11 - Conceptual Artist, Cognitive Film: Miklós Erdély at the Balázs Béla Studio
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
Summary
Abstract
The Hungarian Balazs Bela Studio (BBS), established in 1959 to create opportunities for young filmmakers, was unique in former Eastern Europe in the way it gave nonprofessional filmmakers access to the medium from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Its history complicates our understanding of the relationship between official and unofficial culture in the Eastern Bloc as an officially supported studio that gave unofficial artists opportunities to co-opt state resources to produce innovative and subversive work. This chapter gives an overview of how nonprofessional filmmakers, particularly visual artists, came to create important work that applied the insights and methods of conceptual art to film—with a focus on the work and theories of Miklos Erdely as a particularly paradigmatic example.
Keywords: Miklos Erdely; Balazs Bela Studio (BBS); conceptual art; neoavant-garde; Hungary
A strong case can be made for the contribution that works on film made to the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of both performance-based and broadly “neo-avant-garde” and “conceptual” intermedia practices across Eastern Europe that eventually came to define the histories of contemporary visual art in their respective countries. A particularly large and notable group of films made by visual artists with a conceptual bend was produced at the Balazs Bela Studio (BBS) in Budapest throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. The artists who made films there included Miklos Erdely and Dora Maurer, who created the two largest bodies of such work at BBS, as well as Peter Donath, Gyorgy Galantai, Tibor Hajas, Agnes Hay, Tamas Szentjoby, Gabor Toth, and, in the generation of artists who began to be active in the 1980s, Laszlo Laszlo Revesz, Janos Sugar, Janos Szirtes, and Janos Vető.
In what follows, I will give an introduction to the history of the BBS and the conditions that made it possible for it to open its doors to a number of Hungary's most influential neo-avant-garde visual artists and offer them an unparalleled degree of independence in producing experimental films.
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- Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe , pp. 265 - 292Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022