Hungarian Cinema

Watch: The Round Up trailer

Miklós Janscó

Grad of Hungarian film academy

 Jancsó’s major films concentrated on upheavals in Hungary’s tumultuous history: World War II, military coups, and popular rebellions. He follows Soviet Montage cinema in creating drama out of collective action and historical movements. In Jancsó films, individuals have little psychological identity. Instead, they become emblematic of social classes or political factions. The drama emerges out of the ways in which they are caught in a historical process.

Distancing us from the characters, the films avoid subjective devices like fantasy and refuse flashbacks and flashforwards.

What comes to the fore are naked displays of power.

In The Red and the White (1967), after a peasant woman has numbly obeyed a Cossack officer’s order to strip, a superior appears and curtly orders the troops to execute the officer.

In The Round-Up (1965), the occupying Austrians promise a peasant that he can escape execution if he can find a partisan who has killed more men than he has.

Before suffering torture or execution, victims must march in file, form circles, strip or lie down or swim a river—that is, undergo absurd ceremonies that merely display their subjection to the will of authority. Coming from a generation appalled by the revelation of wartime atrocities and the Nazi death camps, Jancsó suggests that power is exercised through public humiliation and minute control of the victim’s body.

Jancsó’s manner of treatment suits his dramas.

After My Way Home (1965), he exploited abnormally long takes; the average shot in Silence and Cry (1968) runs two and a half minutes.

Jancsó presents the moment-by-moment oscillations in power by means of a dynamic camera that renders every situation fluid and filled with tension.

In few auteurs’ work do structure, style, and theme mesh so precisely as in Jancsó’s. His narrative construction and cinematic technique present a spectacle of power that is at once abstractly symbolic and concretely historical.

To illustrate even a single Jancsó shot would require several pages.

• In The Round-Up, the camera often emphasizes geometrical patterns in the Austrians’ search for partisans (20.68).
• The Red and the White uses both immense landscape views and medium shots, sometimes tracking, panning, and zooming all at once (20.69–20.74).

He became the principal example of the artistic originality and seriousness that could be achieved in an Eastern European film industry.