Intermedially Emotional: Musical Mood Cues, Disembodied Feelings in Contemporary Hungarian Melodramas

In contemporary Hungarian cinema some melodramas presenting struggling female protagonists like Ágnes Kocsis's Fresh Air (2006) and Adrienn Pál (2010), Kornél Mundruczó's Johanna (2005), Peter Strickland's Katalin Varga (2009) and Károly Ujj-Mészáros's Liza, the Fox Fairy (2015), seem to resist Linda William's definition of melodrama as ‘body genre’, offering the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion, triggering the emotional mimicry of the spectator. In the Hungarian films in question, female protagonists remain expressionless and their emotions are ‘translated’ into visual and aural stylisation. Instead of spectacular representations of emotions, these films operate with mood cues, visual and auditory (mostly musical) figurations of melancholic sense of loss and helplessness. In these films audiovisual stylisation is not only portraying the character's moods, but it compensates for the lack of bodily excess and ensures spectatorial embodiment with an intermedial figuration based on congruency, contrast or competition between image and sound.