Artists as Amateurs: Intersections of Nonprofessional Film Production and Neo-Avant-Garde Experimentation at the Balázs Béla Stúdió in the Early 1970s

Recent scholarship on socialist Eastern European amateur cinema has provided fruitful discussions on state-supported institutional frameworks and the production of formally and ideologically subversive films. This study expands this research by focusing on the state-funded Hungarian filmmaking platform Balázs Béla Stúdió (BBS) during the transitional period of the early 1970s. While the BBS functioned as a stepping-stone for aspiring film professionals throughout the 1960s, it opened up during the following decade to a range of industry outsiders, including neo-avant-garde artists who were societal and cultural outsiders as well. This essay sketches how the studio's distinct institutional framework allowed this move toward deprofessionalization to occur. It also explores how ambiguous yet purposeful conceptualizations of the amateur legitimized these filmic activities within the BBS and negotiated a sociopolitical context that denied independent modes of creative expression.