Background
Jancso, Miklos was born on September 27, 1921 in Vác, Pest, Hungary. Son of Sandor Jancso and Angela Poparad.
Jancso, Miklos was born on September 27, 1921 in Vác, Pest, Hungary. Son of Sandor Jancso and Angela Poparad.
It is significant that Jancso was trained in law and ethnography—the two courses of study overlapping, just as dispassion and formalism mingle in his work. Indeed, he became a doctor of law before the end of the Second World War, but did ethnological research in Transylvania in the following years. It is unclear how he found his way into filmmaking, but in the early 1950s he made newsreels and over a dozen shorts on ethnological and artistic subjects.
It was in 1966 that Jancso first made an impression outside Hungary with The Roundup. That much nearer the 1956 uprising, it was difficult not to see the film as growing out of specifically Hungarian circumstances and experiences.
Cantata is judged by Jancso as the first feature of his own. Like My Way Home, it is a work of conventional poetic realism, dealing with precise, unique characters. The first is about a young doctors spiritual crisis as he returns to his rural home. The second concerns a young Hungarian, taken prisoner by the Russians in 1945, and put to work with a Russian soldier tending cows. Observant, sensitive films, these two were compared with the work of Olmi, and taken as a sign of fresh authenticity and humane concern in the Hungarian cinema.
The Roundup really revealed Jancso. Ostensibly, its basis is historical: the period after 1848 when Austrian soldiers trap, round up. interrogate, torture, and kill a band of Hungarian partisans. But the way of showing these things was so much more impressive than the non-Hungarians sense of Hungarian history. First of all, Jancso had defined the flat Hungarian puzta in the way that Ford mapped out Monument Valley for himself, or Antonioni the London park in Blow-Up. Robert Vas saw this as a “specifically Hungarian vision. The horizontal line was surely dictated by the landscape, the domineering plain that left so rich a mark on the national character and literature. Its hard blacks against white suggest the toughness, the contrasts of this character: the rich fertilitv of summer as much as the tragedy, secretly maturing under the blazing heat.”
But was the tragedv merely Hungarian, and was the roundup tragic or a ritualistic exercise, a dance variation of the inevitable power struggle? The Roundup paid much less attention to individuals than had Cantata or My Way Home. The camera style became increasingly decorative, abstract, and domineering. Thus, a sense of mysterious fatalism muffled the plight of the partisans and the unhindered cruelty of their captors. That meant that the viewer did not actually experience plight or cruelty so much as share in the ethnologist observers view of an unfamiliar culture. Visuallv, The Roundup is a matter of pattern and shape, like a visitor from Mars describing a firing squad. And when Richard Rood suggested that it was as if Bresson had filmed Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, that served to remind one of Jancs6’s origins. The Roundup did have something of Kafka’s worried but meek attitude to divine law, and it did study human groupings with a semiscientifie remoteness.
This situation—of irrational authorities and hopeful revolutionists confronting one another in the open—has run through The Red and the W hite, The Confrontation, Agnus Dei. and Red Psalm. The historical bases of these films seem very tenuous, less important than the chance to persist with the same visual ingredients—solemn girls, ominous riders, the sun on the plain, and the extraordinary, balletic, mathematical behavior of the camera. These films have very little speech, no character, and very opaque sequences of events. They do have an overwhelming camera sequence built on some of the most elaborate traveling shots in cinema. The shots are as beautif ul and as blank as the slim, dark, half-naked girls in Red Psalm. But that is to talk of beauty in a way that reveals the gulf between prettiness and character. And when some critics came away from Winter Sirocco with the report that it has only thirteen shots, and from Red Psalm that it has but twenty-six.
The mechanical movements are the more disturbing in that Jancso does have an eye for sudden revelations. There is no doubt about the poetic generalizations he can achieve with horses, sunshine, the river, riders, grass, and his herded victims. What makes him seem cold-blooded and frivolous is the need to decorate this vision with senseless movement. When the camera does not move with a character, an emotion.
Quotes from others about the person
The Hungarian critic Robert Vas: “With a burning intellectual charge, he imites his viewers to throw away the pleasant, comfortable dream of Hungary’s romantic-heroic history and face up to reality: black as much as white, oppressor as much as oppressed. A challenge to self-analysis of a small and tragic country surrounded by so many dif ferent tensions in the middle of Europe.”
Married 1st Marta Meszaros in 1958. Married 2nd Csakany Zsuzsa in 1981, one son.