Miklós Jancsó
“If I hadn't chosen this silly profession, I would be a millionaire.”
Watching
In my last semester of college I took a now-infamous course on philosophy of music (“This isn’t my area of specialty,” the professor announced on the first day, “but somebody had to teach this and I play the trumpet so why not me?”). Along with excerpts from Nietzsche and Plato and Lydia Goehr, the class read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets as a sort of primary textbook. My memories of that book aren’t especially fond or detailed (except for the line “for what it’s worth, they [the early Christians and the cult of Dionysus] even had similar symbolic creatures: the fish for Jesus, the dolphin for Dionysus”—that’s a reach, Barb), but the basic premise about the overlooked historical and societal importance of dance and, more amorphously, collective expressions of joy, came back to mind as I was watching six restored films by Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó streaming through the Metrograph theater last month.
Miklós Jancsó was born in 1921 just north of Budapest in the Hungarian town of Vác, to a Hungarian father and a Romanian mother, both from enormous families (gatherings of the extended family just on the Romanian side would number close to 100). Though he had dreams of becoming a stage director, he studied what was available to him—law and folk studies, his interest in the latter sparked by a childhood spent traveling to villages across the country and witnessing how local folk customs functioned as part of a national anti-German cultural movement. After World War II, Jancsó planned to revisit his first passion for theater but was redirected to film after getting pulled into the orbit of the leftist intellectual and film theorist Béla Balázs, who had fraternized with Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig and taught at Budapest’s University of Theatre and Film Arts. Balázs took Jancsó on as an assistant in the Hungarian film archives and the rest was history.
Jancsó’s earliest filmed works were newsreel documentaries on which he honed his technical skills but at great annoyance to his firmly socialist sensibilities. “They were lies, and I always knew they were lies,” he recalled in interviews, “But they were done in the manner of making a feature film, as everything had to be staged and directed. It breaks your heart to make things like that, because they were so untrue.” In 1958 he would make his first feature and marry fellow filmmaker Márta Mészáros (whose work is coincidentally also enjoying a retrospective this year courtesy of Janus Films). After breaking out with The Round-Up, which played in competition at Cannes in 1966, the year after a domestic premiere, there would be no looking back to the newsreel days; he would produce more than 30 features in a career that lasted until 2010, only four years before his death at 92.
I will not pretend to have become an expert on Hungarian history or politics in the last month, but the six films featured in the Metrograph Jancsó retrospective all come from his historical period (he later made comedies), so I will try to do the details brief justice. The Round-Up is set some 20 years after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848 in a prison camp where the last of the anti-Habsburg dissidents to be caught by the regime are pitted against one another in psychological warfare by their captors, who are trying to ferret out their leader. Despite the historical specificity, the film is typically read as an allegory for the 1956 revolution against the Stalinist government in Hungary. For The Red and the White, Jancsó worked with financial backing from Soviet funders, who intended the film to pay homage to the 50th anniversary of the Russian Civil War. What they got for their money was a film in which both the Bolshevik-allied Hungarians and the Czarist Whites take turns enacting nothing but cruelty and suffering on each other. For dispensing altogether with the idea that heroism has any place in a war film either narratively or aesthetically, the movie was banned in the Soviet Union for years after its initial screening run.
The Confrontation, made in the same year as the 1968 student protests that erupted across the world, is set in 1947, at the start of Communist rule in Hungary. A group of rowdy Marxist university students challenge the seminarians next door to a debate but quickly lose the moral high ground they initially claim for themselves through infighting and allying themselves with the police. To ensure that the relevance of the film’s cautionary message about the Left’s vulnerability to authoritarianism is not lost on anybody, Jancsó dresses the cast in contemporary outfits exactly like what the youths of his day were wearing. In Winter Wind, Jancsó travels back to 1934 to tell the story of Croatian separatists who sought Hungary’s help in gaining Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia. For Red Psalm, he goes even further back, to the late 19th century, to memorialize the harvesting strikes and ensuing violence in Hungary that ushered his country into the 20th. Electra, My Love breaks from the strictly historical to adapt the familiar Greek myth wherein the Mycenaean king Agamemnon is avenged in uxoricidal death by his children Electra and Orestes. Jancsó finds relevance in the myth for his country’s experiences under tyranny, but ultimately the film is a universal call to peoples of all nations to stand against authoritarian rulers anywhere.
With the exception of The Confrontation’s mostly urban setting, each of these films is staged at least partly on the great Hungarian Puszta, an expanse of grasslands covering over 19,000 square miles. This environment lends itself to some especially striking images—particularly in the black-and-white Round-Up, where people and buildings are framed from on high in shockingly stark contrast to the vast and empty plains that stretch out interminably past the edges of the frame—but it also seems to have determined the development of Jancsó’s filmmaking signature: the long take. Honed in this period with cinematographers Tamás Somló and János Kende, Jancsó’s signature long and fluid camera movements are intensely choreographed to the point of showing off. Unlike a single-take shot dropped in the middle of a 21st-century indie drama, say, they’re also the most basic grammatical elements of the films themselves; The Confrontation is made up of just over 30 shots while Winter Wind and Electra each come in under 16. There’s a direct line between the staging required to pull off such shots and Jancsó’s early-career dramaturgical interests, but “filmed theater” this ain’t.
Long takes aren’t necessary for a socialist filmmaking philosophy, but Jancsó uses them with great intention to complement his films’ politics. A term that comes up often in writing about Jancsó’s films, and their cinematography in particular, is “anti-psychological.” Jancsó might start a shot wide, but by letting the film roll and the camera move for sometimes as long as five minutes, he can push in on a close-up of a single character for a significant portion of the shot’s duration before pulling back to always ensure that the individual, whatever their personal feelings and conflicts, is always contextualized in both the collective and the landscape (which, given its barrenness, is uniquely suited to Jancsó’s ambitious tracking shots—though the interiors of Winter Wind don’t slow him down much either). Even Electra, the most obviously character-driven of these films, is memorable more for the absurd circus of extras singing and swordfighting and horseback riding and dancing in the fore-, middle-, and backgrounds than for Mari Töröcsik’s performance.
Ah right, the dancing. So far as I’m aware dance is not typically thought of as a defining feature of socialist movements or an end of Left politics1 but it features prominently in Jancsó’s rendering of the world. The young Communists of The Confrontation are first introduced to us singing and dancing, indeed even using song and dance as intimidation tactics, and their gradual abandonment of this overzealous mirth comes to represent the breakdown of their solidarity. For the peasants in Red Psalm, dance is both pastime and form of collective mourning, if not collective action. And Electra ends with what looks like the entire cast, in standardized Gray Sackcloth Utopia-issued tunics, line-dancing across the Puszta while Electra and Orestes circle above in an anachronistic red helicopter that descends in the final minute so brother and sister can lead the line into a final revolutionary hurrah. The war films may lack for dancing but are no less choreographically inspired: the awe-inspiring penultimate march of the soldiers in The Red and the White involves a coordination of body and spirit that’s just as much a dance as any of the more joyful movements in the other films.
I couldn’t help but compare the Hungarian folk dancing of Jancsó’s films to the neighboring dance tradition in my own, Greek culture. In both, as in other kinds of coordinated line dancing, individual technique and bravado are subsumed into the collective. Certain dances or performances might make space for a single dancer or a pair or even a quartet to move to the fore and perform a flashier set of acrobatic maneuvers, but a soloist is only as impressive as their ability to gracefully return to the line without tripping over themselves or anyone else on the way back. Even an intoxicatedly enthusiastic line-leader at a wedding Καλαματιανός ceases to be the life of the party if their antics drive the line into a tight corner or throw everyone off tempo. Folk dancing in this form asks that you know your part while maintaining an acute spatial mindfulness; help the person next to you get back on tempo if they’re thrown off, gently squeeze a hand to indicate a change in direction, ultimately, align yourself well enough with the people around you to give the ego a break and get in the zone. Far from being a pointless ornamentation on his films (a criticism you could fairly level at the arbitrarily naked women that somehow manage to appear in every one of these movies2), dance is a logical, necessary element of Jancsó’s aesthetics of solidarity.
Reading
I’m less into this canon,” she said, when we came to a handful of canvases with Biblical and epic subjects. One showed a weeping, generic-featured young woman in a flimsy dress, being smiled at by an avuncular bronze bust. The wall text identified her as the “Muse of Poetry Mourning the Death of Voltaire.” “She is crying, ‘Now we just have Rousseau.’”
—Elif Batuman profiles Céline Sciamma for The New Yorker
Coming Soon
Francis Ford Coppola will be financing his now 40-years-in-the-making passion project, Megalopolis, with $120 million of his own money.
Steven Spielberg will be giving us a new Bullitt movie and so far that’s about all we know about that.
Speaking of Steve, a clip from West Side Story made waves on Twitter this weekend. This interview with camera operators Mitch Dubin and John “Buzz” Moyer makes for excellent further reading on the film, and I also appreciated Guillermo del Toro’s thread on it (relevant to the above discussion of Jancsó to boot):
West Side Story and FOUR-TIME OSCAR NOMINEE (!!!!!) Drive My Car both arrive on HBO Max this week. Readers, you know what you have to do [watch Drive My Car in theaters if possible to support your local independent art house cinemas! or, like, the AMC Georgetown if you must].
What is going on in this Baz Luhrmann Elvis biopic, what is that accent Tom Hanks is doing:
The movie I’m most curious about coming out of this year’s Berlin Film Festival is Unrest, about workers at a 19th-century watchmaking factory who are swept up in communist and anarchist movements. The trailer:
Finally, a special message from David Lynch on the current war in Ukraine:
If there is a DSA folk dancing caucus I’m not aware of, somebody please correct me.
Electra, at least, has gender parity.