Timothy Havens

This article uses the case of international media production in Budapest, Hungary, to think through how film and television locations get articulated to the spatial politics of Hungary’s government, which has grown increasingly illiberal since 2010 alongside an exploding international production sector. To date, most academic studies of location shooting have focused on either the use of locations by film and television producers, or the ways that liberal, Western-style governments use locations to attract tourism dollars and international media capital. While the Hungarian government uses international productions for economic purposes as well, it also seeks to tether location shooting to its own illiberal spatial projects. I develop a typology of the different uses of locations—spectacular and unspectacular, masked and unmasked—and how these different uses facilitate specific illiberal spatial politics, including the refurbishment of nationalist monuments important to the party’s ethnonationalist ideology; the unequal distribution of infrastructural wealth to wealthier, pro-government districts; and the near exclusion of oppositional domestic projects from shooting in much of the city. At the same time, I show how criticisms of the illiberal Hungarian government also seep into international media productions through unmasked, unspectacular location shooting. While many of the political details in the article may be specific to Hungary, the typology I develop for studying the political uses of locations by host countries should be transferrable to a wide range of cases.

Budapest, Hungary, has become one of the largest media production centers in Europe, even though the country has little local domestic production and few exports. Rather, nearly all production spending in Budapest comes from servicing foreign productions. This article explores the role that location managers in Budapest play in producing a recognizable sense of Budapest as a specific place, both on and behind the screen, in an effort to make the city “sticky” for global media capital. Throughout pre-production and production, location managers produce a sense for foreign creative workers that Budapest is both versatile and flexible as a shooting location. Ironically, while their efforts generally erase the specificity of Budapest, creating the impression that the city is as film-friendly as any other media capital, this erasure is precisely what makes Budapest sticky for transnational media productions.

Superconducting magnets in MRIs are subject to various sources of vibrations. As the magnets respond to these excitations, eddy currents are generated in metallic structures in the cryostat and create their own magnetic fields inside the region of interest (ROI) where the imaging process takes place. Because these vibration-induced magnetic field distortions are not synchronized with pulse sequences, they are especially detrimental to image quality. In this paper, a novel passive compensation method for vibrational magnetic field distortions is presented. It provides a cost-effective solution that is capable of compensating dynamic field distortions over broad-band frequency ranges and complex vibrational behaviors.