This video is an offshoot of the large-scale project “The social history of Hungarian cinema”, in which my colleagues as I in the Department of Film Studies at Eötvös Loránd University coded all feature films for a large number of variables including time period, location, protagonists etc. With the database at my disposal, I was able to list feature films made after 1985 in which the protagonist experiences social and/or economic downfall.

In the article based on the findings (“Move on Down. Precarity and Downward Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian Feature Films” In. Precarity in European Films. Depictions and discourses. Eds: Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten and Hanna Prenzel. DeGruyter. 2022), I identified three distinct periods in the representation of contemporary precarity. The videoessay in turn attempts to deploy examples that show how the aforementioned three phases can be distinguished.

There are a large number of questions that could and should be investigated further in relation to this topic. The most important seems to be: how and why do the stylistic and generic markers in the representation of precarity shift over time? In a future article, I plan on analyzing this crucial question, for which I have some hypotheses.

In the first phase between 1985-1994 that I have called “Decline as inevitability’, the films appear to work with a dramatic tone, that manifests itself both generically and stylistically. This, arguably supports the stories that depict individuals caught by social-historical forces. Countdown (Erdőss, 1986) or even Dear Emma, sweet Böbe (Szabó, 1992) are both good examples with their sober and stern styles that attempt to appear to infuse themselves on their material as little as possible. The black-and-white visual world of Countdown, or the reportage-style inserts of Emma are both good examples.

However, the second phase called ‘Decline as agency’ between 1994-2003 introduces a comedic tone, which ranges from full-scale comedy to other much more subtle forms of satire. The trash television aesthetics of Szomjas’s Gangster film (1999) with is monochrome filters, tilted screens and slow-motion effect productively interacts with the grim brutality of its heroes’ lives. Similarly, Losers and bandits (Bacsó, 1997) shifts the acting of its protagonists far in the direction of absurd comedy, which foregrounds many contradictions of individual agency typical for the decade.

The third phase after 2004 introduces a variety where clear trends and generic and/or stylistic markers cannot be discerned anymore. In the video, you will see examples for classic genre depictions of precarity (Glasstiger 2, Rudolf 2006) that deploy a playful, sit-com language, but also an authorial depiction of precarity with a minimalist realism visible in The Citizen (Vranik, 2016). The analysis of these factors will be the subject of further investigation on the representations of precarity in contemporary Hungarian cinema.