Müpa Mozi, the film club of the Palace of Arts and the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute (MaNDA), continues to welcome sell-out audiences for its third season. This series of musical films beginning in February presents a selection of iconic screen gems containing the biggest Hungarian hit tunes of the past 50 years. Audiences will get to see their favourite stars perform in a broad variety of genres, from operetta to socialist-era road movie, and from straight musical to retro parody. The casts feature everyone from János Sárdy to Zsuzsa Koncz, Hobo to the Latabár Brothers, Violetta Ferrari to János Gálvölgyi, Miklós Gábor to Hanna Honthy, and Imre Soós to “Bill the King”. The film club hosted by András Réz explores the source material behind the birth of hundreds of hit tunes, examining how the professional world of cabaret and operetta – inherited from the films of Gyula Kabos – was enriched by the social “workshops” of the 1950s: the factory, the swimming pool, and the sports field. Seen through a variety of filters in both period films and later satirical adaptations, we can discover how the naïve and love-struck, but ideologically ignorant, young worker was re-educated in the 1950s. During the lukewarm period of “goulash communism” in the 1960s, what role did the World Festival of Youth and Students and the TV talent show “Ki mit tud?” play in the emergence of beat groups such as Illés and singers such as Zsuzsa Koncz? How were iconic objects such as the Pacsirta radio set, noodles with grits or the Bambi soft drink – as well as socialism in general and its declaration of communal cooperation and ideals – portrayed in a musical film of the 1960s, or in a later retro satire from the 1990s? Why has György Ránki’s musical Egy szerelem három éjszakája (Three Nights of Love) remained a popular favourite almost continuously since its appearance in the 1960s? How is it possible to capture the feeling of blues-rock in the context of a documentary-style portrayal of the Kőbánya district of Budapest? And to the rhythm of which tune by the band Fonográf do we recall the emblematic image of the Zil truck grinding over the socialist asphalt having picked up a curly-haired blonde hitchhiker? This retro comedy musical strung around the hits of the 1960s was the most popular Hungarian film of the 1990s. The secret to its success was that while the older generation could laugh and wax nostalgic over – among many other things – hits like Kicsit szomorkás a hangulatom máma (“I’m Feeling a Little Gloomy Today”), the TV talent show “Ki mit tud?”, the Bambi café, the cola craze and the World Festival of Youth and Students (VIT), Péter Tímár paints a fantastically absurd picture of both the idyllic and the nightmarish sides of the 1960s. He thereby captures something of this period that the collective subconscious has been able to preserve in all its many facets, achieving this with the help of wordplay and dry humour, as well as in a series of scenes that pay homage to songs by literally translating them into images (such as the scene between Kati Lázár and Gábor Reviczky “on the lake by the shimmering moon”). But there are also elements of caricature, such as the antics of the ex-secret policeman, the champagne striptease of the ticket inspector and the payday scene. Tímár stuffs his movie with ironic references to films of the period, but using technical tricks such as super-fast cutting or moving the characters backwards. As a consequence, the wonderful actors jerk and twitch like puppets and the entire world enters a vacuum where not only the 1960s, but also the nostalgic view of them is presented in ironic inverted commas. Presented by: Palace of Arts, MaNDA

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