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György Pálfi’s Taxidermia (Hungary, 2006) is a landmark work of post-socialist cinema. It reflects upon the history of Hungary over the past century: a history of socio-political failures, betrayals, and disappointments. But more particularly, the film is the product of a specific and profound disillusionment, one that still resonates for us today. The end of Communist Party rule in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 led to a “genuine elation, caused partly by the incredible ease with which the much-feared dictatorial powers crumbled”; entire societies felt “a rush of liberty and. . . an outbreak of collective imagination, intelligence, and inspiration” (Szeman and Tamas 2009, 22). In the aftermath of this exhilaration, however, things went bad. The newly freed societies were swamped, as the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás puts it, by “oligarchic rule, fake electoralism, a yellow press, a precipitous decline in culture and education, a revival of authoritarianism and racism/ethnicism, misogyny, and homophobia” (Szeman and Tamas 2009, 26). Conditions today, in the early twenty-first century, are thus quite different from anything that Central and Eastern Europeans hoped for, or imagined, when they brought down the actually existing socialist regimes that oppressed them. For Hungary and the other former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been entirely absorbed within the framework of global neoliberal capitalism. The only “winners” in the new social order, Tamás says, have been “the transnational corporations and the power networks that can be loosely called ‘Western’ ” (20). The result, for the people of Central and Eastern Europe, has been “an inhuman, unjust, unfair, inefficient, anti-egalitarian, fraudulent, and hypocritical system that is in no way at all superior to its predecessor, which was awful enough” (24).

Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Györgi Pálfi's Taxidermia