The Labyrinth Principle: Figures of Entrapment in Hungarian Art House Cinema

Abstract

This chapter offers a conceptual and historical introduction to what the book calls the labyrinth principle and its connections with specific forms of masculinity. The chapter argues that the labyrinth is much more than a simple motif: it looks more like a pervasive principle organising several characteristic features of these films. It is directly related to camera work (often simply by the limited cinematic spaces in which the camera must be placed and moved), to the types of shots building up scenes, the combination of different shots, to acting styles and body language. However, it appears in more indirect ways in many key pieces of Hungarian film history, for example as an epistemological metaphor expressing the impossibility of knowledge or the opacity of a situation, as a narrative figure determining the shape of the story told by the film, or as a vehicle for psychological character building. It is this symptomatic interconnection of specific cinematic features in Hungarian film that the book defines as the labyrinth principle. The operation of this principle rewrites both the organisation of classical film storytelling, its typical modes of establishing cinematic space, and the characteristic formations of masculinity appearing on the screen. The chapter also puts the present study of contemporary Hungarian cinema in the context of such canonical local filmmakers as Béla Tarr or Miklós Jancsó, exploring how this principle is established in such films as The Prefab People (Panelkapcsolat 1982) or The Round-Up (Szegénylegények 1966).