Virginás, Andrea, 2021. Film Genres in Hungarian and Romanian Cinema: History, Theory and Reception. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books. 339 pp.

Abstract

East-Central European audiences have enjoyed international and domestic genre-films since the early 1930s, a time when white-telephone melodramas dominated the screens. Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns produced in the1960s in Italy also became instant cult classics in the Soviet Bloc. Historical dramas, detective thrillers, and romantic melodramas were likewise imported as well as domestically produced even during those sparsest years of Eastern European filmmaking. More recently, Hollywood and domestic genre-films draw audiences in numbers that dwarf the much-revered local independent art-film movements. Within this context, Andrea Virginás’s monograph, Film Genres in Hungarian and Romanian Cinema: History, Theory and Reception promises a comprehensive and fresh look at genre cinema within the East-Central European context. Focusing on Hungary and Romania, the author proposes an examination of the concept of “genre” as a creative space where global and local, national and transnational works can come together and interact with each other forming new and unique, hybrid cinematic texts. In Chapter One, Virginás lays out the “Conceptual Foundations, Corpus, and Methodology” of her investigation. This chapter also presents the author’s main hypothesis that “the characteristics of twenty-first century Hungarian and Romanian cinema that define their small cinematic status on the global scale can be related to the aesthetic and poetic practice of adopting film genre elements – usually classical Hollywood in origin – within their own domestic (small) national contexts” (11). Chapter Two is an overview of the history of genre films in Hungary and Romania, divided into three distinct periods: the pre-communist, the communist and the post-communist. This chapter attempts to reconstruct a highly condensed history of Hungarian and Romanian national cinemas, including production and distribution mechanisms, as well as an overview of main periods from the silent-film era all the way to the present. The third chapter presents a detailed explanation of the concept of “small nation cinemas” based on the 2007 The Cinema of Small Nations, co-edited by Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie. Virginás then applies this theoretical framework specifically to Hungarian and Romanian genre cinemas to make a case about the existence of unique “artistic-generic hybrid” films – a blend of genre elements with auteur cinema – as characteristic of Hungarian and Romanian film traditions. The author dedicates Chapter Four to expanding her main argument by contextualizing regional cinema within a larger framework of European genre-films. Here she