Kinoblog

Szegénylegények
Hungary, 1965, black and white, 87 mins

It’s appropriate that Miklós Jancsó took inspiration for more than one film (Cantata, 1963; Allegro Barbaro, 1979) from the work of his great compatriot Béla Bartók, as in many ways he was attempting to achieve the same with Hungarian cinema as Bartók did with Hungarian music. Though both artists had a conventional training and spent long apprenticeships developing their craft in a way that wouldn’t frighten the horses (an apt metaphor in Jancsó’s case), they also had a strong sense that their work needed something not only distinctive but distinctively Hungarian before it could achieve full flower.

In Bartók’s case, the breakthrough was the discovery of folk music – the real thing, not the ersatz version diluted for the tourist trade. In Jancsó’s, it was the realisation that the great Hungarian puszta, those flat plains seemingly stretching out to infinity, could be as expressive a part of his film language as any of his human protagonists. This developing interest was already clear in Cantata (Oldás és kötés, 1963) and especially My Way Home (Így jöttem, 1964), but they are mere conceptual sketches compared with his breakthrough in The Round-Up, as remarkable in his artistic development as the Eroica symphony was in Beethoven’s, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in Picasso’s and The Waste Land in T.S. Eliot’s.

The film’s original title Szegénylegények translates as ‘the hopeless ones’ (its French title is Les Sans-espoir), and if that doesn’t already set a suitably grim and despairing tone, this is reinforced by the opening montage. Using simple illustrations and a deceptively informative voiceover (the original UK release print replaced this with a rather more detailed text scroll), Jancsó sets the scene in the late 1860s, the round-up of the English title involving the last holdouts from the 1848 Kossuth rebellion whom, one assumes, have been eking out a basic existence on the puszta ever since. But even here, images of buildings and landscapes are rapidly usurped by mechanisms of torture and oppression, made all the more unsettling for being presented as though they were items in a hardware catalogue. By the time we’re told that Count Gedeon Raday, the commissar ultimately responsible for the operation, “wasn’t particular about his methods”, that has already become abundantly clear, and one braces oneself for the worst.

What one gets, though, is a series of shots of such formal magnificence that they seem at first glance to work against the grim, oppressive, quasi-Kafkaesque scenario. Using every inch of the wide CinemaScope screen (a pan-and-scan version of this film would be criminal vandalism), Jancsó’s images recall Sergio Leone’s in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West – though Leone hadn’t reached anything like this level by 1965.

Groups of horsemen thunder past either side of the camera to join their companions on the horizon, creating a startling three-dimensional effect, and throughout the film Jancsó is careful to compose for every plane – the far distance is as likely to feature people and horses in intricate geometrical arrangements as the foreground. The film often has more in common with dance than cinema: a group of hooded prisoners shuffles around in a circle, soldiers form two parallel lines to repeatedly whip a naked girl, black-clad old women bring white bundles of provisions that are laid out in a perfectly straight line. Jancsó often shoots from a high vantage point, as if to emphasise the massive scale of his canvas, and in the many sequences featuring literally hundreds of people, one can only marvel at how long they must have taken to set up. The soundtrack is clearly post-dubbed, as Jancsó liked to give directions during his long takes, aping his silent-movie forebears of four or five decades earlier.

Five years earlier, Alfred Hitchcock had taken the then virtually unprecedented decision to kill off his female lead partway through Psycho (1960). In The Round-Up Jancsó does this with such regularity that it’s impossible to latch onto any single individual, despite the presence of recognisable actors such as Zoltán Latinovits and András Kozák, the leads in his two previous films. It rapidly becomes clear that every character, without exception, is a pawn in an exceptionally complex game of three-dimensional chess whose board lacks squares and whose rules change from minute to minute.

But, make no mistake, there are rules, and they’re certainly not arbitrary at the time they’re applied. No-one is immune from authority, not even those designated as authority figures (entire troops can be replaced at a moment’s notice), and a fatal bullet could hit at any moment, its origins an eternal mystery. The authorities’ main purpose is to track down the (real-life) bandit Sándor Rósza but, to continue the Hitchcock parallels, he’s the film’s McGuffin in two senses: he’s both a cipher used to entrap his former associates, and a convenient narrative hook on which to hang the material that Jancsó is really interested in, an almost forensic study of the psychological techniques used to disorientate and ultimately break prisoners into betraying their comrades.

This atmosphere of uncertainty (the film’s timescale is impossible to establish: it could be hours, weeks, months or years) means that a singled-out prisoner never knows whether he’ll end up dead or given an unexpected military promotion – and, if the latter, whether this is all part of the same macabre game and shouldn’t be taken at face value. The appearance of a full-scale military band just as a triple execution seems about to take place is both incongruously amusing and a wry comment on the ritualised nature of power: the unseen authorities seem to view the entire round-up as least in part as a gigantic Gesamtkunstwerk, a piece of conceptual art whose aesthetic impact outweighs the fact that it involves real human sacrifices.

Although The Round-Up can certainly be reduced to an 87-minute parade of torture and killing, by the same token My Way Home becomes a wartime buddy movie, and anyone who’s seen that film will recognise the absurdity. What’s remarkable about The Round-Up is the way Jancsó’s style so perfectly matches the substance, so that every manipulation and atrocity becomes a comment on similar practices within a far wider political context. There was a widespread assumption on the film’s original release in 1966 that Jancsó had constructed an allegory of Hungary ten years earlier, when the Hungarian authorities did some post-rebellion rounding-up of their own.

This certainly stands up to scrutiny, but so too does a reading of the film as a representation of Bosnia, Rwanda or Iraq, which Jancsó obviously couldn’t have intended – and he clearly didn’t have September 11 in mind when staging the extraordinary sequence in which desperate prisoners fling themselves off the stockade to their deaths, or Guantánamo Bay (and Abu Ghraib) in the rigidly-defined groups of hooded prisoners who have no idea of their fate. But that’s one of the defining characteristics of a truly great work of art: it constantly reinvents itself for a new generation, and despite being over forty years old at the time of writing, Jancsó’s masterpiece has dated hardly at all.

• Director: Miklós Jancsó
• Production Manager: István Daubner
• Screenplay: Gyula Hernádi
• Photography: Tamás Somló
• Production Design: Tamás Banovich
• Costume Design: Zsuzsa Vicze
• Editor: Zoltán Farkas
• Sound: Zoltán Toldy
• Cast: János Görbe (János Gajdar); Zoltán Latinovits (Imre Veszelka, first militiaman); Tibor Molnár (Kabai senior); Gábor Agárdi (Torma); András Kozák (Kabai junior); Béla Barsi (third warden); József Madaras (man in Hungarian costume); János Koltai ( Béla Varju); István Avar (first interrogator); Lajos Öze (second interrogator); Rudolf Somogyvári; Attila Nagy; Zoltán Basilides; György Bárdy; Zsigmond Fülöp; László Csurka; Lõrinc G. Szabó; László György; József Horváth; László Horváth; Jácint Juhász; József Kautzky; József Konrád; Magda Schlehmann; Ida Siménfalvy; Sándor Siménfalvy; Gyula Szersén; Tibor Szilágyi; Endre Tallós; Géza Tordy; István Velenczei

DVD Distribution: The Round-Up is released by Second Run (UK) and Clavis Films (France), both offering PAL transfers with no region code and optional English subtitles. This review is of the Second Run disc.

Picture: Not as good as either Clavis’ Cantata or Second Run’s My Way Home, but for the most part very acceptable, this anamorphic transfer does at least get the basics right in that it’s sourced from a very clean-looking print and is framed in the correct CinemaScope aspect ratio. The image is certainly a lot sharper than Second Run’s disappointing The Red and the White, and less contrasty than their Marketa Lazarová, though there’s still a tendency for people to get lost in the shadows during the few night-time sequences. The transfer’s biggest problem is highlighted by the main title, which has telltale edge-enhancement haloes, and while nothing in the film itself is quite that blatant, there’s a fair amount of evidence of digital manipulation of a less than perfect source. But I must stress that the film is generally towards the upper end of the Second Run quality scale, and it’s certainly the best version currently out on DVD – the Clavis edition being apparently extremely dark and with yellow subtitles.

Sound: A marked improvement on both Clavis’ disappointing Cantata and Second Run’s better but still slightly distorted My Way Home, this soundtrack is to all intents and purposes flawless, perfectly reproducing the mono original. (And it’s only when one listens closely to it that one realises just how busy it is – there’s virtually no music, but a near constant accompaniment of birdsong, tramping feet and distant cries).

Subtitles: Although initial rumours that Second Run was authoring the disc so that the subtitles would appear outside the frame turned out to be untrue, there’s nothing wrong with them otherwise: they’re white, properly synchronised, typo-free and optional. The only disappointment is that the folksong that opens the film (to the tune of ‘Deutschland über alles’) has not been translated.

Extras: As usual for this label, there are two extras, both excellent. The real treat is a new 20-minute interview with Jancsó, who is in amazing physical and mental shape for someone in his mid-eighties (he would probably have been 86 when this was shot), and gives a delightfully candid and chatty self-portrait – the fact that it was filmed by his sons probably encouraged him to let his hair down. There’s one particularly delicious moment when he keeps breaking into fits of giggles as he tries to deliver a particular philosophical point – a more po-faced editor would have taken this out, but I’m glad it was left in. The other extra is a 16-page booklet showcasing a fine essay on Jancsó and the film by John Cunningham, author of the definitive English-language study Hungarian Cinema: From The Coffee-House to the Multiplex (2004).

• Filmtörténet (in Hungarian, but with video clips)
• Internet Movie Database
• Kinoeye’s excellent overview of Jancsó’s 1960s career mentions The Round-Up.
• Reviews: The Guardian (Derek Malcolm), Ozus’ World (Dennis Schwartz), Socialist Film Review, Strictly Film School (Acquarello)
• Second Run’s page about their DVD.
• Clavis’s page about their DVD (with video clip).
• DVD available from: Amazon.co.uk; MovieMail