Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on film documentaries produced about pilgrimages during the 1960s in Hungary. I examine how these anti-religious propaganda films attempted to convince people of in the fraudulent nature of religious pilgrimage sites during the Cold War era.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on film documentaries produced about pilgrimages during the 1960s in Hungary. Through my visual examples (Poisonous Kiss, Miracle in 1950, and Mary of Hasznos), I illustrate how vernacular religiosity labeled as “subversive,” “backward” or anti-progressive was portrayed. Using film clips and visual examples, my presentation analyzes how public health hazards associated with bacterial and viral infections from ‘miraculous water’ and touching and kissing holy statues by pilgrims are used to debunk religious practices and dissuade.

Discourses on progress, science, well-being, and morality are mediated in these films, which also reveal a degree of ambiguity and a questioning of values that are not present in the more extreme Soviet-style anti-religious propaganda. The filmmakers’ “eye” is ambivalent, and the films constitute a strong ethnographic interest in religion combined with a unique Socialist religious sensitivity.

It is important to note that the repressive apparatus of communism did not simply want to document everyday life and culture of the period, but it had a constructed message, which can be considered a fabricated reading of reality. Documentaries and images were instrumentalized and became powerful tools in support of the regime’s narratives and their underlying truth claims.

This presentation aims to look beyond the propagandistic portrayals of pilgrimages and answer methodological questions such as how anthropological research could use historical documentaries that were produced to hinder religious practices during Communist times; and how this historical-anthropological research on anti-religious propaganda films provides so-far hidden important insights into the hardly known Christian materiality of communist/socialist period. Is it possible to liberate these documentaries and allow alternative narratives to emerge?