OSA | Visions after the Fall: Program

Visions after the Fall: Museums, Archives and Cinema in Reshaping Popular Perceptions of the Socialist Past

Balázs Varga: Undressing the Naked Truth: Politics and pornography, private/public lives in Kádár's Kiss by Péter Forgács

Private footage and home movies are usually considered to be parts of microhistories and as weapons of the weak. Péter Forgács's series Private Hungary (based on home movies from the 1930s and 1960s) is one of the most provoking and thoughtful examples of the creative use and re-orchestration of private footage. However Kádár's Kiss hangs out of line. The film combines private footage, radio broadcast, theatre performance, news, items from Kádár's speeches and official propaganda. In a unique audio-visual collage it twists (together) private and public, everyday custom and private/secret pleasure. This eccentric and grotesque structure reveals the lies and inner frustrations of the seemingly quiet and tranquil Kádár-regime. The presentation will discuss the film's subversive energy and Kádár's Kiss as a subversion of common (public/private) images of Eastern European everyday life under Communism. Balázs Varga received defended his Doctoral dissertation at the Department of Social History at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. Since then, he taught at Hungarian Film Academy (Budapest), at the Department of Film Theory and History at ELTE, and at the Department of Philosophy at Janus Pannonius University, Pécs. He has been a Jury-member at Hungarian Film Week, Torino International Film Festival, and Troia International Film Festival. He is the editor of Metropolis, Quarterly Journal of Film History and Theory and Member of the Board of the Association of Hungarian Film Critics. For years he was a member of the pre-selection committees for Mediawave International Film Festival and Hungarian Film Week, and the programme director of Titanic Filmfest in Budapest. He has published widely on film history and theory.

« Back Date: June 10, Saturday Time: 10.30-11 am