University of St Andrews
The proposed 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 assess the dialogues between historical preservation and appropriation in filmmaking, foregrounding the ways in which storage, preservation, restoration, and access are repeatedly shaped by the politico-economic context. 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.
