The Life of an Agent

Gabor Zsigmond Papp's darkly ironic historical documentary The Life of an Agent stitches together a compilation of instructional films used in Cold War Hungary to train secret government police. Papp uses much screen time to draw striking aesthetic, stylistic and thematic parallels between those works and the Z-grade, cliché-ridden fictional thrillers of the day, thus demonstrating how the Hungarian government modeled its propaganda on the conventions of popular cinema. The films at hand provide police trainees with suggestions on such procedures as: leading home raids, conducting rudimentary surveillance and planting moles.

Back in the days of communism, the Ministry of Interior Affairs had its own film studio where several hundred short and full-length films were produced between the years 1958 and 1988. These films provided training and instruction to secret police agents on how to defend law and order in the regime.