Archiving on the Screen - Remediation of Cultural Memory Through Hungarian Documentary Cinema

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This research explores the remediation of archive footage in Hungarian documentary films across three different contexts: socialism, post-socialism, and since 2010, under the Orbán government. It employs a new critical method - "archiveology" - to foreground the ways in which archiving processes (storage, preservation, restoration, and access), repeatedly shaped by the politico-economic context, influence retrospective narratives in documentary films. The historical documentary can use the archive to negotiate and reconstitute the past across seismic political shifts and, in so doing, bring into focus the politically-motivated connections between historical preservation and creative practice (filmmaking). The analysis of critically neglected Hungarian documentaries stemming from the 1960s until the present day brings a new Eastern European perspective to issues of mediality, curatorship, and politics of representation. Examining the (re)use of audio-visual media, which traverses different political regimes, provides a fresh, and critically-neglected, means of understanding filmmaking as an archival practice, an intervention to how cultural memory is established and challenged on screen. Thus, this research illuminates connected and far-reaching issues surrounding the transmission, translation, and reworking of mediated memories, especially since this can also lead to supporting or challenging political regimes and their claims to truth.