5/20/2020 Red Modernism: Miklós Jancsó

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Red Modernism
By J. Hoberman (/author/j-hoberman/) in the September-October 2006 (https://www.filmcomment.com/issue/september-october-2006/) Issue

It was the last century’s impossible dream: a double vanguard, radical form in the service of radical content. ere were moments—the Soviet
silent cinema, Brecht’s epic theater, Surrealism perhaps, the Popular Front anti-fascism of Guernica and Citizen Kane, the promise of
underground movies. And then, from the very back of beyond and close to the fashionable heart of international modernism, for a half dozen
years from the mid-Sixties to the early Seventies, there was Hungarian lmmaker Miklós Jancsó.

e Round-Up

First manifest in e Round-Up (65), Jancsó’s boldly stylized lm language appeared to be a synthesis of Antonioni (elegant widescreen
compositions, austere allegorical landscapes), Bresson (impassive performers, exaggerated sound design), and Welles (convoluted tracking shots,
intricately choreographed ensembles), even as his free- oating existential attitudes and “empty world” iconography evoked the theater of the
absurd, albeit without the laughs. Jancsó’s subject or, rather, his prison, was history. His narratives recalled the literature of extreme situations-
pivoting on cryptic betrayals, mapping the seizure of power, dramatizing the exercise of terror- and his politics were ambiguously le , perhaps
crypto-Trotskyist.

How the Partisan Review crowd might have loved Jancsó, had they only been watching movies. So far as I can tell, the only one of the New York
intellectuals—Stanley Kau mann, Dwight Macdonald, Susan Sontag—to comment on e Round-Up when it turned up at the 1966 New York
Film Festival, its blurb referencing Bresson and “In the Penal Colony,” was Manny Farber. He called it “a movie of hieratic stylized movement in a
Ka a space that is mostly sinister atness and bald verticals . . . Jancsó’s fascinating, but too insistent, style is based on a taut balance between a
harsh, stark imagery and a desolate pessimism.”

Pessimism or realism? Jancsó’s twin compulsions are to simplify and withhold. His lm form may be universal but his narrative content is o en
barely decipherable outside the arcane realm of Hungary’s history or its cultural politics. As the 20th century dawned, Jancsó’s homeland was
Austria’s junior partner in the Hapsburg Empire. A er WWI (which it fought on the losing side), the new nation was a short-lived Communist
republic and then a military dictatorship; during WWII, Hungary was a Nazi terror state. A er that (having once more allied itself with the
losers) it became a short-lived parliamentary republic that segued into a nightmare Stalinist people’s democracy. Communist rule was interrupted
by another glorious revolt, the bloody trauma of 1956. Russian tanks crushed Hungarian freedom ghters 50 years ago this fall, but then, a er a
time, the country was permitted to become the Soviet bloc’s most modest and humane form of really-existing socialism-at least until the bloc
dissolved in 1990.

Hungary’s divisions ran through Jancsó’s family. He was born in 1921, the son of a Hungarian father and a Romanian mother, with Jewish
relations on his mother’s side, and was raised in a village 20 miles up the Danube from Budapest. He received a Catholic education but converted
to Communism, joining the Party in 1945. Jancsó was something of a perpetual student, having variously applied himself to law, art history, and
ethnography (including a period of eldwork in Transylvania), before entering the Academy of Dramatic Art. A documentarian throughout the
Fi ies, he didn’t nd himself as a lmmaker until, at 44, he made what was immediately recognized in Hungary as perhaps the greatest lm ever
made there.

e Round-Up

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5/20/2020 Red Modernism: Miklós Jancsó
e Round-Up is set in the late 1860s. It is 20 years a er Lajos Kossuth’s failed revolution against the Hapsburgs, and remnants of Kossuth’s army
still roam the Hungarian countryside. Austrian soldiers detain entire villages to uncover the individual partisans concealed among them. e
Round-Up concerns one such mass arrest, and the complex round of interrogations and betrayals that inevitably ensue.

e rhythms are hypnotic. e viewer is at once hemmed in by and outside the action. Most of the o en-cryptic scenario is con ned to a wooden
fort—a gingerbread house concentration camp, stark as a Grotowski stage—on the vast expanse of Hungary’s central plain. In the middle of
nowhere at the edge of in nity, Austrian automatons in operetta uniforms play endless cat-and-mouse mind games with the exotic, impassive
peasantry they’ve corralled. (Perhaps not so exotic: seen in the light of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the image of hooded prisoners being
marched in a circle has a new and shocking relevance.) A few summary executions notwithstanding, the torture is largely psychological- and yet
the historical subjects are psychologically opaque.

“In Hungary, or at least in Hungarian culture, lm nowadays plays the role of the avant-garde,” the venerable Marxist philosopher and critic
Georg Lukacs told Yvette Biró, then editor of the Hungarian journal Filmkultura, in the course of a celebrated interview held in Lukacs’s shabby,
book-crammed Budapest apartment during the glorious May of 1968. Lukacs had been particularly impressed by e Round-Up. Yet this laconic
succession of uid takes isolating tiny gures in the windswept nothingness of the puszta synthesized all that the philosopher repressed.

“If I can’t prove my identity, they’ll kill me,” one doomed prisoner complains. Beyond e Round–Up‘s veneer of chic existentialism, anathema to
orthodox Marxists, Lukacs might have easily seen the “decadent modernism” of Ka a, Beckett, and Genet, not to mention obvious parallels to the
nihilistic theater of the absurd. Instead, Lukacs discovered an imaginative representation of the circumstances under which he himself had lived
his life-and, beyond that, the unmistakable (but also unspeakable) evocation of the unrepresentable 1956. e Round-Up‘s Hungarian title may be
translated as “Hooligans,” the o cial term for those whom Time dubbed Freedom Fighters. And as these captive losers are imprisoned in open
space, so the movie maps a particular state of being: “Do you accept this condition?” an Austrian o cer asks a Hungarian detainee who, in order
to save his own neck, is about to inform on his nephew. “Well, sir, I must,” is the reply.

e Red and the White

Jancsó futher developed e Round-Up‘s ceremonial cruelty in his next lm, e Red and the White (67). Commissioned by and shot in the Soviet
Union to mark the October Revolution’s golden anniversary, e Red and the White presented a brigade of Hungarian volunteers ghting for the
Reds in the 1918 Civil War. e Red and the White was in production at the same time as Alexander Askoldov’s later-banned Civil War drama
Commissar and, in contrast to Askoldov’s subversive revolutionary idealism, o ered a remarkably perverse celebration of the proletarian
internationale: wide screen and wildly aestheticized, the movie’s narrative and characterization are even more abstract than in e Round-Up, and
all sense of the “fraternal” is turned on its head.

Civil War in e Red and the White is a chess game in which two armies battle back and forth, successively occupying the same indi erent
landscape in a series of lethal, geometric reversals. e camera prowls through the action, catching sight of a marching formation or dodging back
from a pair of wheeling horsemen. It was claimed that Jancsó rst choreographed his showy camera maneuvers and then blocked the action to
match; others reported that it was all improvisation and he directed the camera operator as the scene unfolded. (A colleague present on location
wrote that “the camera [was] taking part in the gigantic confusion as a continuous observer.”)

Jancsó’s world is the totality of its laws—aesthetic and otherwise. He remains resolutely outside his characters, noting merely their wariness,
vulnerability, and resignation in the face of death. As e Round-Up reminded some of Ka a, e Red and the White evokes the cruel beauty of
Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. Few war lms have been so little concerned with heroics and so fascinated by the logistics of killing. Although not
shown with bloody verisimilitude, the disposal of prisoners is all the more horrifying for its matter-of-factness. ( ere’s a sense in which Jancsó is
the European equivalent of Sam Peckinpah.) Captors take target practice on eeing captives as they run naked through the elds or shoot their
prisoners point blank and dump their bodies in the placid Volga that eddies through the verdant landscape.

Mass murder in bucolic summer: e Red and the White is something like an austerely pornographic pastoral. Midway through, Jancsó introduces
a eld hospital sta ed by a gaggle of pretty wood (or water) nymphs. e Whites march them and a military band into the birch wood for some
girl-on-girl waltzing. en, in a further demonstration of their power, they compel the unwilling nurses to identify the Red patients in their care-
as well they might.

e Red and the White

Such forced betrayals and denunciations notwithstanding, the movie’s back-and- forth action is programmatically di cult to follow. e Red and
the White‘s built-in joke of having the Reds speak Hungarian while the Whites use Russian may have insured that the lm would never be
released, at least as Jancsó shot it, in the Soviet Union—although by the time the movie ends the distinction between the two sides is nearly moot.

Jancsó played out a similar dialectic in his next lm, the glum chamber drama Silence and Cry (68). Here the con ict is contained within a single
tormented family. e Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 has collapsed. A Red soldier seeks refuge in the countryside, and a White commandant
(who may be his brother) orders a farmer’s family to hide him. e diminutive peasant, himself a former Red, is at once being punished by the
authorities and poisoned by his wife. ese sinister enigmas force the fugitive to blow his cover and shoot the commandant. Jancsó’s direction is
characteristically terse-nothing is explained and the soundtrack is all but liquidated. It was here that Jancsó introduced a new editing pattern: each
lengthy shot constituted an individual scene, and every cut marked either a spatial or temporal shi . is strategy would come to fruition the
following year with his rst color lm, the French-Hungarian-Yugoslav co-production Winter Wind (69).

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5/20/2020 Red Modernism: Miklós Jancsó
Capping the icy symmetry of his previous lms, Winter Wind was composed of only 13 shots, some as long as ten minutes, and each a completely
mapped-out sequence. ese tracking shots are, in fact, the subject of the lm, which ostensibly depicts the cell of Croatian fascists (Ustashi) who
assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia on his 1934 visit to France—an incident that nearly triggered a Mitteleuropean war when it was
revealed that the terrorists were trained in Hungary.

As usual, Jancsó’s interest is more geometric than geopolitical, eschewing the big picture for micro-social behavior. Opening with a newsreel of
Alexander’s killing, Winter Wind purports to dramatize the intrigue that preceded it, “a mechanism that had gone mad,” per the lmmaker. As the
terrorists plan the assassination, one of their leaders, a grim revolutionary ascetic named Marko (played by the lm’s French producer Jacques
Charrier), escapes a bungled ambush in Yugoslavia and crosses the border to the group’s Hungarian hideout.

Winter Wind

Despite Marko’s devout Catholicism, he’s far more an anarchist than a nationalist. And although he’s considered a national folk hero, there’s an
utter absence of trust between him and the rest of the cell. Indeed, Marko refuses to take an oath to their organization. He’s a royal pain, and,
when the Hungarian authorities let it be known they consider him too hot to harbor, his fellows gladly make him a martyr and are last seen
pledging their allegiance to Croatia in his name. But this obvious irony is only a detail in a lm that concentrates mainly on Marko’s not
unjusti ed paranoia amid the group’s shi ing patterns of loyalty.

“Don’t stand behind me,” Marko snaps at one of his supposed comrades, as much director as revolutionary. “How many of our men have you shot
in these rooms?” Everyone’s motivations are ambiguous. e elaborate, oblique power struggles enlivened by a cheesy, barely motivated lesbian
love a air between Marina Vlady and Eva Swann take on epic proportions as registered by a peripatetic camera pacing back and forth through the
snowy landscape with the relentless deliberation of a caged animal. ( e camera is less mobile when it ventures indoors but Jancsó maintains the
beat with the ampli ed sound of boots treading the wooden oors.)

Appropriately, this coolly formalist exercise in political prurience and svelte sadomasochism was distributed in the U.S. by Grove Press. Making a
note of it in his Village Voice column, Jonas Mekas seized upon it as evidence that there was avant-garde lm east of Vienna.

e dance of the dialectic continued. Winter Wind was invited to Cannes in May 1968, but Jancsó was unable to screen the movie when student
militants and their lmmaker allies closed the festival. Times had changed but the more things change . . .

Red Psalm

Jancsó’s next lm, e Confrontation (69)—in which dancing, singing student Communists face o against Catholic youth in the brave new
Hungary of 1947—would extend his fascination with group dynamics, while addressing the zealotry of the New Le . e director dressed his own
generation at the zenith of its youthful idealism in the blue jeans and miniskirts of the Sixties.

Subsequent lms were blatantly allegorical. Agnus Dei (70) made no pretense of naturalism in putting an assortment of peasants, soldiers, and
priests through a symbolic reenactment of Hungary’s 1919 revolution and counterrevolution; the abstract folk musical Red Psalm (71) mixed
Catholic liturgy and classical mythology to create a socialist passion play celebrating the “harvesting strikes” which swept rural Hungary in the
1890s.

For its rst hour Red Psalm unfurls as sinuously as a strand from the maypole around which the peasants dance. e strikers are ultimately
massacred by the army that has been circling around them throughout, but this attempt to recast history as ritual is Jancsó’s most optimistic lm-
perhaps the most ecstatic fusion of political and formal radicalism in the 40 years since Dovzhenko’s Earth. But optimism was not a Jancsó forte;
writing its own epitaph, Red Psalm would also be the last.

(https://www.filmcomment.com/issue/september-october-2006/)
From the September-October 2006 (https://www.filmcomment.com/issue/september-october-2006/) Issue
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