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.