat (or death) of the protagonist. Thus, the regime change took place around 2000-2001 in Hungarian filmmaking, with the first feature films of such directors as Kornél Mundruczó, György Pálfi, Szabolcs Hajdu, and of course Ferenc Török. Though these films of "new Hungarian cinema" definitely open a new chapter in terms of film style(s), they do not necessarily tell stories of the fulfilment of the new hopes that emerged with the new Hungarian Republic. By 2001 the initial euphoria of 1989 was over: the times when the state-socialist 1 This article was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and by OTKA 112700 Space-ing Otherness. Cultural Images of Space, Contact Zones in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Film and Literature.

What can politically engaged aesthetic productions from the former Soviet Union tell us about socialism? As recently as ten years ago, popular audiences and scholars alike might have answered this question by invoking the dissidents who fled the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. Throughout the twentieth century, dissidents provided popular and critical “Western” discourses with vivid tales of both the treachery of leftist utopianism and the courage of individual resistance. Today, the outdated imperialist ideologies that undergird this approach have become readily apparent, while a vital strand of post-socialist leftism has surfaced once more across the former Second World. The emerging Russian filmmakers I discuss in this article offer visions of radical politics and aesthetics that learn and diverge from the state socialism that shaped their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Russia offers a stage for intellectual and artistic upheavals exceptional both for the political traditions they juxtapose, and for the foregrounded awareness of the ambivalent legacies of these traditions. Tackling a range of contentious subjects from sexuality to police brutality, these films met with controversy in Russia while securing the reputation of their directors on the international festival circuit. I examine three recent films—Svetlana Baskova’s For Marx… (2012), Angelina Nikonova’s Twilight Portrait (2011), and Lyubov Lvova and Sergei Taramayev’s Winter Journey (2013)—all by female directors or co-directors, and all seeking to imagine and image social alterity after state socialism.

Edited by Rimgaila Salys The early years of the twenty-first century have been an exciting transitional period in Russian cinema, as the industry recovered from the crises of the late 1990s and again stepped onto the global stage. During these years four generations, from the late Soviet directors through post-Soviet and New Russian filmmakers to the Russian millennials, have worked in varying visual styles and with diverse narrative strategies, while searching for a new cinematic language. Financing and distribution models have evolved, along with conservative politics driving Ministry of Culture regulation. This reader is intended both for contemporary Russian cinema courses and for modern Russian culture courses that emphasize film. It does not attempt to establish a canon for the period but seeks to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to significant Russian films released between 2005 and 2016 that are also available with English subtitles. The twenty-one essays on individual films provide background information on directors’ careers, detailed analyses of selected films, along with suggested further readings both in English and Russian. Learn more & purchase: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/filmandmediastudies/the-contemporary-russian-cinema-reader

The Journal of Central Asian Studies, Vol. 26/27, 2020

The female image in cinema has always been a reflection of socio-political transformation, thus, changes in the social status of women are directly related to their artistic representation. The image of a modern Uzbek woman in cinema combines traditionalism peculiar to the Central Asian region and glamorous femininity inspired by the West. Although the female image has undergone diversification in commercial film production, the willingness to build a family remains an integral part of women's aspirations and desires. The search for personal happiness as a wife and mother is an obligatory element of the plot narrative, and success in personal life despite various circumstances is almost the only possible happy ending for a female protagonist. In the latest art cinema, there is a general trend toward the reverse evolution of the female image-from a modern woman to a traditional one. In these movies, spiritual values, morality, and traditions as the principal factor of society's well-being are brought to the foreground, while female characters are mostly depicted in a traditional environment and within an ethnographic context. This paper mainly focuses on Bakhrom Yakubov's film Superbride (2008), which became a national hit and box-office sensation in the domestic market. Superbride is a particularly successful example of a fiction film that through the prism of youth comedy promotes an ideal and frankly banal female image based on patriarchal mentality.

Культурология UDC 008 Russian Image of the Modern Western Screen: Case Film Studies (2 films of S.Spielberg and J.Stelling) Abstract. This article analyzes the modern Western films about Russia and Russian characters -in terms of their ideology, social and cultural context. As examples -the films of S.Spielberg's and J.Stelling.