Conceptual Artist, Cognitive Film: Miklós Erdély at the Balázs Béla Studio

Abstract

The Hungarian Balázs Béla Studio (BBS), established in 1959 to create opportunities for young filmmakers, was unique in former Eastern Europe in the way it gave nonprofessional filmmakers access to the medium from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Its history complicates our understanding of the relationship between official and unofficial culture in the Eastern Bloc as an officially supported studio that gave unofficial artists opportunities to co-opt state resources to produce innovative and subversive work. This chapter gives an overview of how nonprofessional filmmakers, particularly visual artists, came to create important work that applied the insights and methods of conceptual art to film—with a focus on the work and theories of Miklós Erdély as a particularly paradigmatic example.