Zsolt Pápai – Balázs Varga:
Within and without Hollywood. Introduction to the thematic issue on Hungarian genre film
The introduction to the thematic issue begins with an overview of the most important issues concerning the definition of genre film as well as of major genre theory research trends. The question examined is why genre analyses overwhelmingly confine themselves to Hollywood films (or partially out-of-Hollywood films which nonetheless adapt Hollywood patterns). Then the issue of analyzing non-Hollywood films within genre frameworks is discussed; here the authors are of the opinion that such a framework can be determined via reinterpretations of the cultural contexts of genre film. From this perspective, two questions can be raised: on the one hand, the interpretation of non-western film productions within western (Hollywood) genre frameworks, and on the other hand, the issue of cultural and traditional connections as well as genre characteristics of western, yet non-Hollywood film productions.
The second half of the introduction surveys a range of problems associated with the analysis of Hungarian genre films, and then goes on to outline a biography of Hungarian genre films, which can be divided into three major phases. The first phase, from the 1910s through the end of World War 2, favored genre-based film production, the films made during this era were predominantly genre films and a viable genre film production process was in place, especially in the sound film era. The four decades of socialism pushed the classical genres into the background: genre films were still being produced, but due to political-ideological reasons, genre film production was almost completely abandoned. It was in the phase following the transition from communism to democracy that genres were reinstated, even though we still cannot regard present-day film production as being genre-based.
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