Müpa Film Club
It Only Hurts When I Laugh
Excerpts from the history of Hungarian film comedies and satires
Film comedy is a strange thing. It ages, and yet it doesn’t. There are human foibles we still laugh at 90 years later, but the political humour and satire in older films grow increasingly lifeless with the passage of time. And the era in which they came about becomes somewhat muddied as well. Today, there are fewer purveyors of fashion, family shops have been replaced by discount stores, and borders are open. Being an entrepreneur now means something different to what it did 40 years ago; the price per square metre of flats in prefabricated tower blocks has risen somewhat; and instead of using cumbersome industrial cameras, curious individuals and institutions can now spy on each other with far more modern and minuscule devices. (Nor is much said these days about the aesthetic shortcomings of workers’ militia uniforms.)
This season of the Müpa Film Club series is therefore a kind of journey back in time. Nostalgia? Depends on who’s watching. Some viewers will be enchanted by the period street scenes and the vehicles that you now only see with OT (old timer) number plates. The real adventure, however, is that in scaling our collective past as it appears on the cinema screen, we find ourselves at the top of a strange lookout tower. From up there, we can look down on our present. The latest films served up by the Müpa Film Club lead us from the swindles of the 1960s into our own age – a bizarrely collapsed space and time with its own brand of multiculturalism. Laughing out loud is allowed.
