Saturday, 11 January 2025

Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Phases in East Central Europe 1949-80. 6 (38) Hungary Part 2 : Jancsó “Hungary's greatest film-maker'

Miklos Jancsó

Although there was no “Hungarian school” of filmmaking there was a common commitment taken up initially in a rigorously singular way by Miklos Jancsó (1921-2014), to a more grounded portrayal especially of the violence, always a part of Hungarian history.  Jancsó, who had been making mainly short films since the early 50s, later at the Bela Balázs Studio established as a centre for low budget experimentation. He was the first to benefit from the new freer cinema policy from 1963. The real beginning of Jancsó’s film career was his second feature Oldás és kötés / Cantata (1963) centred on a young doctor attempting to reestablish a relationship with his peasant father “told of the general influence of what was happening in 60s European cinema – Bergman, Wajda, Godard - but in a de-dramatised form inspired by Antonioni, specifically for Jancsó, by La Notte.  His  “transition from the private to the panoramic, from psychology to history,” can be traced in Igy jottem / My Way Home (1964), the semi-autobiograhical story of a strange friendship between a young Hungarian prisoner and his Russian guard in the last months of the war, the beginning of Janscó's collaboration with writer Gyula Hernádi.  In the 'New Hungarian Quarterly' (Winter 1968 issue) Gyula Maar places My Way Home at the crossroads of Janscó's career “balancing one foot on individual psychology and the other in history; The Round-up is virtually in its entirety about history.” 

Cantata

Jancsó's films marked the new Hungarian cinema's break with the literary tradition of the older generation of director : that adaptation from a classical novel was a necessary requirement for a great film. Hungarian literary historian, Lóránt Czigány, related that Janscó  admitted to toying with such literary adaptation when planning 
The Round-up, the first fully realised “Jancsó film,” instead deciding to stick with his scriptwriter, Hernádi, whose role in the development of Jancsó's cinema, by general agreement, was immeasurable..
                                                                                                                                                                         

The Round-up

In 
Szegén,ylegények/ The Round-up (1965) Jancsó takes up a situation of imprisonment and interrogation, confining and claustrophobic on the open Hungarian plain 20 years after the Kossuth revolution of 1848 which was crushed with the aid of the Russian army. In conflict is the 'oppressor' -   -agents of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - and the 'oppressed' - clusters of former revolutionaries including the legendary hero of the struggle for freedom, Sandor Rozsa, and peasant rebels many reduced to banditry carrying the epithet of “the hopeless ones” (the approximate translation of the Hungarian title of the film).  Destruction of solidarity between the prisoners is not by the systematic use of physical torture (although violence is used} but drawn-out destruction of trust setting the former revolutionaries against the peasants. The characters representing violence are faceless in releasing a chain of action and reaction in a realignment by a method that is both reductive and additive: effect without cause, the dismissal of dialogue and psychologising, character conflict and emotion-inducing close-ups, no sudden edits, a lack of resolution.  A controlling, frequently moving camera is distanced from the action in sustained 'what happens next' tension, in composed choreographed patterns of figures in the sparse landscape.

The Red and the White

What becomes apparent in The Round-up is a formal strategy to expose the inner mechanism of oppression - the 'how' rather than the 'why' - drawing on situations in modern Hungarian history.  
Csillagosok katonák / The Red and the White(1967) although filmed largely in long shot, is less subtle and more schematic in the deployment of long takes in patterning in Tamas Soniló's “crystal clear” images of the anti-heroic conflict between the detachments of “Reds” and “Whites” in the Russian civil war in 1919 as power shifts back and forth between the opposing sides in the 'dance of death', Janscó's form becoming even more concise. The fact that the “Reds” happen to be Hungarian irregulars speaking Hungarian while  the “Whites” speak Russian in this Hungarian-Russian co-production, meant that it was never screened in Russia (Liehm 395).  “Janscó invites us to study the mechanisms of power almost abstractly (as suggested by the Stendhalian ring of the title), with a cold eroticism that may glancingly suggest some of the subsequent work of Stanley Kubrick. But this shouldn't mislead one into concluding that Janscó is in any way detached from either politics or emotions” (Jonathan Rosenbaum '1001 Films You Must See..., 2003 ed. 482).  

Silence and Cry

In the period after the crushing of the 1919 Hungarian revolution, in 
Csend és kiáltás / Silence and Cry (1968), the aftermath from the conflict is set within the walls of a single home where one of the pursued finds refuge setting off a desperate struggle for survival as the family's world gradually disintegrates. “As in The Round-up, the chief mechanism of oppression is treachery; in Silence and Cry, it is compounded by the complicity of a demoralised peasantry“ (Kuttna), filmed with almost constant camera movement. The strong impression of formal control in the framing of shots in the enclosed space is maintained more than in the adjoining films (Petrie 86). Petrie describes how in the The Round-up Janscó begins to use the moving camera in an almost dialectical way i.e. setting up conflicts and oppositions, and then resolving them within the context of the one shot. In Silence and Cry he extends the process further using the closed, restricted environment from which none of the oppressed can escape, greatly increasing the length of the shots with the camera continually circling accompanying the oppressors as they prowl around the victims assessing their vulnerability, the moving camera altering spatial relationships visually mirroring the ambiguity of their emotional patterns (93-4)

The Confrontation

By way of contrast in Fenyes szelek / The Confrontation
 (1968) set in Hungary in 1947, the movement of the of the camera reaches a peak of stylisation in long takes perfectly in union with the movement  of the characters conceived as a ballet,” almost “a musical,” with a group of young Hungarian Communists confronting those who do not share their faith. Colour is used here by Janscó for the first time as “another symbolic language, refined and pared down to express exactly what [Janscó] wants to say” (Petrie 88). The integration of songs, music and dancing from a variety of sources in the structure of the film – all have revolutionary, anti-clerical, or socialist connotations - is adopted by Janscó in following films. They are used both as a means of expressing and establishing connotations and are a means of expressing and establishing solidarity, an indication of defiance and challenge to opponents” (ibid 88). In the Confrontation, Jancsó brings his founding concept to its logical conclusion: “affirming that power can only be used for its own ends, to maintain itself” (Liehm 395), posing the question : 'what is the role of the individual in history' ?  “More than anything else, such a confrontation involves hatred. Intolerance, and the quest for power. Parallel conflicts arise within the revolutionary group itself” (Liehm 396). The revolution is shown for the first time devouring its own children” (ibid). Sirokkó / Winter Wind (1969) continues Jancsó's increasingly austere stylisation of the moral deterioration taking place in the thirties within a group of Croatian nationalists being trained on the Hungarian-Yugoslav border to assassinate King Alexander of Yugoslavia. “Here once again, another reality emerged, in parallel with the reality of the story itself, to make another metaphorical point about the basic methods of a totalitarian society. Relationships between individuals are characterised by aggressiveness - threats, blackmail, denunciation -  with no room left for trust. And again one who is to be liquidated could just as easily be a false hero or a false traitor.” (ibid).

Agnus Dei

Dina Iodonova raises the question of the “unabashed formalism” of Jancsó’s distinctive film style, formalism being “one of the named offences that state socialist censorship was supposed to harness.” By the end of the 1960s the director’s preoccupation with form appeared to have become so pervasive that critics like [Graham] Petrie have questioned “whether his scrupulously worked out compositions exist largely for their own sake, or whether they contribute to be fused with the political and humanistic concerns the director is ultimately known for ?” (70).  Acceptance of this mode of filmmaking, with its focus on group behaviour rather than individualisation, combined with Janscó’s choosing to give priority to the geometry of his screen compositions, would seem to effectively undermine any sustained emotional approach to historical material in an assertion of a more distanced view of the past. David Paul suggests “the time settings are inter-changeable” between the historical events in Hungary’s difficult modern history. Jancsó’s shift to an allegorical approach continued “to build in subtle ways on his early aesthetics while further expressing insistent concerns with questions of power, oppression, and the morality of revolution” (182).

Assuming “a ritualistic and enigmatic quality”Égi bárány Agnus Dei (1971) described by Roy Armes as Jansco's most impenetrable film to this time, “unlike his others demanding a knowledge of Hungarian history” (149). A series of clashes takes place on the Hungarian Plain in 1919 between brave but motley and ill-equipped revolutionary units of the Left and the followers of a fanatical religious leader in alliance with the forces of the oligarchy, ending in the triumph of the latter.  In Még kér a nép / Red Psalm (1972) “Jancsó created a stratified structure with an even more further-reaching conception than ever before, choreographing the uprising of landless Hungarian agricultural workers, c1900, “as much an allegory about Hungary’s timeless geopolitical dilemma” (Paul 182).  Here Janscó “perfected a method of crystallising political and personal tensions and conflicts, and of suggesting complex and ambiguous motives and emotions within a cluster of images united by a constantly moving camera ” (Petrie 96). As Petrie further points out, “Red Psalm takes the process a stage further by pushing the images more clearly toward symbolism : Janscó's method is by now the antithesis of the classical Hollywood style of invisible camerawork, editing and music” - classical cinema's illusion of unmediated reality. Janscó's stylistic devices cannot be ignored; they call attention to themselves requiring active attention rather than passive absorption (ibid). “With Red Psalm Janscó has made a film that translates abstract ideas into complex but clearly comprehensible images […] Janscó's style here is totally integrated into the nature of the material : in a very real sense, the form itself is the narrative” (ibid 100).

Red Psalm

All Janscó's historical films were researched by Gyula Harnadi.  Red Psalm draws on historical studies by Dezso Nagy who stressed the importance of music and song in 19th century insurrections. The film is structured around this music (cantatas, psalms and popular folklore). “Red Psalm was Jancsó's least ambiguous statement of socialist faith and himost widely praised film since The Round-up […] As Jansco's films became more stylised, moving from epic story-telling to choreographed ritual, his films became more poetic” (Kuttna). His aim, Kuttna suggests, surveying his career up to the end of the 70s (when he had completed 18 of more than 30 features from 1958 to 2010), “remained to fuse political ideas with emotionally meaningful forms of myth, fable and ritual,” is not without irony. Given their increasing ambiguity which is recognised as a constituent element of poetry, the effect of Janscó's films, working on several levels at once, can seem contradictory.

Mari Kuttna describes a Janscó film as “an analysis of oppression, revolution, counter revolution and even the contentious idea of permanent revolution.” While acknowledging these cannot be separated “their juxtaposition causes dramatic conflict in historic situations which trigger off each film. Oppression is frequently shown as the outcome of counter revolution” (76). David Bordwell acknowledged  Jancsó's work in the sixties as “constituting a steady critique of centralised power within actually existing  socialism” ( 'Narration in the Fiction Film ' 272).

Elektreia

In his reinvention of the Elektra myth as a fable of permanent revolution in Szerelmem Elektra / Elektreia (1975) told in 12 shots, Janscó moves even more fully into choreographed ritual than in Red Psalm, the rhapsody of song and dance replacing conventional dramaturgy leaving Janscó free to explore the dialectical cross-currents of his subject while operating “totally within the structure of symbolic and visual motifs established in previous films.'  Doing so, as Petrie notes, “becomes one of the most successful renditions of the of the spirit of Greek myth in modern times,” (100).  “Grounding the political fable in the story of Elektra and Orestes' revenge on their father's murderer, Aegisthus, gives it an implicit psychoanalytical dimension of a kind new in Janscó's work” (Tony Rayns 'Time Out'). Several of the 12 shots “demonstrate particularly well Janscó's ability to create a world distanced from us by the elaborate formality with which it is organised and filmed, and yet shockingly close to the immediacy and barbarity of the emotions represented” ( Petrie 101).

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David Paul “Hungary:The Magyar on the Bridge” essay in Post New Wave Cinema  D. Goulding ed.   

Mira & Antonin Liehm  The Most Important Art  East European Film After 1945  1977.   

Dina Iordanova  Cinema of the Other Europe  2003.   

David Robinson “Quite Apart from Miklos Jansco...Some Notes on the New Hungarian Cinema” Sight and Sound Spring 1970;  “Hungary Revisited”  ibid Autumn 1971.  

Graham Petrie History Must Answer to Man: The Contemporary Hungarian Cinema 1978.  

Marek Hendrykowski  “Changing States in East Central Europe”  Oxford History of World Cinema  ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith 1996.  

Mari Kuttna “Miklos  Jancsó – Hungarian Rhapsodies”  Movies of the Sixties  ed. Ann Lloyd  1983.  

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

 6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One



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