Volumen 21 (2022): Edición 1 (July 2022)

This article discusses a documentary film, Austerlitz (2016), by the Ukrainian film director Sergei Loznitsa. The film shows massive flows of tourists visiting Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, therefore, it is interpreted through the prism of dark tourism. The article argues that by functioning as a piece of virtual dark tourism, Austerlitz is constructed as a re-enactment of a collision with places of death. By refusing to moralize or condemn bored concentration camp visitors, Loznitsa enables the viewer to understand how radical experiences of mass destruction and death are being recorded in tourism practices in today’s society. The French semiotician and philosopher Roland Barthes argues that death is most clearly perceived when it opens up as an act that has already taken place in the past, but at the same time will also take place in the future – this has been and this will be. The article concludes that exactly this is the effect of the documentary film Austerlitz. By showing crowds of visitors walking in the empty spaces of concentration camps, Loznitsa opens up a tragedy of mass destruction and death that has already taken place, but at the same time will also happen.

This text discusses Deimantas Narkevičius’s Legend Coming True (Legendos išsipildymas, 1999) and Sergei Loznitsa’s Reflections (Отражения, 2012), two films by contemporary artists and filmmakers that revisit war traumas – the Holocaust in Lithuania and the Siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia – indirectly, without narrative reconstruction of the events or use of the archival images to display their atrocities of these two tragedies. Instead, these two experimental films, I argue via Jacques Derrida, evoke spectres of the war in the contemporary urban setups to activate the half-mourning in the present. Aesthetic strategies used to expose the haunting past are closely scrutinized and compared in order to demonstrate the films’ aesthetic potential of walking the spectator through war traumas without departing the present.

The article argues for the relevance of intermediality in the interpretation of Radu Jude’s films made after 2016: The Dead Nation (Ţara moartă, 2017), I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari, 2018), The Marshal’s Two Executions (Cele două execuţii ale Mareşalului, 2018), To Punish, to Discipline (A pedepsi, a supraveghea, 2019), The Exit of the Trains (Ieşirea trenurilor din gară, 2020), Uppercase Print (Tipografic majuscul, 2020), Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc, 2021). Instead of framing Jude’s aesthetic in terms of the Eisensteinian montage, as many reviewers have done, the article addresses the way in which these films insist on the tensions between media, on creating an ontological collage, not only a cinematic montage. The collage effect of the films materializes in sensuously and intellectually layered permutations that connect different media and shares some traits with the Surrealist play of the cadavre exquis. The mixture of heterogeneous materials becomes a strategy (informed by the ideas of Walter Benjamin) to reflect on history in the conditions of postmemory as well as a way to explore the relationship between media and reality through various positions of spectatorial engagement and the affective metalepsis between reflexivity and immersion.¹

Son of Saul, the Hungarian director, László Nemes Jeles’s film about Holocaust was released in 2015 with great international success: Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival, the Academy Award and Golden Globe for best foreign-language film. In my essay, I approach the film from a variety of perspectives. First, by analysing the visual and aural level of the film I intend to show how – in a very original way – Son of Saul is capable of depicting the understandably limited perspective and numb state of mind of the protagonist, a member of the Sonderkommando. In the second section, I compare Son of Saul with the Nobel Prize winner novel, Fatelessness (1975) by Imre Kertész. I argue that these two works show strong similarity in their storytelling and staging of the Holocaust. Both works miss a looking back in hindsight and the historical perspective, confining their protagonists to the present. Thirdly, I examine the relation between the absurd mission of Saul saving the dead boy and the problem of remembering and commemorating the Holocaust. Finally, I try to map the traces of popular genres in Son of Saul. I recon the film applies – on the one hand – the audiovisual techniques of the POV-horror genre while – on the other hand – the media and presentation tactics of first-person-shooter video games. The application of well-known media procedures can thus bring the historical event that can be hardly visualized or verbalized closer to the younger generation. With the Holocaust fading away in the past and the number of survivors and witnesses radically decreasing, this is certainly becoming more and more important.

As a result of its radical approach to the topic of the Holocaust, as well as due to the long list of prestigious prizes it won, Son of Saul (Saul fia, 2015, directed by László Nemes Jeles) has put the relation between Eastern European societies and totalitarianism in the centre of public and academic discourse. Though most reviews and articles placed the film in the history of Holocaust-representations, this is not the only context in which the film can be understood. In the present article I argue that Son of Saul can also be read outside (or at least at a distance from) the context of a Holocaust-film, as it also belongs to another, quite different and internationally much less known local cinematic canon. There is an unclaimed heritage behind Nemes Jeles’s controversial masterpiece, a trend in Hungarian cinema that explores the crisis of masculinity in totalitarian political regimes, thereby performing an allegorical critique of modernity and modern subjectivity. My recontextualization of Nemes Jeles’s work indicates the ways it is influenced by a local, Eastern European filmmaking tradition (which includes the work of his own father, the filmmaker András Jeles as well), and is supported by three interrelated conceptual focus points: a post-Foucauldian understanding of cultural and cinematic space, an awareness of the workings of modern cinematic allegory, and finally the use of male protagonists as prime sites for the inscription of social crisis and historical trauma.

This article explores synergies between Hungarian critical sociology in the 1960–70s and the documentary films made in Balázs Béla Stúdió in the same period. It treats the rationalization of social phenomena as a battle ground for meaning and claims that both representatives of the social sciences and filmmakers, on the one hand, called upon deficient social mechanisms and the inner contradictions of existing socialism and, on the other hand, pointed to the discrepancy between ideological and empirical perceptions of reality as the root cause of the crisis characterizing the consolidated Kádár regime. Adopting Clifford Geertz’s conceptual matrix of the experience-near and the experience-distant production of social meaningfulness, the article explores how sociologists and makers of sociographic documentaries alike resisted the prevailing epistemic regime, more specifically how they punctured and undermined the ideological meanings of such concepts as maternity, the Romani, and cooperative democracy.¹

The study aims at investigating the phenomenon of crisis in the intersection of three areas: simulation, singularity and temporality. The argument develops a theory of the singular crisis whose instances are demonstrated and proved by the American thriller, Take Shelter (2011, Jeff Nichols). The applied concept of crisis is based on the argument that any critical period is treated by models derived from earlier crises. The theoretical background to the simulated operating mechanisms of the crisis is Jean Baudrillard’s and Gilles Deleuze’s appropriations of simulation and simulacra. In case the simulated problem-solving patterns fail in a critical period, the singular characteristics of the crisis can be observed. Based on examples taken from the film, the article argues that reaction to any given crisis is essentially built up by both hyperreal patterns governed by simulation and singular elements that simulation cannot account for. The description of the temporal nature of crises is heavily dependent on interpretation, thus their temporal span is observed from the vantage point of their singular characteristics. The study argues that crises are characteristically open-ended but their endpoint is predominantly designated in hindsight to render the crisis as a finished time period for the sake of manageability.

The article shows the way must-see film lists hosted by financial publications positivize, after the 2008 crisis, the message of feature and documentary films representing finance. Here positivization refers to the detouring or softening of the critical edge of the message of a film in the interests of the hosting website and the profession of finance in general. Emphasis falls on financial literacy and on a film’s artistic prestige and entertainment potential. The author argues that positivization is a semantic strategy indicative of a neoliberal business ontology that informs the interpretation of cultural artifacts. It instrumentalizes signification processes in order to foreground exchange value and present film reception as an investment in human capital.