„Bovaryné a panelban”: Lakótelep a francia filmekben
“Madame Bovary in the Panel”: Housing Estates in French Films

Summary/Abstract: Housing estates are often presented in French and Hungarian discourses as homogeneous and universal, while attributing the problems associated with them to the current political, economic and social situation of the given country. How can something general, internationally modern, strictly functionalist, derivable from physical-biological laws, be a faithful and cruel mirror of the local society at the same time? According to my hypothesis, schematization and individualization can be seen at the same time in the depiction of the housing estate. In the moment of schematization, a general image of a housing estate takes the place of the given housing estate, with well-recognizable, almost stylized forms (geometric, abstract), tones and lights (cold blue, gray, white), materials (concrete, linoleum, neon), thematic (broken elevator, getting lost) and emotional-mood tropes (closure, no way out, suffocation, infantilism, depression). At the same time, this schematized, abstracted, fundamentally identical image in its emotional, moody and sensual nature, which is so similar in France and Hungary, nevertheless seems to be differentiated in the moment of interpretation: according to the local social, political and economic conditions. To put it simply: if the housing estate is mostly oppressive and unlivable in the depictions, the Hungarian housing estate is because of socialism, while the French housing estate is because of the soul-destroying and personality-destroying internal logic of the mistaken capitalist-consumer society, the dark legacy of colonialism. A comparison of the French and Hungarian representation would go beyond the scope of this study. The image of the housing estate in Hungarian films is examined in the study “Panel connections: the housing estate motif in Hungarian film” by Gábor Gelencsér until its publication in 2008. And although my hypothesis can only be proven by comparison, the French material perhaps paints a more “typical” picture of the phenomenon, if we think of the work of Le Corbusier, the role of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), or Mathieu Kassovitz’s classic housing estate film, Hate (1995).

• Details
• Contents