In 1934 Budapest, whose spa heritage dates back to the Romans, became an official spa city, like Bath, Wiesbaden, or Carlsbad. Journalist, photographer, cameraman, and director István Somkúti (1895–1973) celebrated this event in his 1935 film Budapest: City of Baths. Made for the Budapest Spa and Resort Committee, the film was most probably a promotional work though it was considered a kultúrfilm, a cultural or documentary film. It portrays three facets of Budapest: the capital of Hungary, the modern city, and a health resort. Focusing on several of the more than 120 hot springs in the city, Somkúti uses experimental montage techniques and film tricks such as rotating images and kaleidoscopic effects.
Somkúti started his career in the film industry at the Pathé laboratory in Budapest, like Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig, who made São Paulo: A Symphonia da Metrópole in 1929. In fact, they weren’t the only city-symphony filmmakers from Hungary; the list also includes Andor von Barsy, who made the Dutch city symphonies De Stad die nooit rust (1928) and Hoogstraat (1929), and László Moholy-Nagy, who composed the typo-photo Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (1922) before he realized the films Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (1929), Berliner Stilleben (1931), and Großstadt-Zigeuner (1932). However, Somkúti, who also worked for the Hungarian Film Office, seems to be the only director who made a Hungarian city symphony about a Hungarian city. Nevertheless, two sound films, that were considerably less symphonic, were made about Budapest at the time. In 1932, the French production company Osso Film made Budapest Symphoniája (Symphony of Budapest), and in 1940, Dáloky János completed Látta-e már Budapestet télen? (Have you ever seen Budapest in Winter?).
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Márton, Kurutz, “Budapesti helyszíntár: Budapest a híradó- és dokumentumfilmek tükrében, a kezdetekto˝l 1945-ig,” Budapest Fo˝város Levéltára, retrieved from http://old.bparchiv.hu/id-380-kurutz_marton_budapesti_helyszintar.html, 30 August 2017.
Nagy, Zsolt, Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy 1814–1941 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2017).
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