Party authorities considered filmmaking a highly effective tool with which to shape the attitudes of the citizenry. The
cultural policy guided by György Aczél, the primary cultural politician during most of the Kádár era, closely monitored film production and the dissemination process. The authorities tolerated the emergence of more experimental artistic practices in realms hidden from the public. The Béla Balázs Studio (BBS) was meant to
… read more Party authorities considered filmmaking a highly effective tool with which to shape the attitudes of the citizenry. The
cultural policy guided by György Aczél, the primary cultural politician during most of the Kádár era, closely monitored film production and the dissemination process. The authorities tolerated the emergence of more experimental artistic practices in realms hidden from the public. The Béla Balázs Studio (BBS) was meant to function as a
training ground, where filmmakers who had completed their formal instruction could make short films that were
not produced to be
screened.
Precisely this latter criterion, which was a kind of cautionary measures, granted special freedom to the Studio, since the films were not subjected to censorship until after they had already been made. In the early phases of the production, the Studio’s artistic circle (and the leadership formed from this circle) controlled the process, so numerous films were made that later were not accepted, and some films even disappeared or remained unfinished.
Another significant consequence of this partial autonomy was that over time artists who were not official filmmakers could make films within the Studio. Beginning in the 1970s, representatives of other fields (writers, poets, visual artists, actors, sociologists, musicians, etc.) could also make films on their own or as co-authors. This reshaped the character of the Studio. The training ground increasingly became a space for countercultural art.
In the 1990s, the radically changed structure of film financing doomed the workshop character of the studio to a slow process of atrophy. The BBS finished its last production in 2005 and ended its activities legally in 2010. The BBS Research Archive was created as a joint initiative of the Balázs Béla Studio Foudation, the Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle Budapest, and the Hungarian National Film Archive in 2006. The purpose of the Archive is to disseminate the films and various documents produced during the years in which the studio was active.
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