Szegénylegények

I have made of this most notable of Hungarian films a personal holy grail ever since I laid eyes on an illustrated two-page spread found in an old British magazine of my father's entitled "The Movie" – and now, over 20 years later, I have finally managed to track the thing down and, thanks to the valiant R2 DVD label Second Run, add it to my ever-increasing eclectic home video collection. For the record, despite knowing of its imminent release on DVD, I was seriously contemplating traveling to London for last week's big-screen showing of THE ROUND-UP at the Curzon Mayfair (with Jancso' in attendance, no less) – but, alas, it is just as well that I didn't go because of what occurred over here a couple of days prior to the event: a tragically unnecessary death in the family which, worse still, turned into a national tragedy (with long-term social and legal repercussions to boot). But life, pitiless and unjust as it is, has to go on and, slowly but surely, I have now jumped back into my old routine of film watching and reviewing...

Although there have been other noteworthy Hungarian film-makers before (Paul Fejos) and since (Istvan Szabo), Miklos Jancso' is still perhaps the most important. Ironically, while he was the first one I personally became aware of, my viewing of THE ROUND-UP has actually been my very first encounter with his work – although, now that the first step has been taken, it will be followed by three more in a few days' time. Sometimes it can happen to a film buff that the actual experience of watching the movie, about which one has heard a lot and eagerly longed for, turns out to be underwhelming but, thankfully, this has not proved to be the case for me with THE ROUND-UP. Indeed, the phrase "unlike anything you've ever seen before" is often freely banded about by unimaginative film reviewers – but this description is unquestionably apt when applied to Jancso''s masterpiece.

In that enticing and insightful article I mentioned above written by Jancso''s first assistant director on the film itself (and which I immediately re-read upon the film's termination), it is stated that while THE ROUND-UP was based on factual events which had taken place in Hungary in 1869 and could have easily been shot on the actual locations of castles and fortresses, Jancso' sought a different visual approach altogether with regards to sets and costumes – "half-way between reality and abstraction", as he brilliantly puts it. Since I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with other observations he made on the film, I don't see why I can't quote him some more: "It has a coherent, easy-to-read story – comprehensible at a single viewing – and at the same time a deep, intellectual, almost abstract parable".

The abstraction being alluded to is not restricted to visual (literally, black and white) terms alone – where the stark whiteness of the prison-fortress walls and the hooded Hungarian convicts memorably contrast with the black capes and uniforms of the Austrian oppressors – but also to its very narrative style: while it becomes clear early on that the subject of the relentless interrogations is the identification and capture of legendary rebel leader Sandor (who never actually appears in person but whose presence permeates the entire film), people appear and disappear with insistent frequency and, although there are definite characters which take precedence over others, there is no true main central figure one can clearly identify with and root for.

Thematically, it is oppression and degradation which are the key elements: right from the animated prologue at the start displaying a succession of torture devices, we later watch men made to stand in the rain and a woman stripped naked and whipped to death with canes (the sight of which sends her despairing spouse leaping to his death). But the oppressors' ultimate weapon of humiliation is treachery: through vain promises of instant freedom, prisoners – and, at one point, a grieving mother and, later still, father and son – are repeatedly induced to betray one another (via abrupt, silent motions) but, instead of liberty, they are rewarded with a bullet in the back, the retribution of their own people and, in the supremely ironic finale, cold-blooded mass extermination. In this context, the character of Gajdor is especially poignant (and even amusing in a blackly comedic way) as he pathetically keeps reminding his captors that, even though he has already fingered several worse criminals than himself, he is a prisoner still. Interestingly, this paradox can also be applied to the ingenious location of the prison-fortress (within which practically the whole film is set) – rebuilt specifically for this production in the middle of uninhabited plains that stretch as far and wide as the eye can see.

Miklos Jancso' is renowned for his rigorous visual style and, even from this one sampling of his work – albeit that which is generally perceived as being his chef d'oeuvre – to say that I was rightfully impressed would be putting it mildly. The constantly moving camera, on the one hand encircling the prisoners as if it was one of them and encompassing wide vistas of soldiers astride their horses on the other, necessarily limits the utilization of close-ups to the barest minimum – as if purposefully adopting the impassive stance of an historical observer. For this viewer, it literally wove a mesmeric spell the likes of which I have only experienced once before during a movie – Robert Bresson's A MAN ESCAPED (1956) which, perhaps significantly, also deals with incarceration.

Cinematography in Eastern Europe during the 40 years of the Communist regimes was subject to very close ideological and artistic supervision, as the rulers understood very well the power of cinema as a propaganda tool, either explicit in the newsreels or documentary films or implicit as mass entertainment. Yet, talents of exception existed, cinema schools and exceptional directors and actors made memorable movies which fought censorship and bureaucratic intrusion to make films written in their own language - a language that was eluding direct critics of the oppressive systems but were yet establishing through image and visual metaphors the communication between the artists and their audiences. Although lesser known than their Polish and Czech counterparts, the Hungarian school had also at least two top level directors - Miklós Jancsó and István Szabó, and was also continuing a school of film makers and cinematographers who had made it to Hollywood in the first half of the century. 'The Round-Up' (the original title is 'Szegénylegények' which would translate approximately as 'The Poor Lads') is one of the best if not the best film of Miklós Jancsó, considered also as one of the best Hungarian movies ever made. I have seen it 52 years after its release, and all the reasons and the exceptional qualities are still here.

In one of the few concessions that Jancsó may have made to the ideological kommissars the introductory part of the film places the story in a very specific historic moment - 1869, two decades after the revolutions that shook Europe in the middle of the 19th century and which led to the formation of the dual Austro-Hungarian empire. As the last pockets of resistance were liquidated, the remaining patriots were gathered in a sort of concentration camps in the middle of the endless Hungarian plains (the 'puszta'). No means were spared to identify and eliminate the heads of the revolt, including torture, blackmail, and the use of informing traitors. However everything in the tone, the style, the text indicates that Jancsó was aiming higher and was telling an universal story, one which is the same as the one told by many survivors of camps and prisons under authoritarian regimes at many times and in many places in the world. But even if the allusions to the lost fight for freedom are to be read in the context of the Hungarian history, we should not forget that the film was made in a country that only ten years earlier was invaded and its revolution crushed by another neighboring empire - the Soviet Union.

There are several reasons that make the watching of this film a cinematographic experience that is hard to forget. First of all the cinematography. 'The Round-Up' is filmed in black-and-white and the perfect composition of each frame, the dynamic of the movements and the aesthetic expression remind the early films of Ingmar Bergman. The setting is majestic with the horizon of the Hungarian plains visible almost all the time and building a permanent contrast with the concentrationary universe the characters are living in. There is a lot of suffering and there are some hard scenes in the film, but all these are sublimate and the heroes (even the villain ones) seem to keep a trace of dignity at any moment. The dialogs bring to mind Kafka and other writers who brought up in a more or less visible manner the absurd language of the bureaucratic and repressive systems. At the time of its release and more than half of century later 'The Round-Up' stands as a powerful and straggled shout for freedom.

I took a punt on this one needing out of the house on a holiday Monday. It was short enough, ranked in certain quarters as a classic, and had made it onto those most worthy of cinéaste lists as an undeservedly overlooked masterpiece. It sounded like one of those films, like Koyaanisqatsi, that, like Twain's classics, everyone wants to have watched and nobody much wants to watch; one which I would sit through with a lot of deep and meaningful thoughts in my mind, which would stay with me for years but be approximately as enjoyable as the last three fifths of all those long form essays on climate change, crypto currencies or the situation in the Ukraine I mean to get round to. Some of the write ups on it made it sound as if there was barely any dialogue.

In fact, though the dialogue is reasonably sparse, there are few long scenes without any dialogue. Indeed it is important enough that the subtitles caused me problems. I have been watching films with Czech subtitles for a few years now and have few problems with that from a language point of view. What I do tend to notice, though, is that the comprehensibility of subtitles varies widely. Sometimes subtitles flash up and are cancelled so quickly you don't have time to scan them. This can be the case even where they are not replaced with others. The viewer in these films begins to distrust the subtitles and scans the text quicker than is natural, taking little in even in those moments where the subtitles remain in place. This is far more often a problem than the poor idiom often seen in Czech subtitles. I don't know much about the technology of subtitles, but it looked as if the text was applied to the copy of the film in this instance, probably many years ago, and being essentially burned into the film itself, parts of the text disappeared for a number of frames. I missed a number of exchanges because of this and would like to watch the film again with English subtitles for this reason.

I'm in two minds, too, about the need to read up on the background of the film beforehand. As with a Forward in a classic novel, I find that knowing too much about a film before first seeing it can detract from its immediacy. With The Round-up, though, I might perhaps have benefited from knowing a little more. At least with a film, and certainly a film of this length, I can see it again more easily than I might find time to read a Victorian novel.

Knowing as little as I did about the background, however, it is certainly true that was plenty to keep my interest, both on the human level (which in places I would have understood better had the subtitles been a touch better), and on the visual level. As far as the human level goes, there are scenes here that could gainfully be projected in lectures on game theory and the prisoner's dilemma. The psychological methods used by the captors are brutally effective and it is impossible to watch without thinking how well you would fare in such circumstances. Purely aesthetically, both the landscape here and the people are so full of character. János Gajdar's face is just one of those that fills the screen and though stoic, almost static much of the time, speaks of many years of rough breaks and a dangerous contained emotion.

They don't make films like this anymore in part because they don't make men like that anymore.

Life comes along at a variable pace, and we are constantly re-positioning our gaze to obtain the optimum information in order to understand the situation we are in. This is replicated in the cinema through the mise en scène and editing of the scenes. Since the 1930s there has been an either explicit or implicit debate as to whether editing within the scene is a good or bad thing, with Andre Bazin rooting for the unity of the image against montage (editing). Fifteen years before this film, Hitchcock set down a marker with 'Rope' (and to a lesser extent 'Under Capricorn') that scenes, indeed whole films can be made without much in the way of editing, by simply organising the action and camera movement to reveal the same information in a more continuous way.

Enter Miklos Jancso. With this film he became something of a celebrity in intellectually active film circles by structuring it to be shot in the main, in long takes. Does it work? Well, it works in one way, and that is that it draws attention to the Hungarian plains in which it was shot and which, during the numerous long slow pans that we see, seem to stretch forever across the landscape. Looking at it again after almost forty years, I find it difficult to believe that it made such a big kerfuffle. Long held takes DO enhance suspense - hence Hitchcock's temporary enthusiasm for them - but they seem artificial as they do not mimic the action of the eye, which is always on the lookout for something more interesting elsewhere (hence Hitchcock's enthusiasm being only temporary!).

The 'rounding-up' of prisoners that it portrays is an OK subject for a film, but I think we would have been much more emotionally involved with the characters if we had been treated to reaction shots and the like.

Still, see it as a theoretical/historical curiosity.

The plot description doesn't say it all, by any means. Thundering hooves, veiled and wailing women, desolate landscapes with waving seas of grass and the occasional forbidding stone fortress or burned house, this movie appeals to nearly all of the five senses. It's been three years since I saw it first, and scenes still flash vividly through my head. The harsh faces of the guards, the equally harsh faces of the prisoners. Blunt and brutal deaths. And overhead, the sun burning down, always.