Museology, institutionalised and popularised in the twentieth century, has gradually acquired social, cultural, pedagogical and academic functions, turning museums into local, national and global destinations. As key sites of learning beyond school, museums operate alongside laboratories and libraries, while remaining intertwined with the civilisational narratives of cities. They do not only display inherited heritage; they also stage spatial representations of events that still shape collective memory. A striking example is the Budapest museum opened in 2014 that presents the 1956 Hungarian uprising within a deliberately limited space and immersive narrative design. The continued public interest in this episode—long after the Soviet retreat from the scene—suggests that such memory is sustained rather than temporary. The museum’s ability to meet curiosity and informational needs through visual storytelling, reinforced by film projects produced in different formats and genres, highlights its cultural-communication role: films expand contextual details, whereas the museum condenses lived experience into an embodied encounter. This study aims to assess, from a communication-studies perspective, how the uprising is mediated through museum visits and through film variations on the same theme, and to compare the narrative, visual and experiential strategies through which meaning is produced for diverse publics.
Hungarian Revolution, Social Memory, Museum, Cinema, Communication Sciences