Representations of Female Alterity in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Cinema
Representations of Female Alterity in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Cinema

Summary/Abstract: The present study carries out a comparative/contrastive analysis of two ways of contemporary Hungarian and Romanian film discourse, namely magic realism and micro-realism, and will focus on the representation of the woman in the contemporary films entitled Witch Circle (Dezső Zsigmond, 2009), exploring a subversive female mythologem of a confined traditional community, that of the Csángó people, Bibliothèque Pascal (Szabolcs Hajdú, 2010), which creates a private mythology, materialised in form of surrealist images, of the female self interpreting herself out of her conditions, and Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012), drawing its topic from a real event —reality generating fiction—that inspired Tatiana Niculescu Bran’s Deadly Confession (Spovedanie la Tanacu), Judges’ Book (Cartea Judecătorilor), as well as Zsolt Láng’s The Monastery of Protection (Az oltalom kolostora). Beyond dealing with related female patterns, the films under discussion are engaged in mediating collective and private mental representations, as well as in creating film narratives with the convergent feature of juxtaposing the real and the mythical. The films approach the topic from distinct possibilities of cinematic representation and offer, in my view, a complementary and intercultural image of the woman trapped between the East and the West, between social and religious institutions and victimised by the stereotypical view of society.

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