Máté Fazekas:
Our Science Fiction litmus paper. The Hungarian science-fiction film

The essay examines the Hungarian science fiction corpus consisting of just six film through a division into three phases, by analogy to the great film-historic phases. Ákos D. Hamza’s film Sirius (1942) represents the classical phase, its thesis characterized by narrativity and the incorporation of other genres and Hungarian traditions. Tamás Fejér’s film Windows of Time (1969), Miklós Szinetár’s The Fortress (1979) and András M. Monori’s Meteo (1989) form the modern group. The antithesis of this category consists in the departure from narrativity, the weakening of genre features, and—within the confines of a socialist framework—the prevalence of a universal way of thinking. The postmodern phase is marked by Pater Sparrow’s film 1 (2009) and Roland Vranik’s Transmission (2009), which execute a synthesis of the previous films: weak narrativity, the incorporation of other genres, universal mode of thinking. Fazekas argues that the three symbolic phases demonstrate that the Hungarian science fiction genre, which has been largely neglected, plays the same role in Hungarian film as do widely recognized cinematographic works: they reflect the era in which they were made, through them, we glean one possible interpretation of the mood, way of thinking, the Zeitgeist of the given decade.