100-year-old newsreels

 

We inherited a year's worth of news footage recorded during the 1918/19 Revolution. The copies were seized from the lab by the Horthy police after 1919, several prosecutions were based on these images and they served as evidence in finding out about people's acts and whereabouts during the Revolution. All the Az Est Film and Vörös Riport Film reels became investigative material and ended up in the criminal archives after the cases were closed.

100 Year Old Newsreels Playlist

From August 2018 until July 2019, the 100 year old news will be available on this page. News relevant to the current week will be uploaded each week, so we suggest checking the website on a regular basis, not to mention that all videos can be embedded or shared. This is the first time for historians of the Archive to connect the news reports with their corresponding newspaper articles, which allows them to explore details no one ever could before. As most of the reels' historical background disappeared with time, the Film Archive now attempts to narrate the silent reels to (re)reveal all the forgotten stories, so we could learn why people were waiting in line on Károly körút for silk on the summer of 1918, how the city was trying to solve the housing problem, why the Baby Theatre's child star tried to kill himself and what happened to the 8 year old boy, who put his hand in the hyena cage at the zoo.

It is much more rewarding to conduct a thorough research now that past articles are available in digital form. By going through the interlinked archives we were able to define the reels' location and time, and identify people by name, which would not have been possible without the Hungarian National Film Fund and Film Archive's digital restoration program. Besides 40 known news reels, we also scanned deleted scenes of the news from never-before-seen negatives we found while rearranging the warehouse. The 2 hour unsubtitled medley will be uploaded to the Film Archive's website, as there might be others who could join the research by recognizing faces and places, and help us reveal how Hungarians lived in the past century.