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Jean Rouch is the iconic director of the French New Wave, the ethnographer and visual anthropologist of sub-Saharan Africa, and also the inventor of the cinéma vérité style. His perplexing and much-debated film The Mad Masters is a cornerstone of his oeuvre in regard to ethnographic filmmaking. During a “hauka” possession ritual emblematic figures of colonial rule come to life as “spirits” in front of Rouch’s camera. The reception of the film proposed many diverse interpretations. Is it an anti-colonial parody, collective therapy, the carnivalesque reversal of the world as Bakhtin described it, or the “colonised psyche” theorized by Fanon? My paper aims to introduce shades into the debate and discuss how arguments relate and rely on each other. I first clarify the visual research methods of the filmmaker and the general context of his cinematic approach. Secondly, I argue that in order to understand the social dimension of the ritual presented in the film we have to undertake a close reading of the film involving postcolonial theories, the notion of the carnival, lévinasian ethics and written ethnographic descriptions of the hauka-cult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my paper, I examine the borderline between documentary and feature films by enumerating the typical differences and similarities. My question is: in adapting a true story, is the documentary an unbiased presentation of reality, or rather a representation of the director’s subjective objectivity? I compare the adaptations of the popular story of Oskar Schindler: Steven Spielberg’s world hit feature film Schinder’s List and Jon Blair’s documentary, Schindler: The Real Story, examining the adaptation techniques of the two genres, focusing on the emphasis of the episodes of the well-known story in each of the two works. Finally, I show, through a case study of my own work, how the boundaries between the two cinematic genres are blurred in the processing of memory and documentary data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erzsébet Kádár-Karr and Jolán Földes both started out as poets in the avant-garde journal Ma, edited by Lajos Kassák, the former publishing expressionist poems in 1918-1919, the latter in 1919. Another common feature of their careers is that from the 1920s they tried to make a name for themselves abroad publishing fiction, they were also involved in foreign film production, and they both won literary prizes. Erzsébet Kádár – as a left-wing émigré under the name Elisabeth Karr – published mostly in German, but in several European countries, while Jolán Földes tried to make her work available on the book market in many languages and language areas. The paper presents the transnational career strategies of the two women writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]