Agnus Dei

When I was in college, my film class buddies and I would sometimes joke about creating a film festival called The Very Foreign, Foreign Film Series, dedicated to the most impenetrable of foreign films. I think Miklos Jancso's Agnus Dei could have played opening night.

There are some who will try to bluff their way through a review of a movie they did not understand. I am not one of those.

I have admired some of Miklos Jancso's other films. I especially liked The Round-Up. I know that Jancso finds much inspiration for his film from Hungary's past, a past about which I know very little. I also know that Jancso is known for long takes with moving cameras. Some of these shots can be breathtaking. There are such shots in Agnus Dei as well. I was carried along by the film's motion for about the first half, but then I became increasingly restless and confused.

The first Miklos Jancso film I ever watched was The Red and The White. I remember being slightly confused about which side was which and about the way both sides committed nasty acts. Agnus Dei is somewhat similar. The film is set in 1919 during a leftist rebellion against landowners. What I got out of watching it is, that unlike The Red Army in the previous film, the leftists here were trying to fight honorably, but were doomed to lose because the other side was completely ruthless.

Take for instance the priest character. He is on the side of the landowners and also seems somewhat mad. He is captured by the leftists, but then let go. This turns out to be a big mistake because the priest is not as merciful as the leftists. All of that I understood, while wondering if there was more to all of this than I was getting. However, the final third becomes frustratingly vague.

There is young man with a violin who appears about halfway. Whose side is he on? I don't know. He seems to be for and against both sides. The film climaxes with this giant bonfire that might be intended as symbolic. Then, there is a final twist of the knife involving that young man with the violin that just had me scratching my head. Agnus Dei is certainly not a viewer friendly film.

On the other hand, Miklos Jancso can shoot a nice-looking tracking shot. There are some good ones here.

A seemingly completely forgotten film from Hungary's days of Communist occupation, I could find no reviews anywhere online for it so thought I would give it a look and be the first.

Agnus Dei (The Lamb of God) is, right from its opening images, a visually striking work, if a little boring, with the kind of roaming, dreamlike cinematography that you would never find in any western movie from the same time, but could be encountered several places over the border of the Iron Curtain, in Soviet films such as those of Tarkovsky. The precison of the choreography needed for such long, floating takes is astonishingly impressive, but the work itself is still little more than a rather serious and glum wartime movie, which feels like it is covering similar ground to many other post-war European films of that time.

The main story, as such, is of a fanatical priest marching with the Fascists against the Communists in 1919: I know next to nothing about that culture and period of time so I found it hard to follow exactly what was going on and who, if anyone, I was supposed to be rooting for the first 20 minutes or so, but even after figuring out the uniforms it didn't help make me care. The anti-Christian propaganda is too heavy-handed to be at all believable, with all the kindly Communist officers presented as wholesome and blameless as Santa Claus, so it's hard to find or connect with anything beneath its surface.

A review I saw of another of Miklós Jancsó's films said "it is difficult to pinpoint the reasons for the incredible monotony of so much vigorous activity, but surely one reason is that nothing happens in (this film) except for the benefit of the camera", and that pretty much puts its finger on the problem: although many dramatic moments occur, there is no real emotion accompanying any of them; we don't care about any character in the film, and get the impression that every event is taking place entirely for the visual possibilities. I'm curious as to what that says about what happens to the soul and creativity of artists under Communism, how when the safe possibility of saying anything challenging, original or profound is brutally removed, the artist's creativity moves into the more safely abstract areas of surface visual innovation instead, which is something I've noticed in many other Soviet-era pictures I've seen.

In conclusion, all I can really say is that it's always interesting to look at, and made with great care, but terribly dull, tediously crass on the surface and pretty much entirely empty inside.