Architecture. – The Hungary it has developed an architectural language of great interest in which the functionalism inherited from the post-war period has progressively changed towards a neomodernism of international taste or towards different forms of regionalism. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Hungary, Historically part of the Eastern Bloc, has further westernized, adopting neo-capitalist economic models that have led to a consistent growth of the construction industry.
Among the major investments in the sector, we recall the gigantic Millennium city center complex in Budapest, overlooking the Danube: one of the main in Central Europe since the beginning of the 21st century, it was promoted by Tri-Granit and includes, among other things, other: the new national theater designed by Mária Siklós, inaugurated in 2002; the Palace of Fine Arts inaugurated in 2005, based on a design by Zoboki-Demeter and Associates Architects; CET Budapest Architect’s Duna-Pest Residences (2005) condominium; the Millennium Tower I office towers (2006) by Fazakas Architects; Millennium Tower II (2008) by Schön Architects; Millennium Tower III (2008) by Schön Architects with Vadász Architects. Also of note is the Budapest sports arena (2003), a sports palace built to replace the previous Budapest Sportcsarnok. For Hungary 2016, please check softwareleverage.org.
Also interesting is the refurbishment of the facades of the Kristina Palace (2010), designed by the French studio of Dominique Perrault. Also worthy of note is the controversial, showy headquarters of the Hungarian Autoklub Headquarters (2011) in Budapest, built by Vikar & Lukacs Architects. The project for the new city hall of Budapest, which proposes the completion of the pre-existing historic site and is the result of an international competition won by the Dutch studio of Erick van Egeraat in 2008, has not been carried out.
Cinema. – Prince figure of Hungarian cinema from the 1980s onwards, Béla Tarr retired after the Silver Bear won at the Berlin Film Festival for A torinói ló (2011; Il Cavallo di Torino), closing his own production house (with Magyarország 2011, 2012, controversial collective film with Viktor Orbán’s government) and dedicating himself to the project of a school for young directors, the Film Factory, hosted by the Sarajevo School of science and technology. Singer of the desolate stasis to which the illusion of progress is reduced, responsible for a cinema that in the duration of the shots annihilates the expectation of a future and asks to concentrate one’s gaze on the present, social and existential at the same time, Tarr started from a novel by Georges Simenon, L’homme de Londres (1934), to shoot his most meta-reflective film, A londoni férfi (2007; The Man from London), a noir that becomes a moral parable about the act of looking, and closes his career with A torinói ló, immanent apocalypse, miserable and minimal, in the form of exhausting waiting.
The specter of the communist regime, the sense of the end of history about which Hungarian cinema continues to question itself are also at the basis of the work of György Pálfi (Taxidermia, 2006), who makes the human body a place of grotesque political expression, between bulimia and cancellation of language, deforming the traditional surrealism typical of Eastern European countries into a rejecting caricature. Of Pálfi it is worth mentioning Final cut – Hölgyeim és uraim (2012, known as Final cut – Ladies and gentlemen), editing essay, reflection on the suspension of disbelief and mockery of copyright, in which the director mounts fragments of 450 films belonging to the history of cinema (illegally downloaded from the net) in a single love story, a boy meets girl in which hundreds of actors play two ghostly protagonists.
Benedek Fliegauf, also focused on a politics of the body (Dealer, 2004), pursues a hyper-realistic cinema that disturbs the viewer with an ethical question, with an eclectic style that in the low-definition immersion of Rengeteg (2003, known as Forest) and in the static paintings in slow contemplation of the absurd of Tejút (2007, known as Milky way) it finds its extremes. The new Hungarian art film is well represented by the work of Kornél Mundruczó (Fe hér isten, 2014; White God – Symphony for Hagen), stretched between phenomenology and elegy, gloomy metaphor and excess of realism, and from the portraits of incommunicable existential pain by Ágnes Kocsis (Pál Adrienn, 2010). While the films of Márta Mészáros and Miklós Jancsó (who died in 2010) dialogue between historical reinterpretation and caricatural analysis of the present, in popular forms compared to the past, and Péter Forgács continues to modulate the revision of the past via found footage, the Hungary discovers a new vocation for comedy, between sociological satires (Pánik, 2008, by Attila Till), existential intimisms (Van valami furcsa és megmagyarázhatatlan, 2014, known with the title For some inexplicable reason, by Gábor Reisz), linguistic pastiches crossed by black humor (A nyomozó, 2008, known as The investigator, by Attila Gigor) and paradoxical glances on history (Made in Hungaria, 2009, by Gergely Fonyó).
