Great discovery! – Original film collection about Hungary from the 1920s – VIDEO

Two unknown videos were revealed about Hungary from the 1920s, reports Film Fund. Nearly 100 years ago, French cameramen were walking around Hungarian villages and cities to record people’s everyday life. The rolls were presented by the Dutch film archive, within the framework of the professional program of the 3rd Budapest Classic Movie Marathon.

The short film collection was published by the Dutch film historian, Elif Rongen, in the French Institute of Budapest. In the last few years, the rolls were taken from private collections to the Amsterdam EYE Filmmuseum  – which is in close cooperation with the Film Archive Management of the Hungarian National Film Fund – and thanks to which several long-lost Hungarian silent films have been found, including the world-famous drama of Mihály Kertész (Michael Curtiz) from 1918, The Last Dawn. 

As Hungarian news portal hvg describes, each of the newly published report films were created by the French Pathé film factory in the early twenties, which primarily presents rural life in pictures.

The world of Zsigmond Móricz’s art revives – we can meet his novels’ characters on the screen, and their daily life can be observed at the farms, city streets, or the market.

A special feature of the freshly published one-hour-long film material is that part of it was prepared by a popular hand-colouring process in French cinemas, which means that the black-and-white prints are posteriorly coloured by chemical paint frame by frame.

There is no other recording related to Hungary which was prepared with a similar technique. The reason for the colouring process is obvious – the world-famous embroidery of Mezőkövesd and the folk costume of Matyóföld are presented in tiny details.

Besides these, Kassa also appears in some scenes, by which we can assume that the pictures might have been made a few seconds before the Trianon borders were set. This assumption is suggested by other sequences as well, including small villages which might have been located in Transylvania or Kárpátalja.

Budapest also shows up in the half-hour-long “national image film” (1927), in which – besides its most popular venues – some lesser-known details of the city can also be recognised.

Source: hvg.hu