1972’s Red Psalm tells of a 19th century peasant’s revolt, shown mainly with folk song and dance broken up by political speeches. The camera moves amongst the cast as if it too were a dancer, with no individual getting much screen time. It is the group or the class that is important. Jancso’s shot lengths were getting longer and longer, as the focus on character got less and less, so much so that 1969’s Sirocco only featured eleven shots in total. In the middle of this development is The Round-Up, widely considered his masterpiece (also known as The Poor Outlaws and The Hopeless One's which is a more appropriate title that is directly translated from the original Hungarian). A despairing, brutal and unforgiving masterpiece which will enchant any new audiences as much as it did the audience at the time of its release. In his book, Hungarian Cinema: From the Coffee Houses to the Multiplex, John Cunningham contextualises this point: “Jancso continued to impress his audiences and in the latter half of the 1960’s he probably reached the pinnacle of his career. After the impact of My Way Home, he astounded audiences worldwide with a film that many regard as his finest masterpiece, The Round-Up.” (P110) Set in Hungry of 1848 at a time when Austria has annexed the country following the defeat of Hungarian Insurgent Army, which has been disbanded, some members fleeing into exile, others fighting back in smaller groups. But insurgents are a problem for the authorities so they round-up a group of guerrilla fighters and lock them away in a prison, exposed to dehumanising conditions for months on end the prisoners are then coerced into betraying their fellow inmates with the promise of a reprieve for their co-operation, but the guards are far from trust worthy as demonstrated in one of the first scenes as a man is set free and then gunned down by an unseen rifleman. The end that the authorities are seeking is the exposure of the prisoners who belong to the Roza band, hoping that they have been captured; they have no way of distinguishing between an insurgent and an ordinary criminal. Ultimately though by co-operating with the guards the prisoners continue to condemn themselves, by turning on each other they are in fact turning on themselves. Man is induced to betray man, father betray son, son betray father, but their selfishness does not furnish them with the instant freedom they've been promised and desire, instead only death awaits them either at the hands of the guards or at the hands of their fellow prisoners avenging themselves against the traitor in their midst. Like a number of Jancso’s films at the time, The Round-Up dissects and re-evaluates Hungarian history, John Cunningham expands this area of the film: “Hungarian audiences were invited to think about and question their own troubled history. In this way, the Hungarian New Wave differed from its French counterpart whose films rarely dealt with historical topics. It was a process that continued for a number of years and was one of the enduring contributions of 1960’s film-making. For the critic, writer, editor (of Film Culture) and one time dramaturgist, Yvette Biro, it was this very engagement with history that was one of the major defining criteria of Hungarian films in the 1960’s. As she remarked in the English language New Hungarian Quarterly: ‘With merciless questions aimed at us, they bring us face to face with a cross-examination of the historical past and the pressing problems of human responsibility. One foreign critic was justified in saying that the history which appears in Hungarian movies is not a sign of the usual escape, or the result of a need for myths but rather the other way around, it is a means of destroying myths… they strive for a finally authentic, even though painful national self-knowledge. History appears in these works as a collective self-portrait’.” (P108-109)
Unconcerned with character development, Jancso's approach to film is as remote at the prison where our subjects reside; a series of small buildings in the middle of a vast Hungarian plain which spreads as far wide as the eye can see. The film is as visually bleak as it is thematically, the exploration of degradation of the human spirit is at the core of the film, in one scene a woman is stripped naked and then whipped to death by canes, a man throws himself from the roof in protest to stop her torment, other men throw themselves from the roof of the prison to stop the torture as well but their deaths are in vain as the woman perishes anyway. This brutal oppression forces prisoners to conspire to murder one and other and then use the knowledge of the others culpability to incriminate them and vindicate themselves; it is a merciless environment, where self preservation is all consuming. The film has impressed critics over the years especially in terms of mood and atmosphere. The fate of the prisoners is as cold and detached as the weather around them. The film is scored by gently howling winds, its desolate location is matched by the cold sounds of the air gushing by them at all times. A few hundred feet in the air you can no longer hear this most invisible of elements but on the ground it is constantly present. But beyond the films sound design is its cinematography which is where the film achieves the most. Mesmerising camera work is consistently excellent throughout the entirety of the films run time, crisp monochrome imagery reminds of the best work of Sven Nykvist, beautifully extended tracking shots add a huge physical depth to the environment and move back and forth, in and out with almost rhythmical consistency and remind of Bela Tarr’s films, Tarr describes Jancso as a major influence on his work and this really is not surprising, the extended dolly shots seem a precursor to the steady cam work in his later films like Damnation or Satanstango. The tortured wind bruised faces of the prisoners are reminiscent of the drinkers often found in the pubs of Tarr’s films. The expansive and the claustrophobic are neatly contrasted, the cramped conditions of the prison and the endless landscape around them. The expansive shots make the best use of the widescreen frame and invokes the more epic work of Sergi Leone or David Lean. This is not the first film to use such long and creative shots in cinema, Alfred Hitchcocks Rope for example pre-dates this by many years, but Jancso has a sense of space and movement that Hitchcock could only dream of. Cunningham comments on the unique nature of Jancso’s cinema: “Figures are frequently shot against this wide expanse, isolated and tiny, under a blazing sun that bleaches much of the landscape and emphasises the stark white buildings. There is little music and the dialogue is often sparse and in staccato military commands. In this setting the rebels are deprived of their humanity and ultimately whatever heroism they possessed. As Robert Vas suggests: ‘One has to destroy the few idols to make a real self-reckoning possible, and this is what Jancso sets out to do. With a burning intellectual charge, he invites his viewers to throw away the pleasant comfortable dream of Hungary’s romantic-heroic history and face up to reality: black as much as white, oppressor as much as oppressed’.” (P111) The films tone and structure make it difficult to watch, the lack of a central protagonist or even a central antagonist is a problem for the film in terms of securing an audiences attention. However the films blatant condemnation on torture both physical and psychological means that it is as relevant today as it was at the time of release. We may not be invested in the characters as such, but we are invested in humanity and the chipping away of humanity which is catalogued in this film. Any regime, any government in the world which employees techniques such as the ones demonstrated in The Round-up, are breaching general standards of global morality, human rights and in some cases the law. Prisoners have their vision concealed by hoods and have their movement restricted by being chained together; it is Guantanamo Bay before the institution even existed; the similarity is eerily obvious and for that reason alone if needs be - The Round-up remains essential viewing. M.Dawson |
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Hungarian director Milklos Jancso has become the subject of renewed praise in recent years in part due to Second Run DVD re-releasing three of his films which is still staggeringly poor for a film maker with over seventy-five film credits as director. Jancso is highly prolific and is still working today despite being in his late 80's, like Sidney Lumet the word “retirement” does not appear to be part of his vocabulary. Jancso first came to the notice of the West with 1965’s My Way Home, which follows one Hungarian teenager in his attempts to return to his home village during World War II. He is captured by the Russians, let go, then recaptured after ill advisedly putting on a Nazi uniform for warmth. His relationship with his Russian guard forms the bulk of the story. It differs from the next few works in concentrating on characters that stay in the film for most of its duration. 1967’s The Red and The White, set in the 1919 war between the Communists and the Czarists, has almost no recognisable characters: as soon as we start to recognize faces, they are shot or retreat out of view of the camera. The two armies are fighting for control of the frame, with the off-screen threat ever present, and the occupation of the space can be changed with one rifle shot. The lack of characters to identify with means that the audience finds it hard to choose sides. Both armies are judged by their actions. The film is a die-hard examination of the futility of war, but in making such an uncompromising statement on that matter, Jancso has been criticised for making a futile film, one that is difficult to engage with because of its lack of a central character.
The Round-up is devoid of main characters or a traditional narrative, the character of Gajdor, an older more seasoned prisoner who is still way out of his depth, is the closest to a protagonist, but even he is only present for approximately half of the films run time. He is told that he will be set free if he can find a man within the camp who has killed more people than he has, after exhausting and dangerous efforts he uncovers a murder who'd killed six men but can only remember the names of four of them before he dies. The prison warden shrugs this off telling Gajdor that without the other names it is as if he'd heard nothing at all as he can’t prove that the dead man killed all six, but his character arc is mercilessly cut short as Jancso moves onto another set of prisoners foolish enough to try and deal with the authorities, prisoners who have no idea that they’re playing but a small part in a far larger and wider game which the authorities have surreptitiously put into motion.
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