Hírnévpolitika és a történelem esetlegességei
The politics of fame and the contingencies of history

The two versions of the film ’Csodacsatár’

Summary/Abstract: The 1950s was a remarkable period in the history of Hungarian football, not just because of the spectacular results, but we can surely state that the Golden Team (Aranycsapat) was an image-building means in the propaganda arsenal of national communism, which played a prominent role in the system-level symbiosis of sports and politics. The way the team's fame was changing and was being shaped grew far beyond the significance of the events of sports history: the riots on the streets of Budapest after the 1954 world cup final as well as the rewriting and deletion of the memory of those players who stayed abroad after the crushing of the 1956 revolution equally belong to the interpretive context of Márton Keleti's movie A Csodacsatár (The marvellous striker), which was originally filmed in the summer of 1956, then partially re-filmed with new actors in 1957. In my paper, I mainly look for answers to the question: what strategies of politics of memory can be detected in the storyline of the movie as well as in the characterization and the modal formation of the genre of satire? Both versions of the movie can be interrogated using such interpretive interests since it thematizes fame itself, as it is being formed in mass media, in such a way that in its historical references it recalls the political agents and practices of both the interwar period and the Rákosi regime.

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