080024 PS Case Study II/III: Intersections between narration and identity, fiction and factuality (2022W)

Huns and Magyars, totem animals and cultural traumas, lost world wars and imperial fantasies, multiple, hybrid, constructed, politically concealed identities, amnesias and 'distortions' of collective memory - figures and phenomena that will haunt (or at least concern) us in the course.
For most of the semester, two Hungarian films (film essays(?), compilation films(?), docufictions(?)) from the recent past will accompany us. Both works have a palpable reference to the present, are (to varying degrees) politically engaged - and committed to an ideological-critical approach. One of the thematic intersections of the works is the (often playful, but always critically reflected) examination of cultural topoi, political myths and ideologemes of (Hungarian) history. Both work units can be located in the paradigm of "artistic research" - the artist sees himself partly as a historian, anthropologist, collects "documents", found footages, archive materials - and reflects (in the medium of film) on the mediatisation of 'history', on the seductive role, even "complicity" of visual media in the establishment of political myths and collective imaginations.
We will pay particular attention to forms of "visual argumentation" - i.e. the question of how certain figures of thought and patterns of argumentation are inherent in the films - beyond the apparent thematic-motif surface. These usually only become tangible when we turn to the complex interplay of editing, montage, narration, etc. Special attention will be paid to the specifically cinematic procedures - a narratological approach will be followed (sequence analyses, peculiarities of acoustic and visual narration, potential alienation effects, appropriative gestures, editing and montage techniques...).

In the seminar, we will primarily work on competences that are indispensable for a well-structured, precisely linguistic and methodically reflected video or film analysis. The course is also intended as a reading seminar - in order not to get lost in the quicksand of the many visual stimuli and historical references, we will discuss texts that are relevant from a methodological or thematic point of view together and relate them to the works.

Questions that will concern us are: what does it mean to treat a film/work of art as a "theoretical object"? What is the role of the figure of irony? What is the function of the figures of unreliable narration? How is what is actually 'ideological' "caught in the act" in the films? To what extent are the works critical at all - what does criticism achieve? Which artistic-filmic traditions do the works make use of? We will also be interested in taking a conceptually and methodologically more differentiated look at the seemingly obvious pair of opposites "fiction" versus "factuality" (and their complex interlockings).