Veterans and Grannies. The Polyphony of Memory in Two Hungarian Documentary Films

The essay analyses the representation of polyphonic memory in two groundbreaking Hungarian documentary films, made thirty years apart: János and Gyula Gulyás’s I was at the Isonzo, too (Én is jártam Isonzónál, 1984–87) and Bálint Révész’s Granny Project (Nagyi projekt, 2017). The earlier film was made in the 1980s, under the state-socialist system, when doing memory work of both World Wars was limited, if not forbidden. The second film was made recently, in 2017. They differ from each other in many ways, but instinctively they chose the same solution for representing and working out traumas: through transnational dialogue. They focus on traumatic experiences of the past, changing national, so-called monologic memory into a broad perspective, putting Aleida Assmann’s (2005) theory of dialogic memory into practice.¹