I´m particulary fond of Jancsó (mainly his 60 and 70s work), the german trilogy of Szabó or Bella Tarr but I´m sure there is much more I´m missing. For one thing I miss the great epics that were made in all communist countries (Mihai Viteazu from Romania, Marketa Lazarova from Chequia or The deluge from Poland), there is an hungarian equal to them? Some recomendations anyone?
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It is indeed and it´s one of the few jancsó films you can find in dvd. I can´t recommend it enough.
shareThis is strange, I've seen some 30 Hungarian films and not a single one could qualify for an 'epic' (maybe some Jancso?). Quite on the contrary, their best films (to my knowledge) are 'intimate', 'small' stories.
I think you should check some films from Károly Makk (Another Way), Zóltan Fábri (Requiem), Márta Mészáros (Diary for My Children), Péter Gothár (Time Stands Still), Péter Bacsó (The Witness) and Géza Bereményi (Eldorado).
Szabo's 'newer' entry 'Sunshine' has epic proportions though (it's a big film about 3 generations of a Jewish family), but I guess you know that already.
Please let me know, if you need more details.
vivaLuis
Quite on the contrary, their best films (to my knowledge) are 'intimate', 'small' stories.
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Maybe unlike poles or romanians, hungarians doesn´t have a predilection for this genre. Czechs best films are of a more intellectual nature and yugoslavia seems to prefer comedy (Of course, this is a generalization).
One really epic hungarian film, recomended to me by another user it´s Egri Csillagok. It had a really grand scale in terms of crowds, horses and stuff but feel more like a gratuitous display of it to me than nothing else.
I´ve seen Another Way, and found it very ahead of his time and very unexploitative, something that was not easy given the subject matter. I´ll check your other suggestions in no time.
Sunshine was epic enough, by the way. Good film.
I've only seen István Szabó's trilogy: Mephisto,Colonel Redl and Hanussen.
All of them great movies.
I wish I'd watch more hungarian movies, sadly here in my neck of the woods they are quite hard to find.
I recommend you:
It Happened in Europe (1948)
Merry-Go-Round (1955)
Love (1971)
The Fifth Seal (1976)
Sinbad (1971)
The Hopeless Ones/The Poor Outlaws (1965)
The Witness (1969)
The Corporal and Others (1965)
These movies com to my mind right now. These are real Hungarian classics. All wonderful.
And speaking of Szabo's "Hanussen", I can't seem to find it. Is it out of print?
Redl and Mephisto I have.
There doesn't seem to be a good DVD release of Hanussen. The only one I could find was a Region One release with Spanish subtitles, which isn't useful to non-Spanish speakers. There are some VHS copies floating around which may or may not be subtitled.
I'm afraid that you underestimate the number of subjects in which I take an interest!