1989 The Real Power of TV

by Gusztáv Hámos, 1991, 58:25 min

In Romania the fighting was not yet over when Hámos, a Hungarian filmmaker living in Berlin, left for Hungary in December 1989, for the first time since he had left his country of birth without permission ten years earlier. He wanted to make a film about censorship at Hungarian Television — about news analysis, newscasters and reading news — that was contrary to the officially sanctioned broadcasts. Day after day, Hámos watched broadcasts from Romania with his grandmother at the dinner table. In this remarkable video essay on what Hámos terms the “real power” of television, his grandmother’s personal point of view is contrasted with the revolution on TV. Archival news footage — from the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the ’68 Prague Spring to the events in the Eastern European countries and China in ’89 — is interlaced with the comments of television journalists, news presenters and newscasters.