About us

 This is an international project (no. 112700) financed by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA), conducted by Dr. Mónika Dánél, gathering 22 researchers (seniors, undergraduate and postgraduate students) from three major Hungarian university centres: Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, the University of Szeged and the University of Debrecen. Our international partner is the research team conducted by Dr. Ágnes Pethő, at the Department of Film, Photo and Media Studies of the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Romania. http://film.sapientia.ro/en/research-programs/cncs-uefiscdi-pce-idei-research-program In the ongoing discourse about the effects of economic globalization and Western cultural standardization, the cultural production of Eastern European countries has been regarded mostly as a blind spot to which Western cultural concepts do not apply entirely. Our project aims to partially fill a theoretical gap by proposing, together with a Romanian partner, a complex overview of contemporary Hungarian and Romanian cultural production of the

last decade in terms of representations of cultural, aesthetic otherness through concepts and images of space, as well as spatial performances such as rituals, journeys, exodus and immigration. By undertaking a comparative point of view and relying on the interdisciplinary assumptions of the Spatial Turn, we will examine not only the thematic and symptomatic occurrences of specific space concepts and performances in films and literary works, but we will also view displacement in terms of “travelling concepts”, interculturality, and an artistic attitude serving the quest of identity. Besides map ping up the cultural causes of the paradigmatic differences detectable both in linguistic and visual representations, we will seek to identify the political, economical and sociological causes underlying the differences in representing mobility, trauma and memory-places in literary works and films from the two countries. Through an indispensable theoretical exchange, consulting and reciprocal mediation with the Romanian partner, we propose to create a conceptual framework applicable to spatial representations of otherness in films and to disseminate it together in teaching, at workshops and conferences, as well as shared publications.

While lately both literary works and films from Hungary and Romania have gained an increased international attention, their critical approach often seems to be ignorant about the cultural and political backgrounds of these works and thus is applying an inadequate theoretical and conceptual framework on them. We consider the films and literary works under analysis as cultural products both symptomatic and paradigmatic of the resistance to the Western gaze, i.e. an impulse for cultural and visual standardization, paired with a preference for stereotypes. We depart from the assumption that both contemporary cinema and literature from this region is opposing “glocalization” to “globalization”, often by incorporating the Western gaze in their very narrative and by creating their own spatial concepts and topology.

 In continuous cooperation with the Romanian partner in terms of the films in question we propose: Firstly, to “test” the existing space theories and concepts on the corpus under analyses, exclude those irrelevant and create a functional conceptual framework for the research. Secondly, we aim to detect and interpret the similarities of recurrent spatial forms(e.g. the chronotope of the journey) as figuration of shared political and sociological issues. Third, we will focus on specific concepts and forms in cultural products from both countries and interpret them in the light of different underlying political factors and aesthetic traditions. Finally, we will explore the contact zones of the cultural products in question, including literary adaptations, co-productions, the issue of the immigrant author and bilingualism.

Data of the International Partner:

Principal Investigator: dr. Ágnes Pethő

Affiliation: Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Project Title: Re-mediated images as figurations of intermediality and post-mediality in Central and East European Cinema. Exploratory research project PN-II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0573

Funding agency: UEFISCDI Romania (Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Developmentand Innovation Funding)

The collaboration of the PI and post-doctoral researcher with Ágnes Pethő, goes back to at least one decade. It started with a research project financed by the Institute of Research Programmes of Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in 2001, and since then it has shown its result in publications in several volumes on intermediality, medium and film theory, both Hungarian and English, edited by Pethő. We believe that this project would ensure the continuity of our cooperation and would open a new, cultural-anthropological dimension to it. At the same time, we assume that in any critical discourse of comparative nature the point of view of the other needs to be embedded.

Both the PI and the members of her team, have already researched extensively the cinemas of the two neighbouring countries in question and elaborated several in-depth analyses. Ágnes Pethő is an authority in the very new field of Intermediality Studies, her book Cinema and Intermediality. The Passion for the In-Between (Cambidge Scholars Publishing, 2011) being one of its founding theoretical works. She is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies, which would facilitate the publication of our research results. Her presence in our project means an external critical point of view and a strong theoretical framework regarding the poetical trends in contemporary cinema, as well as intermediality conceived as the “nature” of cinema, susceptible of cultural, aesthetic or even political figurations. The collaboration with the Romanian partner is indispensable for a range of practical reasons also: 1. reciprocal consultation, 2. mediation of materials towards local professionals (critics, film directors, writers, actors, archivists etc.) 3. Dissemination of results through teaching, shared conferences, workshops and publications and 4. Our shared aim is ultimately to create a new field of research and academic network for prospective doctoral students from both countries by mapping up host institutions, contacts, events, sources, as well as by creating the possibility of publication.