Exhibition on the 120 Years of Hungarian Cinema

An exhibition celebrating the 120th anniversary of Hungarian cinema and showing relics of various eras has opened in Budapest's Ludwig Museum, hirado.hu reports.

“The exhibition presents a wonderful golden age with wonderful films, Hungarian artists and those born in Hungary making an international career, it showcases the Hungarian cinema universe,” Csaba Káel, the government commissioner for developing Hungary’s motion picture industry, said at the opening ceremony this week.

The show Wide Angle guides the visitor through the past 120 years of Hungarian cinema starting from April 1901, when 'The Dance', the first Hungarian film was screened at the Urania Scientific Theater in Budapest.

“The Dance was the first Hungarian film to contain staged scenes, originally produced as visual aid for a lecture of the history of dance. The scenes featuring Lujza Blaha and Sári Fedák, celebrated actresses at the time, were recorded on the Urania theater’s rooftop,” Janka Barkóczi, a curator of the exhibtion told the Hungarian state news agency MTI. She noted that so far, some 2,000 Hungarian feature-length films have been made altogether 40% of which have been lost.

The exhibition features a rich collection of photos, posters, objects, filming equipment, moving images, costumes, original scripts, awards and text backgrounds, and also offers screenings.

As Csaba Káel added, the exhibition serves as an initial collection of a planned Hungarian motion picture museum.