Independent Women: The Pioneering Cinema of Márta Mészáros | Hand-Picked by MUBI

Описание: The Pioneering Cinema of Márta Mészáros is now showing on MUBI: https://mubi.io/3x92BMI

“An independent woman—one who finds herself in a situation where she must make a decision on her own—is the central character in each of the films I have made so far.” —Márta Mészáros

With 30 features and many documentaries to her name, Márta Mészáros is a trailblazing figure in Hungarian cinema. Born in Budapest in 1931, Mészáros grew up in a Russian orphanage after losing her father (the avant-garde sculptor László Mészáros) in a Soviet purge and her mother in childbirth, only returning to Hungary after the war.

After working on numerous documentary shorts, Mészáros broke into feature filmmaking with her semi-autobiographical, Beat-influenced debut The Girl. In the film, the melancholy heroine (played by singer Kati Kovács, a future pop star in the DDR!) escapes a state orphanage to look for her missing family. Fragmented families and parent-less characters who pursue alternative modes of kinship would become prevalent themes in her films, as in her 1975 masterpiece Adoption, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale—the first time both a woman and a Hungarian had done so. Many of her early films were also informed by the visceral excitement of ‘60s pop music, juxtaposing an emergent youthful counterculture against Hungary’s more traditional social values. Class dynamics and the gruelling struggle of workers in factories are subjects Mészáros returns to, always with an eye for the emotional particularities—and economics—of women’s experiences.

Mészáros’s lyrical, realist cinema favors women’s stories and complex, independent, and rebellious female protagonists who run up against society’s disapproval or mistrust. Her lush cinematography is full of intimate close-ups, often hovering on characters’ faces to capture rich fluctuations in emotions, while an authentic portrayal of local scenes is testament to her early background in documentary filmmaking. We are enormously pleased to be showing Mészáros pioneering and provocative films, all lovingly restored by the Hungarian Film Archive.

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