EUROPEAN FILM GATEWAY – THE AGE OF HUNGARIAN SILENT FILM

Stars, photos, posters, films

The European Union launched its European Film Gateway (EFG) project in September 2008, with the participation of 20 film archives, museums and film institutions in 14 countries. Its purpose is to make as large a part of Europe’s filmic heritage as possible accessible for the wider public. The first three years of the endeavour saw 790,000 documents digitized, including films, photos, posters, as well as written and audio material. The Hungarian National Film Archive undertook to make available 1000 photographs from the age of silent film and the dawn of sound film, together with 1200 posters that were made from the beginnings up to the 1990s. The multimedia terminal at the exhibition will allow visitors to browse the content of the newly launched EFG portal, and we present almost 200 hours worth of film from the Balázs Béla Stúdió.

This chamber exhibition presents an exclusive selection from films, photos and film posters made during the era of silent film, treasures of the film and special collections of the Hungarian National Film Archive, which are featured in the EFG project.

It is a typical and regrettable characteristic of the history of silent film that a significant number of the works were lost or destroyed over time. This makes professionals, or any film lover for that matter, hold in high regard those documents that accompany a film throughout its life: scripts, newspaper articles, reports, reviews, photos of stars, posters, and above all, such behind-the-scenes documents as production stills or location photos. These may help to reconstruct the content, mood and visuals of a lost silent film, its technical and artistic quality.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of screenings, featuring such rarely seen works as Sándor Korda’s Aranyember (The Man of Gold, 1918), Jenő Janovics’s Utolsó éjszaka (The Last Night, 1917) and Alfréd Deésy’s Aphrodité (1918).