https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4219-3691
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Abstract
This article analyzes the ways the educational- and propaganda films produced by the film studio of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior during the 1950s and 60s are part of the broader landscape of socialist realist culture. The author proposes that by tracing the transformations of the fatherly police agent figure across the productions of the film studio, we can understand how the project of socialist realism itself began to change in the aforementioned period. In this light, the police agent becomes a figure on whom the shifting epistemological status of representation under state socialism is projected.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The studio is a working entity of the Ministry of Interior (in Hungarian: Belügyminisztérium, henceforth BM), under the direct supervision of the Agitational and Propaganda Division. Henceforth, I will refer to the unit as the BM film studio.
2 Useful cinema as a category has received more attention recently also in Eastern European screen studies, for some examples on this see (Strausz Citation2020, 161). Here I engage with useful cinema as a ‘body of films and technologies that perform tasks and serve as instruments in an ongoing struggle for aesthetic, social, and political capital’ (Acland and Wasson Citation2011, 3).
3 This apparatus, of course, was not homogenous across the region, and in some countries the repressive measures were stricter than in others. In Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland filmmakers had significantly more space to experiment than, for example, in East Germany.
4 Gábor Szilágyi’s book Életjel (Citation1994) offers a detailed description of these transformations in the sphere of feature film production.
5 Her study Army film and the avant-garde (Lovejoy Citation2014) analyses how the Czech Army Film studio, despite its deep embeddedness in Czech socialist state has been able to maintain a constant level of experimentation throughout the 1950s and the 1960s.
6 It exceeds by far the limits of this essay to undertake a comparison with the educational- and propaganda efforts of the capitalist West at similar institutions at the comparable time. Nonetheless, a brief glance at Grieveson’s analysis of early 20th century liberal-corporate capitalist useful film networks reveals the eerily similar the ways in which ‘[t]he state began to systematically make use of the supposed affective and pedagogic power of film, its mobility, its status as an emblem of a machine-made economic modernity, and its figural articulation of government to position movie watching as a technique of governmental management’ (Grieveson Citation2018, 23).
7 For more on the concept of entangled modernity, see Cronqvist and Hilgert (Citation2017).
8 According to Groys (Citation1992, 37), late Stalinist socialist realism diverged from the program of the early modernist avant-garde in three key steps. We will see later that these transformations do play an important role in the BM film studio’s educational output. Firstly, it reassigned the role of tradition for artistic expression. While the avant-garde aimed at creating a tabula rasa situation, and erase the creative norms of the past, Stalinist art made room for those elements of the tradition that could be used in the revolutionary project of the Bolsheviks. This transformation reintegrated classic representational devices (cause-effect connections, identification, dramatic unity, etc.) in the creative repertoire of the artists. Secondly, socialist realism rehabilitated mimetic representation, which for the avant-garde remained an impasse. The key step for this reintroduction took place through the notion of the typical. Thirdly, Stalinist culture rediscovered the role of human subjectivity and emotions, which the futurists attempted to close off from their expressive palette. The monumental classicism of the late Stalinist years and the move towards traditional forms of artistic subjectivity and transparency will turn out to be an important element of the local forms of agitation in 1950s Hungary. The literary orientation of propaganda in Hungary under the reign of Minister of Eduction József Révai overlaps with the three shifts indicated above. Literariness here indicates an attempt to assign a central role to affective capacities of the traditional arts. According to Kalmár, ‘this aestheticizing ideological conception aimed at influencing people’s emotions, and in this sense it was didactic and cultic’ (Kalmár Citation1998, 53).
9 We should note here that the role of the future, the ways in which it was imagined, took on a specific role in the postwar period on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It became another terrain on which political, scientific, social, and also artistic differences were battled out. According to Andersson, the challenge during the 1950s was to understand ‘how future horizons and regimes of historicity changed in a time when notions of progress, economic and technological growth, and scientific and political rationality all became sources of contestation (…)’ (Andersson Citation2012, 1414).
10 For the details of the Déry-debate, see Reichert (Citation2018, 77–103).
11 Gyarmati offers a detailed account of these tumultuous years in his monograph (Citation2021), see especially Chapter 5.
12 The documents that detail the functioning of the studio are spread across several archives in Budapest. What I currently know about the films’ production circumstances, distribution and exhibition networks is based on the documents from the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (ÁBTL). There are, however, more sources to be consulted in the upcoming phases of this project. Strausz (Citation2020) has discussed in detail the historiographic difficulties of writing about the BM studio.
13 Belügyminisztérium (Citation1977).
14 Thus, in this essay I will also use the rudimentary differentiation between educational (instructive-technical) and propaganda (fictional-dramatized) films. At the same time, the terminology in the literature on useful cinema is far from coherent, as the various studies in, for example, Learning with the lights off (Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible Citation2011) indicate. Studies on the Eastern European characteristics of useful cinema (among others Česálková Citation2012, Citation2022; Lovejoy Citation2014; Sarkisova Citation2016) also rely on this basic differentiation.
15 Tamási (Citation2019) recounts that in the basement of the studio’s Isabella Street office, a system of cabinets held hundreds of reels with library-like paper records indicating who checked them out, and when.
16 Reports repeatedly point out how many students were reached during the screening of a given film. See for example the numbers for the three years 1975–1977 in ‘Principles and tasks in the production of Ministry of Interior educational- and propagandafilms’ (Belügyminisztérium Citation1977, 8).
17 Strausz describes this shift as historically specific form of instrumentalization. See his article on the general outlines of the films’ production and the details of this mentioned shift (Strausz Citation2020), and also his analysis on the rhetoric construction of the border zone (Strausz Citation2021).
18 In her 2020 monograph The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor, Skvirsky examines the process narration—’the sequentially ordered representation of someone making or doing something’ (Skvirsky Citation2020, 2)—in contrast to classical narration in terms of their narrative strategies. This comparison can usefully be deployed in the analysis of the BM films as well, which, as I will show, display a classical-immersive early phase, and an instrumentalized, processual later phase.
19 This development continues across the 1980s, by when the projections of the politically ideal future become so far removed from the everyday experiences that they verge on the ridiculous. The propaganda films, nonetheless, embrace this detachment and seem to take great delight in creating convoluted narratives about the work of the agent. In the future, I plan on continuing this work by shifting focus towards the agents of the 1980s, whose figures are not characterized anymore by an avant-garde heritage.
20 See Kunicki on this, who argues that while James Bond flaunts his identity, Eastern European agents tend to work like moles (Citation2020, 43).
21 In the films, all the rookie protagonists are male.
22 Murray Smith has distinguished between recognition, alignment and allegiance in his detailed account on cinematic identification (Smith Citation1995). Here, I refer to allegiance because the film’s rhetoric engages audiences to side morally and politically with the values presented by the older officer.
23 For a statistical breakdown, see Strausz’s chart (2020, 161).
24 In two studies Strausz (Citation2020, Citation2021) singles out the flashback structure as a central narrative device of the dramatized films of the studio made before ca. 1965, but does not connect them to the future-orientation of the socialist realist aesthetic program.
25 Between 1945 and 1956, the number of tractors working in the Hungarian agricultural sector went from 10.000 to 25.000. While this is a significant improvement, it still lagged far behind in international comparison: the number of acres per tractor in Hungary at the time was 274, while in the UK the same figure is 20, in Holland 35 (Romsics Citation2010, 353).
26 As it was customary in the film production of the classic socialist realist period: ‘[a]bout the films’ style we can summarily say that each used device serves the purpose of telling the story, and communicating the ideological message of the film’ (Vajda Citation2021, 33), author’s translation.
27 Which is distinctly different from capitalist consumption on the main point of being more humanized: ‘its main goal consisted not in reaping the largest profit, but to provide the best service for customers’ (Ispán Citation2014, 392), author’s translation.
28 In fact, out of the five episodes recounted by the officer in the film, four feature female thieves. This gendered representation of the criminal in the film highlights that women, on the one hand were regarded active and authoritative members of the socialist collective. On the other hand, however, ‘women were not considered as reliable and devoted as men; in particular, their political “backwardness” and their concern with “trivial matters” were often pointed out’ (Fodor Citation2002, 260). The film’s feminization and trivialization of petty crime is thrown into relief by the playful-ironic tone of the male voice-over narrator. Taking a broader perspective, it becomes all the more important that the instructor-tutor agent characters of the BM studio’s oeuvre are all male.
29 For the distribution of the dramatized and non-dramatic pieces over the years, see the chart in Strausz (Citation2020, 161).
30 Kalmár argues that in the agitation material disseminated to the population, tableaus, images, graphs and charts play a more important role in the 1960s than before (Kalmár Citation2014, 368).
31 Between 1960 and 1963, Hungarian authorities conducted a complex operation to catch a perpetrator who painted anti-socialist graffities on the walls of train-station toilettes. For details, see Gervai (Citation2011, 259–268).
32 Both Schöpflin (Citation2016, 97) and Takács (Citation2010, 116) use this term when they describes the main trends in Kádár’s post-1956 social policies.
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Notes on contributors
László Strausz
László Strausz is an associate professor in Film Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. His work focuses on contemporary East-Central European screen media, cultural memory, and the politics of style. Since the publication of his monograph Hesitant Histories on the Romanian Screen, he has been working with state-produced educational films made during the state socialist decades.