Mozgó fényképek. The scandal and debate around moving images in early Hungarian cinema

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the Budapest staging of a very popular German play in Europe and US at the end of the 19^th century that can be regarded as one of the earliest narratives of the cinematic experience in Hungary. Originally published with the title Hans Huckebein in 1897 and written by Oscar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg, the play remained outside the horizon of early cinema scholars, although it is a rich inventory of different modes of using and interpreting moving images. The Budapest performance of the play incorporates the screening of a cinema program, including a hitherto unknown (Lumière?) film commissioned by the theatre. The characters and the theatrical audience become film viewers, and this experience is extensively debated on stage. Instantaneous photography and moving image recording allowed for trespassing the boundary between private and public, since the model’s consent was not technically required for the recording process. The ‘scandal’ staged by the play is the presentation of a (moving) image ‒ considered personal and private ‒ in the public space of the cinema. The debate around this scandal contributes to the redefinition of both personal identity, construed increasingly as an image, and the public sphere as a realm of censored images. The article sets out to map the variability of practices and cultural codes ‒ such as theatrical plots, practices of instant and studio photography, personal image protection, copyright ‒ that affected the interpretation and uses of moving images.

KEYWORDS:

• Early cinema
• visual public sphere
• screen-and-stage hybrids
• Lumière
• image protection

Acknowledgements

I thank the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program for the grant allowing to conduct research in the Library of Congress and the University of Maryland. I would also like to thank the archivists and librarians Dominique Moustacchi (Archives françaises du film du CNC), and Edit Rajnai (National Széchényi Library). I am grateful for Stephen Bottomore, Eszter Polónyi, and Ervin Török for reading earlier versions of this text. A sincere thank you to Ágnes Matuska for proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The article is an expanded and revised version of the 6th chapter of my monograph published in Hungarian, A vurstlitól a moziig. A magyar vizuális tömegkultúra kibontakozása (1896–1914) (From the Fairground to Cinema. Emergence of Visual Mass Culture in Hungary [1896–1914]) (Szeged: Pompeji, 2022): 141–165.

2. In the 1897/98 theater season of the German Empire, the play was ‘the most commonly played work, with 724 performances’ (Bonnell 2005, 188).

3. ‘The story relates to woes of an unlucky young gentleman who, at Ostend, is entrapped into taking part in a moving picture of lovemaking on the sands. The picture is afterward shown in a vitascope exhibition in London to the delight of all his friends’. The New Play at Daly’s Theatre is a Very Fragile Farce from the German. New York Times, December 8, 1897. 4.

4. The first moving image projections in Hungary are dated at the end of April 1896 and are intensified in May when a national exhibition is opened celebrating the millennial past of Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin (Magyar 2003, 28–29).

5. From here on I will use the English translation of the play (including the names of characters and locations), indicating only the major differences between the Hungarian and English translation. The Hungarian translation is indicated on the title page of the Hungarian edition as ‘Hungarianization’ by Jenő Heltai, the future comic playwright and poet. The English version was translated by F.C. Burnand, a comic writer and playwright who often published in Punch. The two versions show that the translators were quite free with the source material and adapted the original text for national audiences.

6. When interviewing the authors about the ‘cinematographic images, which are only mentioned in their play, and actually shown to the audience’ in the Budapest performance, Blumenthal and Kadelburg react: ‘It’s much more effective this way! Too bad we didn’t think of it ourselves’. (Budapesti Napló, October 18, 1898)

7. According to information provided by Dominique Moustacchi (Archives françaises du film du CNC), there are no traces of this film among the uncatalogued films either.

8. Live actors of the kinema sketches are not spectators of the moving images. The characters have two modes of existence: one is the living, theatrical actor, the other is their recorded, cinematic image. The task of the narration is to integrate the two media and the two types of action and existence. On the introduction of the genre of kinema-sketch in Hungary see Füzi (2020).

9. The early ‘cinema of attractions’ is defined by exhibitionism rather than voyeurism; due to the acknowledged contact between viewers and characters, the look at the camera, and the theatrical acting style, even films presenting openly erotic scenes cannot be classified as examples of voyeurism (Gunning 1986, 64).

10. Some of the early films reflecting on being filmed or photographed: The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1901); Photographing a Female Crook (Wallace McCutcheon, 1904), The Story the Biograph Told (Wallace McCutheon, 1904), Getting Evidence (Edwin S. Porter ‒ Wallace McCutcheon, 1906), Boby’s Kodak (Wallace McCutcheon, 1908), Erreur tragique (Louis Feuillade, 1913).

11. For more fictional stories, see the compilation and introduction by Bottomore (2012) in the Film History special issue.

12. For an excellent analysis of the way the mechanical reproduction and widespread circulation of photographic images redefined identity and brought new systems of criminal identification, see Gunning (1996).

13. For the difficulties of defining privacy and the differences between the continental and US legislation on personal image rights, see Whitman (2004).

14. Immunization according to Esposito’s etymological analysis serves to protect the individual from the potential threat of the community by exempting the immune person from the tasks and duties derived from his belonging to the community (Esposito 2011, 5).

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Izabella Füzi

Izabella Füzi is an associate professor at the University of Szeged (Hungary) at the Visual Culture and Literary Theory Department. She is founder and chief editor of the online film studies and visual culture journal Apertúra (www.apertura.hu). She has previously written on narrative theories in film, mediality, and spectatorship and is co-author, with Ervin Török, of Introduction to the Analysis of Epic Fiction and Narrative Film (2006, in Hungarian). She is the editor of a special issue on early Hungarian visual mass culture in Apertúra (Winter 2016) and author of a monograph on early Hungarian cinema (From the Amusement Park to Cinema. Emergence of Visual Mass Culture in Hungary 1896-1914, Szeged: Pompeji, 2022, in Hungarian). During three seasons, in 2018/19 she curated and presented a series of early cinema and silent film projections accompanied by live music in Szeged, reconstructing early programming formats and different practices of accompaniment. Her current research interests include the emergence of Hungarian visual mass culture, early film theory (relations between aesthetics and mass mediated experiences), sound perception in cinema, and shifting concepts of the moving image.