Sites of Undoing Gender Hierarchies: Women and/in Hungarian Cinema (Industry)

The article engages Hungarian film production between 1945 and 2005 from a twofold perspective. It surveys women’s inclusion in the film-making profession and assesses the representation of women in Hungarian cinema. The study seeks answers to the questions whether state-socialist emancipation rhetoric and policies targeting women’s employment and social inclusion have also affected 1) the domain of creative work; and 2) the kinds of representations of women circulating in visual culture? The author argues that both women’s representation and women’s participation in cinema production have presented an overall more favourable picture in the decades of state-socialism than during the period following the system change. To indentify assessment criteria for “a favourable picture”, the insights of feminist film studies are consulted. The survey concludes that beside some pieces by engaged women filmmakers, a good proportion of complex portrayals of women came from male directors. At the same time, the author interrogates to what extent, and with what sort of qualifications, (Western) feminist film criticism may prove to be a viable tool of analysis to account for developments within an arguably different historical/social context and production environment. The starkly different production environments of mainstream Hollywood cinema (the foundational “research animal” of BritishAmerican feminist theory), its state-funded equivalent in socialist Hungary and the subsequent re-arrangement of the industry in the new market economy entail both material kind and film text-related consequences. The article proposes that the political economy of cultural production in state-socialist Hun-