Rites of Retreat in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema

On the basis of three Hungarian films of the last decade, the present paper investigates a special sub-category of so-called "return films" (Gott and Herzog 2015, 13), one that I will hypothetically call retreat films. In these films returns become ritualistic retreats with masculinities on "regressive journeys" (Király 2015, 170; see laso Sághy 2016; Sághy 2017). Their spatial trajectories may typically lead from Western cultural centres to Eastern homelands, from cities to the countryside, from the public sphere to the private, sometimes symbolically from the future to the past, and often from the realm of desire to that of Thanatos. The men of these films tend to struggle to find places of their own on the margins of society, awayfrom public spaces: what they seem to have in mind is a place to hide, somewhere to retreat, that is, a closet of their own.