Mozgó fényképek. The scandal and debate around moving images in early Hungarian cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper traces the Budapest staging of a very popular German play in Europe and US at the end of the 19th century that can be regarded as one of the earliest narratives of the cinematic experience in Hungary. Originally published with the title Hans Huckebein in 1897 and written by Oscar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg, the play remained outside the horizon of early cinema scholars, although it is a rich inventory of different modes of using and interpreting moving images. The Budapest performance of the play incorporates the screening of a cinema program, including a hitherto unknown (Lumière?) film commissioned by the theatre. The characters and the theatrical audience become film viewers, and this experience is extensively debated on stage. Instantaneous photography and moving image recording allowed for trespassing the boundary between private and public, since the model’s consent was not technically required for the recording process. The ‘scandal’ staged by the play is the presentation of a (moving) image ‒ considered personal and private ‒ in the public space of the cinema. The debate around this scandal contributes to the redefinition of both personal identity, construed increasingly as an image, and the public sphere as a realm of censored images. The article sets out to map the variability of practices and cultural codes ‒ such as theatrical plots, practices of instant and studio photography, personal image protection, copyright ‒ that affected the interpretation and uses of moving images.