Miklos Jansco 1921-2014

[Stavros]

In the 1960s and 1970s Miklos Jansco was one of the bright stars of the Cinema d'Auteur, along with Antonioni, Bergman, and the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). What marked out Jancso's films from his contemporaries, particularly in Eastern Europe, was his obsession with form, some would say to the detriment of content. Most of his films are set in moments of turbulence in Hungarian history, the nationalist uprising of the mid-19th century or the failed Communist revolution of 1919. A typical Jancso film has a camera moving from left to right, right to left, forward and back, with men on horseback circling the scene in a figure of eight while rebellious peasants sing songs and, mostly, get shot. There used to be a cinema on Oxford Street, the Academy which had three screens, and was established and run by an Hungarian emigre, Goerge Hoellering, until his death. The Academy was the main portal for new films from Eastern Europe, and was where I saw most of the classic Jancso films, The Round-Up (1966), The Red and the White (1967), The Confrontation (1969), Red Psalm (1972). The National Film Theatre was the only other place which regularly showed his films, and I saw Jancso when he appeared at the performances at the London Film Festival in 1980 of two films intended to be part of a trilogy, Hungarian Rhapsody (1979), and Allegro Barbaro (1979) -neither of which have been seen since. YouTube has some full length features but without subtitles, making a full understanding of his films more or less impossible. Jancso alienated people with his socialist politics, his obsessive style and his mostly obscure Hungarian themes, and the films he made in Italy in the 1970s were not well received, and by the late 1980s I think the lack of exposure meant his reputation had decline although he was in his own way an influence on Theodorus Angelopoulos and Bela Tarr, notably the use of very long takes and a minimal number of scenes. I also think that his best films will survive better than those of Pasolini, Antonioni and most of the French New Wave.

An additional aspect of Jancso's work was his interest in Hungary's demoished Jewish communities, although Jancso himself was not Jewish. It began in 1965 with a film Jelenlet (full version is on YouTube) which offers a visually eloquent lament for a lost rural Jewish community; this continued with L'Aube in 1985 and Psalm in 1996, and there are also extracts from his frankly tedious film series Messages of Stones on some of the DVD releases of his films. There is a discussion of the Jewish aspect of Jancso's films here:
http://www.kinoeye.org/03/03/baron03.php

An example of Janco's film style compared to Bela Tarr can be seen here:

Keyframe Video: Mapping the Long Take (Bela Tarr, Miklos Jancso) - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZcd254VO-c)