Miklos Jancs: Experimental film-maker stumbled over his own innovations (2024)

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Miklos Jancso was the most distinctive Hungarian film-maker of his generation, with an instantly identifiable visual style that won him wide international recognition in the 1960s and 1970s.

Jancso (pronounced “Yancho”) specialised in historical subjects, ranging from the Kossuth rebellion of 1848 to the communists' rise to power in Hungary a century later. For Italian television, he ventured into aspects of ancient Roman history, though these projects were less successful.

His fame rested less on the content of his films than on their idiosyncratic treatment. He spun variations on a small number of recurring themes and images: horses snorting and galloping on the great Hungarian plain (the puszta), soldiers marching in formation, naked women dancing with scarlet ribbons, horsemen cracking whips and burning hay ricks.

He filmed these scenes with a constantly prowling camera, the characters weaving in and out of the frame while the camera itself performed intricate arabesques. He pushed the long take to its limits, as Hitchcock had done in Rope and the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, imitating, would do later.

One Jancso film consisted of only 12 shots, changes of angle and perspective being achieved through the moving camera. This technique required extensive rehearsals with cameraman and actors, though the players were spared the need to be word perfect - during the shot, they mouthed the lines, which were dubbed in later.

Critics and audiences were at first spellbound by this approach. When Jancso experimented with colour and widescreen in such works as The Confrontation (1969), it was as if he had discovered a new way of making films that rendered others obsolete. Yet his very originality contained the seeds of future doubts and reservations.

As Jancso used this technique again and again, questions were increasingly raised about the content of his work. His scripts, usually written by Gyula Hernadi, were found to be too abstract, the characters mere symbols on which to hang Jancso's preoccupations and visual obsessions.

While The Round-Up (1965), the film that brought him international renown, was a powerful drama with characters with whom audiences could identify, later works such as Agnus Dei (1970) and Red Psalm (1972) were almost entirely allegorical. However ravishing to look at, they barely communicated at a human level.

The backlash against Jancso focused particularly on a film about Attila the Hun which he made for Italian television in 1971. Called Technique and Rite, it seemed in its very title to underline the ritualistic, virtuoso aspects of his work which many had come to consider its principal limitation.

Jancso's style could not be sustained for long. Theo Angelopoulos, the director most conspicuously in his debt, was able in the 1980s and 1990s to modify it and take it in new directions, which Jancso proved unable to do. He failed to find new themes and techniques, and his later work was little seen outside Hungary. It was a sad end, for in his prime he achieved what all artists strive for - a perfect fusion of form and content.

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Miklos Jancso was born on September 27, 1912 in Vac, a village near Budapest. He studied law and ethnography in Romania, took his degree in 1944 and was briefly a soldier and a prisoner of war. After the liberation, he returned to Budapest and enrolled in the Academy of Drama and Film Arts. He and his fellow students were ardent socialists and welcomed the communist victory in 1947.

He graduated in 1950 and began to work on newsreels and shorts of a conventional propagandist nature celebrating May Day, harvest time on cooperative farms and visits by Soviet agricultural delegations. Jancso later admitted that his early shorts were made on the Zhdanov principle that cinema's sole function was to reflect the prevailing party line.

His first feature film, The Bells Have Gone to Rome (1958), was a stolid World War II drama indistinguishable from other Hungarian films of the time. Cantata (1962) was little better, but in 1964 he began to attract favourable notice with My Way Home, which deals with a young Hungarian soldier caught between the German retreat and the Soviet advance in the last stages of the war. Its elliptical narrative, expressive use of barren landscapes and emphasis on the moving camera rather than editing were all early manifestations of Jancso's mature style.

In Britain it was released after the extraordinary impact of his next film, The Round-Up (1965). Set in the aftermath of the 19th-century Kossuth rebellion, the film depicts the efforts of the police in a remote prison on the great plain to pinpoint the rebels among the many in captivity. Playing one prisoner off against another and planning every move like a chess game, they spring their trap and the revolt is snuffed out. Cold, brutal and harrowing, it was immediately hailed as the work of a brilliant stylist.

The Red and the White (1967), a Hungarian-Soviet co-production made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, developed Jancso's choreographic style still further. The CinemaScope screen was used in a formalised way to underline the striking compositions - diagonals, horizontals and circular patterns echoing the contours of the landscape itself.

Torture, nakedness and ritualised atrocities became vivid illustrations of the breakdown in humanity during the fighting between the Whites and the Reds in Russia in 1918. Both sides were shown as equally culpable - hence the film was never released in the Soviet Union.

Elsewhere, Jancso was the man of the moment. Silence and Cry, his 1968 film, was a change of pace - a chamber piece rather than epic in scale, but no less impressive. Set, like The Round-Up, on the great plain, it was an intense drama of lust, betrayal and murder on a remote farm in 1919.

It was followed by The Confrontation (1969), Jancso's most audacious film to date. Though set in 1947, it was seen as an oblique comment on the student riots in Budapest in 1968-69. Jancso's first colour film, it dramatises the conflict between Roman Catholic and Marxist educational theories in the early days of the Hungarian communist state. There are songs, slogans and dances, escalating to book-burning and violence, with the camera and the students performing an almost balletic illustration of the dialectics.

The Confrontation was not universally admired, but neither of its successors was much liked by anyone. Winter Wind (1969), about a gang of Croat terrorists in 1930s Chicago plotting to assassinate King Alexander II of Yugoslavia, was too cryptic for many tastes. The reduction of the film to only 12 sequence shots was considered self-indulgent and attention-seeking.

Agnus Dei (1970), though one of Jancso's personal favourites, was even more esoteric. Handsomely shot and full of nightmarish images of torture and nudity, it was so nationalistic as to be virtually impenetrable to non-Hungarians. Even critics who had hailed the originality of his early films felt that he had ploughed his furrow once too often, and was sacrificing ideas and characterisation to sterile display.

A two-year break in Italy seemed to confirm this. The Pacifist (1970), intended as a radical departure and his first contemporary subject, turned out a hollow pastiche of Michelangelo Antonioni, starring his favourite actress, Monica Vitti. By the time of Technique and Rite, it seemed he was plumbing the depths of self-parody, transporting his regular Hungarian motifs to the inappropriate context of ancient Rome.

He returned, however, with two striking pictures. Red Psalm (1972), though featuring his familiar trade marks, found a new simplicity in dramatic construction, elevating a tale of peasants, landowners and military intervention on the puszta to a kind of epic poem. All agreed that it looked stunning. His Marxist version of Elektra (1975), had the triumphant Elektra and Orestes ascending in the end in a flame-red helicopter.

This proved the high water mark of Jancso's fame. Artistically, his subsequent work disappointed. Private Vices, Public Virtues (1976) abandoned the long sequences that had become his signature in favour of an explicitly erotic reinterpretation of the Mayerling affair. Hungarian Rhapsody and Allegro Barbaro (both 1978) formed the first two parts of an uncompleted trilogy on the life of a nationalist executed in 1944 for his involvement in an anti-Hitler plot. Both were judged too parochial to travel abroad.

His last films included an uncharacteristic Renaissance costume piece, The Tyrant's Heart (1981), a Franco-Israeli co-production called Dawn (1986), Season of Monsters (1987) and God Runs Backwards (1990). They passed almost unnoticed outside Hungary.

In later years, Jancso was more active in the theatre. He directed a notorious production about the life of Mata Hari and a still more scandalous Jack the Ripper (1977), in which the Limehouse serial killer was finally unmasked as Queen Victoria. In 1980 he staged Verdi's Otello in Florence.

Between 1999 and 2006, he made six films about the adventures of Kapa and Pepe, two comical anti-heroes.

Miklos Jancso married first, in 1949, Katalin Wowesny, with whom he had a son and a daughter. He married secondly, in 1958, the film director Marta Meszaros, their son Miklos Jancso Jr is a cameraman. With his third wife, Zsuzsa Csazany, whom he married in 1981, he had another son - she and his four children survive him.

Telegraph, London

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