Young Mothers, Concrete Cages: Representations of Maternity in Hungarian Housing Films from the 1970s and 1980s

The chapter examines state socialist spaces of communal living from a gender perspective using relevant Hungarian films. Informed by Judit Ember's Fagyöngyök (Mistletoes, 1978), Béla Tarr's Családi tűzfészek (Family Nest, 1979) and Panelkapcsolat (The Prefab People, 1982), and György Szomjas' Falfúró (Wall Driller, 1985) I argue that highrise blocks of flats might have eased the housing shortage brought about by socialist industrialization, they hardly achieved social or gender equality. Emphasizing the resistance of the selected films to play along the official ideological-utopian discourse surrounding housing policies, I point out the collaboration between the paternalistic and the patriarchal regimes, most evident in the subordination of welfare policies to national economic considerations that privilege male control and ensure female subordination in the home. Cinema is a useful tool to study "architectural patriarchy" as it both captures the gendered affective imaginations females and males invest in space and portrays marital relationships as a site of inequality, identity crisis, and (female) entrapment. The second part of the chapter distinguishes between three psychodynamically invested social environments ? that of the neighbourhood, the extended family, and the nuclear family (mainly the relationship between spouses) ? and offers a close reading of how cinema renders legible the character's affective investments in space through describing their varied associations with patriarchy.