ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that with support from James Donald's reflections on urban life in Imagining the Modern City, that rather than being postmodern, the film's exploration of urban space is, in fact, modernist in tone and universal in application. Kontroll was, initially, heralded critically as another film from a young European director albeit one born in the United States who returned to his native Hungary in 1990 which, according to the Independent on Sunday at least, had the words 'cult classic' spray painted all over it. A contextual reading of Kontroll as a poetic meditation on the instabilities of post-communist life in Hungary should therefore not be discounted. Kontroll could be seen to epitomise Donald's conviction about film's ability to teach its audiences across the globe ways of seeing and so imagining the modern city, whether or not they live in one: The imagined landscape of the city has become, inescapably, a cinematic landscape.
