The Stakeholder Spectrum. The History and the Current State of Participatory Film in Hungary

The Research Centre for Minor Media/Culture (founded at the Department of Media and Communication, ELTE University, Hungary) includes a number of research areas and work processes. One of them is to reveal the history and to map the actual state of the participatory film in Hungary, concieved not just as a visual social research method, but as a wide spectrum on which there are many different examples according to the depth and nature of the involvement of the stakeholders. The academic activities in the Research Centre cover the historical and theoretical aspects of participatory film, its foreign and Hungarian antecedents, contemporary national and international examples. Following the definitions of the field and examples from abroad, the author attempts to delimit the possible sub-themes that belong or could belong to the scope of participatory film. The author also mentions some aspects that seem useful for the analysis of the research topics, specifically film examples. From these varied examples a broad repository of participatory-based film will hopefully emerge: the stakeholder spectrum.¹