Szociológiai valóságfeltárás és válságtudatosság az 1970-es évek magyar dokumentumfilmjében
Sociological Representations and Crisis Awareness in Hungarian Documentaries of the 1970s

Summary/Abstract: This article explores Hungarian sociographic documentary films from the late 1960s and 1970 which called attention to the inner contradictions of the consolidated Kádár regime. Representatives of critical sociology and filmmakers shared the view that many of these contradictions were the result of the discrepancy between ideological and empirical perceptions of social reality, the emergence of dual social consciousness, and the strict control over access to the public sphere. The paper argues that consolidating the political system came at the cost of setting off an epistemic crisis characterised by the desperate suppression of knowledge and experience incompatible with the official interpretations of social phenomena. Analysing a handful of films made about rural poverty, the Roma minority, and agricultural businesses, the article explores in great detail how documentary strategies of analytical realism depleted and invalidated official concepts (e.g. the concept of maternity, Romani, cooperative democracy) and brought to light concealed layers of individual and social experience. In broad terms, the article claims that a new kind of political cinema came into existence during the consolidated Kádár regime, a cinema which exposed the epistemological unconscious of political establishment and opened new avenues for the understanding of Hungarian society.

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