CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Udvari, Orsolya |
|---|---|
| Title | Ways of Seeing the Other Migration in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema |
| Summary | Around 2015, the migration wave had a huge impact in Hungary. The crisis had resulted in the intensification of the migration discourse that was never seen before in the country. A part of this intensification was a strong state campaign that has been built on the crisis: a nationalist and hegemonic rhetoric which was rejective and hostile towards migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. This propaganda spoke about migratory processes in the framework of securitization where the process was understood and mobilized as a threat to the European-Christian culture. This narrative was not only rhetorically but visually outstanding. State financed posters and advertisements represented “the migrant” as a voiceless, faceless, male, violent, dark-skinned person who is not even an individual but exists in a horde-like group of people. Besides of this xenophobic and hostile context, counter-hegemonic narratives emerged not just in the form of social movements but, as I argue, in the artistic-visual field too. In my thesis, I focus on this contemporary counter-discourse of the Hungarian cinema through the lenses of three movies which have a privileged position in the “migration movie” corpus in Hungary, not only because all of them was funded by the state but because they earned nationwide recognition. These movies are The Citizen (2016), Jupiter’s Moon (2017) and Easy Lessons (2018). The first part of my research would like to contextualize these movies with special regard to their socio-political and cultural context. For this, I carry out discourse analysis on the already existing literature. After, I make the analysis of the movies themselves to explore the place of them in the discourse on visual representation and migration after 2015. The main questions of the analysis are how these movies are the part of the counter-discourse, what are those circumstances by the dominant state discourse that could challenge free artistic expression, and in which ways aesthetic and political elements are intertwined in the visual language of these movies. The research would like to answer these questions through the politics of (in)visibility and those artistic instruments that aim to transform the unseen “Other” into visible. Therefore the thesis displays two competing visual attitudes towards the representation of migration: one by the neo-authoritarian state propaganda and another by the contemporary Hungarian cinema. |
| Supervisor | Vlad Naumescu, Prem Kumar Rajaram |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/udvari_orsolya.pdf |
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