Call for Papers
Study Day, 21st of September 2018, Budapest
“HUNGARIAN CINEMA, THE END OF A CENTURY? HISTORIES, SOCIOLOGIES, AESTHETICS”
First session: 1980-2000

Department of Film Studies – Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) IRCAV – University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris, France) ESTCA – University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis (Saint-Denis, France)


Presentation of the study day :

The study day “Hungarian Cinema, The End of a Century? Histories, Sociologies, Aesthetics (First Session: 1980-2000)” is jointly organized by the Department of Film Studies at the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and the research laboratories IRCAV (Paris 3) and ESTCA (Paris 8). It is part of a three part research program, aiming to coalesce and develop works concerning contemporary Hungarian cinema by gathering scholars from different countries throughout an international academic event, in French and in English.
This call for papers concerns the first session of the program, a study day devoted to the years 1980-2000 which will take place in Budapest on the 21st of September 2018. A second session will be held in Paris during spring 2019 in the form of an international conference, with another call for papers to be released next autumn. This second session will be a continuation of the work begun in the first, whilst broadening upon the studied period, corpuses, and approaches with the particular aim of analysing Hungarian cinema within an international context. A final session is planned to be held at the University of Warsaw in 2020, as a part of the 9th International Congress of Hungarology, with the aim to combine the completed research works for an English publication in the Hungarian Studies review.
The first two sessions will be followed by evening screenings of a selection of the studied films. These screenings will be accompanied by their directors, open to the public and followed by a discussion with the filmmakers lead by a researcher from the conference.

Questions and lines of research :

A great amount of sociological and historical research has been done on the Hungarian
cinema of the 1960s-1980s, whereas the next two decades received less attention, a situation partly explainable by the sense of rupture resulting from the fall of the Soviet empire. The international
conference “Hungarian Cinema: the End of a Century (1980-2000): Histories, Sociologies,
Aesthetics” aims to question the idea of the historical turn of 1989 being an abrupt change, and to study the way(s) directors and their crews in fact anticipated and confronted it. As a result, a
significant section of the conference will be concerned with approaches of art history and art
sociology, in order to understand the modalities of the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s.
Additionally the conference will ascertain what this atmosphere of both “end of time” and “end of
history” generated in terms of mutations and aesthetic inventions.
Marked by the change of the political regime and the socio-economic transformations experienced by the country, the Hungarian artistic scene of the 1990s is distinguishable both by the amount of produced works and the emergence of new aesthetics and approaches. This emergence
occurred at the crossroads of cinema, performing arts and visual arts. Focusing on cinema, this conference will highlight the Hungarian artistic community and its productions, inviting European researchers to reflect upon the relations filmmakers, composers, visual artists and writers had during
this era. We will contemplate upon these creations as a form of “collective enunciation”, attached to
singular socio-historical circumstances and to original philosophical and political approaches.
With this in mind, interdisciplinarity is a fundamental value of this project, born out of the
impossibility to observe films without literature, music without films, literature without theatre within a sociological and historical study framework. A specific interest will thus be granted to “hybrids” or “heterogenous” works which call upon varied practices, artistic fields, collective
works, and artistic communities. Thereby we will mobilise a transmedial perspective within this
conference, in which the cinematographic works are considered a meeting point between aesthetics,
practices and techniques, as products of an art world rather than as the property of an individual
creator.

We invite the participants to choose their approach such as in this (non-exhaustive) list:
- Cultural and Aesthetic History: Stylistic continuities and discontinuities; the question of periodisation and perception of 1989 as a point of rupture; links between political history and aesthetic history.
- Sociology of Cinema : lifestyles of film makers and modes of production of films; relationships to other artistic fields; activities of artistic groups and cultural networks.
- Aesthetics of Cinema: Forms characteristic of the end of the century; aesthetic circulations between cinema, literature, music and visual arts; phenomenons of repetition and mutations across the arts and periods of history.

All proposed presentations of 40 minutes must include a title, abstract, and a note including a short biography and the main academic works of the author. They must be presented in either French or English and sent before the30th of June 2018to the following address: colloque.cinemahongrois@gmail.com. Selected presentation proposals will be announced on the 15th of July. Costs of travel and accommodation will be covered by the participants and/or their research institutions.

Direction of Conference: Mario Adobati (PhD candidate, IRCAV, Paris 3/ELTE), Damien Marguet (Senior Lecturer, ESTCA, Paris 8)

Scientific Committee: Mario Adobati (PhD candidate, Paris 3/ELTE), Kristian Feigelson (Pr, Paris 3), Kovács András Bálint (Pr, ELTE), Mélisande Levantopoulos (Senior Lecturer, Paris 8) Damien Marguet (Senior Lecturer, Paris 8), Andrea Seidler (Pr, Université de Vienne), Matthias Steinle (Senior Lecturer, Paris 3), Varga Balázs (Pr, ELTE)