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Film Studies: National Cinemas

This guide highlights selected resources for various national cinemas.

Introduction

Lumière films were screened in Budapest within a few months of their initial showing in Paris, with the earliest Hungarian film, A tanc/The Dance (Bela Zsitovsky, 1901), consisting of twenty-seven one‐minute reels each documenting a different folk dance. The feature film, Ma es holnap/Today and Tomorrow, released in 1912, was made by Mihely Kertész, who would later become famous in Hollywood as Michael Curtiz, director of Casablanca (1942). By 1915, there were 270 cinemas in Hungary and by 1918 109 films had been produced, with Sandor Korda (later Alexander Korda) a key player. A significant Hungarian émigré tradition was established early on, with Korda, Bela Lugosi, Emeric Pressburger, Miklos Rozsa, István Kovacs, and George Cukor, all of Hungarian origin, making significant contributions to the film industries of other countries. Political upheavals caused a hiatus in film production until the 1930s, with the Hungarian film industry faring badly compared with those of Poland and Czechoslovakia (see Czech Republic, film in; Slovakia, film in); though genre films, especially musicals, romance and comedies (many starring comic actor Gyula Kabos) continued to attract audiences. One of Hungary’s most celebrated films, István Szot’s Emberek a havason/The Mountain People (1942), stems from this period. During World War II, an initial boost to film production, due to the restriction of imports from Western Europe and the US, led to an all‐time high of fifty-four films released in 1942, though this was quickly followed by the wholesale destruction of the technical base during World War II.    ...

Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). Hungary, film in. In A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 6 Jan. 2021

In the library's collections/Searching the online catalog

Selected book title(s)

Other library resource(s)

Finding scholarly articles and journal title(s)

You can find articles about Hungarian film in a variety of publications. To get started in your research, you can use one of the article indexes listed below or use the search box at the top of the page.

Selected movie titles

Find more Hungarian film titles in the library's collection using the online catalog.

Internet resource(s)

Keeping up with Film Studies journal literature

Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for all facets of Film Studies? And you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's, you can download and read the articles you want from the journals for which we have subscriptions.

You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's also available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.