In June 2025, László Strausz's (Institute for the Theory of Art and Media Studies, Department of Film Studies) video essay "Move on Down. Precarity in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema" and the accompanying study were published in the journal Iluminace and in video form on the journal's website.
The video essay engages with the topic of precarity in feature films produced in Hungary around and after the regime change of 1989, which launched tectonic social transformations leading to widespread instability. The essay confronts precarity as downward intragenerational mobility from an economic and social perspective from the final years of state socialism until the present. As an audiovisual product, the video documents the author’s efforts to move beyond the disembodied voice of academic texts and experiment with accent as a marker of social entanglement.
This video is an offshoot of the research project on the social history of Hungarian cinema conducted at the Eötvös Loránd University between 2015 and 2020 (OTKA 116708). Together with his colleagues, the author coded all feature films produced in Hungary for a large number of variables, such as time period, location, protagonists, genre, etc. With the database at disposal, he compiled a list of feature films made after 1985 in which the protagonist experiences social and/or economic downfall during the last years of the state socialist system and its immediate aftermath.
In the article based on the findings (László Strausz, “Move on Down: Precarity and Downward Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian Feature Films,” in Precarity in European Films: Depictions and Discourses, eds. Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten, and Hanna Prenzel (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 179–197.) he argues that the representation of precarity is a useful prism through which one can glimpse the cinematic reflections on social transformation from 1985 onward. Additionally, images of precarity also mirror the filmmakers’ own dispositions towards social mobility, and intellectuals’ fears about precarity and the loss of social status in general. In the written text,
the author made sure to follow the established conventions of academic writing, using a detached and objective language.
Guiding readers from the initial hypotheses through the evidence towards the conclusion, he made every attempt to remain as neutral as possible as a scholarly voice. The production of the video essay allowed him to leave behind the safe but often confining entrenchments of academic writing and offer viewers something personal that could not be expressed in written form. The topic of regime change-era precarity in Eastern Europe is, after all, not just another topic that he addresses objectively throughout his work. Rather, the period was a formative event that impacted his thinking ever since, and the video essay gave him the opportunity to reveal this involvement. Thus, when planning the voice-over for the video, one element he decided not to mask was an accented English. An English with a distinct Eastern European accent. An English that at times puts emphasis on the wrong syllable. His English, which reflects on how language itself can be a source of precarity for non-native speakers, in academia and elsewhere. His accent allowed him to slip into the skin of the films’ protagonists and play with how this not-quite complete command of language, this off-centered referentiality may be used productively.