sometimes it happens that a director all but vanishes
from film history. During the 1960s, Hungary’s Miklós Jancsó
was as well known to followers of international art cinema in 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, when Hungarian
as his contemporaries Antonioni, Bergman and Bresson. If volunteers supported the Red Army against White Russian
those names stayed the course, it was not just because of counterrevolutionaries. Effectively plotless, The Red and the
their continued and consistent output. Familiar faces in their White describes a series of power shifts in a rural setting that,
films helped establish a visual profile: Antonioni launched a despite the manoeuvres taking place there, seems strangely
star in Monica Vitti, and Bergman had the likes of Liv Ullmann detached from the real war, a world away from wherever
and Max von Sydow, while Bresson, working without stars as history is supposedly being made. In fluid extended shots,
such, deployed many memorable characters, as in the hero often incorporating extreme close-ups and long shots in a
and heroine of his Pickpocket (1959). single take, Jancsó consistently unsettles us by withholding
Not only did Jancsó not have stars, he barely had information and concealing key presences. Early on, a Red
individuals. His was a cinema of masses, of actors deployed officer who seems to have established himself as a significant
like troops or chess pieces, often within vast landscapes. character suddenly lays down his arms, as if ambushed by the
Single figures tend to be plucked abruptly out of the crowd, camera itself, then jumps to his death before we even see the
or vanish into the distance, before we can ever know them White officers who have confronted him.
as ‘characters’. In Jancsó’s war films of the 1960s, the players Jancsó is celebrated as one of modernist cinema’s
tend to be members of small contingents – straggling military masters of the long take, along with Tarkovsky and
detachments or POW escapee groups – that get swallowed Theo Angelopoulos. He was also a huge influence on
up or captured by larger bodies, which themselves are then contemporary Hungarian long-take specialist Béla Tarr, and
inescapably mowed down by other forces. These films it’s partly because of the Tarr connection that Jancsó is now
deal with injustice and suffering, but Jancsó’s is hardly what beginning to be rediscovered. Jancsó uses depth of field like
you’d call traditional humanist cinema. Rather, it dramatises few other directors. Characters can appear miles away, like
a conception of history enacted by masses, and comprising ants on the horizon, but they are never home free: as long as
their movements, migrations and fragmentations. a character is visible onscreen (or by implication, alive under
In Jancsó’s world, people have little defined identity the sun), there’s no escape. Jancsó is a three-dimensional
and barely even clear nationality, however much characters director par excellence, often capturing wide perspectives
bark at each other to identify themselves (“Magyar?”). One from hilltops: note the scenes in The Red and the White
Jancsó film that does focus on a protagonist is My Way surveying the movement around a field hospital and the
Home (Igy jöttem, 1965), about a young Hungarian crossing lake it overlooks, culminating in the final clash of forces, as a
the countryside at the end of the Second World War. At shifting, disorienting panorama suddenly coalesces into the
one point he meets a group of concentration camp survivors merciless geometry of a map of battle.
who set upon him, convinced he is German; he ends the After the mid-1960s, Jancsó’s work became more
film fleeing in a Russian uniform, only to encounter other symbolic and more nationally specific in its imagery: colour
assailants. In the final shot he turns to the camera, as if angrily films such as the magnificent Red Psalm (1972) and Elektreia
interrogating the viewer: can we at least tell him who he is? (1974) are vast landscape ballets, less narratives than rituals,
Widely considered Jancsó’s masterpiece – although mobilising fire, musicians, horses and battalions of actors.
it’s one of the least-seen classics in the modernist canon – Later films appealed less to international audiences, and were
The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, 1966) is a historical drama decried by critics as repetitively mannered or self-parodic,
about policing and abusive intelligence techniques that has even – in the case of Private Vices and Public Virtues (1976),
acquired a striking new urgency in the age of Guantánamo. about the Mayerling scandal of 1889 – dismissed as artily
Set on the Hungarian Plains in 1848, it depicts a ploy by the pornographic. In Hungary, however, Jancsó is still working
authorities to flush out revolutionary partisans by herding and enjoying renewed popular success with a series of much
together suspects and subjecting them to an elaborate, smaller scale absurdist comedies.
ritualistic ordeal. All the actors are effectively extras, human Meanwhile, the stock of Jancsó’s earlier work continues
‘furniture’ crowded into tight, labyrinthine interiors; precise, to rise. His 1960s films look beyond war cinema’s customary
complex camera movements document, indeed enact, the observations about the meaninglessness of conflict to ), 1966, dir Miklós Jancsó
methodical dehumanisation of the captives. The Round-Up offer instead a precise, dispassionate demonstration of its
is often read as a veiled depiction of the aftermath of the arbitrariness. War is depicted in these films as a game of
failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but it is just as much chance in which individuals can never win, let alone maintain
haunted by de Sade, Kafka and the Holocaust. any autonomy as individuals. And if national boundaries and
Szegénylegények
Jancsó’s follow-up, The Red and the White (Csillagosok, identities cease to cohere in these films, it is because the only
(
katonák, 1967), resembles no war film ever made. It takes place geography that finally counts in them is defined not by the
politics of government but by the politics of the camera.
The Red and the White and My Way Home are released by
The Round-Up
Second Run DVD, with The Round-Up to follow in February/
March,
www.secondrundvd.com
Still from
Mixed Media_moving image.indd 103 2/1/08 13:30:39
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