Chapter 4 A Closet of One’s Own: Places of Non-Hegemonic Masculinities and Rites of Retreat in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema
In: Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual CultureSearch for other papers by György Kalmár in
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Abstract
This chapter explores some of the recent, characteristically post-economic-crisis displacements in Eastern European identity politics. Through the investigation of the spatial trajectories created by a number of Hungarian films, the chapter introduces the concept of retreat films and the narrative trope of retreat, which it regards as a symptomatic, post-crisis rearrangement of certain Eastern European concepts concerning identity, social progress, and the meaning of the West in the region’s cultural imaginary. The protagonists of these films seem to share a disillusionment about their formal dreams about the urban, hyper-modern lifestyle associated with “the West.” Their regressive journeys are motivated by the renunciation of their formal dreams and desires, and take them back to their Eastern European homelands, far from the metropolitan cultural centres, to the homes of their fathers or grandfathers, to places where they desperately seek to establish alternative lifestyles and identities on the margins and ruins of (the fantasy of) Europe.