Mass culture and national identity

Patterns of heroism in Várkonyi Zoltán’s Stars of Eger and the South Korean filmThe Great Battle

Abstract

In 1968, recognising the audience’s powerful demand for topics on national history, Várkonyi Zoltán filmed „Stars of Eger”, based on real events and a novel considered part of the literary canon. The South Korean director Kim Kwang Sik must have built on a similar basis when he created The Great Battle (Ansisaeng = The Ansi fortress) in 2018. In spite of the cultural-normative differences and as many as fifty years between their production, the two films do show definite resemblances. This study endeavours to follow up the factors that cause these similarities, also the obviously marked differences, and to what extent a mass cultural product made specifically for entertainment purposes can influence the development of national identity in the audience.