Red harvest: Metro Cinema collectivizes the films of Miklós Janscó

With their flamboyant adoption and advancements on some of the most modernist formal tropes of the era, the 60s films of Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Janscó have often come up against accusations of being more concerned with geometries than geopolitics, of being triumphs of design over directive. You could argue that their ostensibly socialist ideology—Janscó joined the Communist party in 1945 and would eventually work under the auspices of the Soviet film industry—was compromised by techniques and aesthetics inspired by the decadent West as celebrated in the Italian, French and American cinemas. For those inclined to read every artistic choice as a political statement—a habit once quite fashionable, lest we forget—Janscó’s work exhibited a troubling schism of form and content.

But from the perspective of one not even born when Janscó’s most renown films came out, only vaguely familiar with the history they invoke, and open to whatever sort of reading, Janscó’s mise en scène—the audaciously long takes and fluid camerawork; the casts of characters whose allegiances are so often impossible to determine, something the regular shedding of clothing only enhances; the willfully cryptic narratives in which opposing forces become indistinguishable across a vast, featureless landscape—constitutes a powerful political gesture in itself. Violence self-perpetuates. The surrender and assumption of power are exchanged until power itself becomes meaningless. Ideology is reduced to pageantry. (Did I mention Janscó was once a law student?) I can’t think of a body of films with a bolder statement on the futility of war and malleability of national or political identities.

It functions all the better for its dearth of exposition or psychology, for our inability to identify with and comprehend characters, something that only grows as you work through these films where the same actors keep reappearing in different roles. There’s a compelling theatricality to these films, not only in their use of a stock company but, in Red Psalm (1971) especially, the sense that everything is staged as a sort of atheist Passion play. Unless you really know your Hungarian history—and, one suspects, even then—to enter into Janscó’s world is to feel like you should really be understanding everything while understanding almost nothing. Janscó drops us into the midst of a struggle without orienting us. What’s on display is “pure” war, or rather the peripheralities of war, the negotiations and executions. All of which is something most of us could stand to consider more carefully as our world slips ever deeper into a global chasm of conflicts whose meanings are never uncontestable.

The best way to get a sense of how all this works is to see these films in a condensed period, something our friends at Metro Cinema are granting Edmonton filmlovers next week with The Films of Miklós Janscó. The selected quartet begins with Janscó’s breakthrough The Round Up (66), which unfolds in a prison camp following the collapse of Lajos Kossuth’s 1848 revolt against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A man is accused of murder and the military use him to finger other insurgents they wish to condemn. What follows is a sequence of betrayals and a dismantling of alliances while the circumstances of the supposed murders become increasingly inconsequential. Brutality becomes an end in itself.

The Round Up introduced some of Janscó’s key themes, but the formal distinctions I’ve been describing don’t come into full fruition until The Red and the White (67), shot in the USSR and intended to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. But the story takes place two years later, with the Communists fighting the White Guard for a hilly plain along the Volga. Territorial lines shift, but any greater purpose for the struggle remains obscure, as does anything resembling heroics. It is the antithesis of a propaganda film. The Soviets were not pleased, while the film was celebrated in the US. Silence and Cry (68), probably the rarest film in this series, revisits the same historical moment, but on a comparatively intimate scale, with a former Red soldier taking refuge on a Hungarian farm regarded as suspect by local authorities. There are moments of what appear to be tenderness and communion, the performances engrossing and nuanced, but everything finally capitulates to the dictates of individual survival. The result is chillingly poetic.

Having seen it just recently, the Palme d’Or-winning Red Psalm—shot in gorgeously saturated colour and, rather surprisingly, with a 1:37 aspect ratio—has become a new personal favourite of mine, though admittedly, hypnotic, erotic, dream-like and seemingly endless—but in a good way!—it may the even more confusing than any of its predecessors. Folkloric and more than a little enraptured with the hippie culture of the time, it centers on a turn-of-the-century uprising of landless agricultural workers, who sing, play music, dance and act out rituals of triumph and slaughter. The camera weaves across faces or hangs back to watch soldiers encircle and open fire upon a ring of peasants. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it, though, as with the preceding three films, it makes clear that without Janscó the work of Theo Angelopoulos and Béla Tarr would be inconceivable.

Clandestine in Bolivia: Che Part Two

To enter Bolivia clandestinely, Ernesto “Che” Guevara disguises himself. Bald up top, with graying sides, dark-rimmed glasses and buckteeth. Castro tells him he looks like his father. The way this transformation plays in Che Part Two, which leaps across the eight years between Part One’s victory in Havana and the campaign that would end Guevara’s life, emphasizes how notoriety can thwart the real work of a revolutionary. (This doubtlessly resonates with actors like Benicio Del Toro, who endeavour to shape-shift so as to better embody that elusive autonomous character, or directors like Steven Soderbergh, who endeavour to make films so wildly diverse so as to sidestep expectation.) It also underlines the gulf between the careers of Guevara and Castro, still alive today, a robust anachronism in modern politics. In any case, long before the proliferation of T-shirts and mindless idolatry, Guevara was already in some sense attempting to foil fame as a means of following his vocation.

After the divergent results of the two campaigns they dramatize, the most striking difference between Che Part One and Two is their level of immersion into the business of developing an armed uprising. Part Two gets us into Bolivia relatively quickly and from there seldom maneuvers away from Guevara’s arduous trajectory, to which the camera doggedly sticks. There are far too many idiosyncratic flourishes and too much historical selection to call Soderbergh’s approach faux documentary, but there is the sense of the documentarian’s commitment to watching a process unfold. It can be grueling to watch, and sometimes confusing. Like The Thin Red Line, the films of Hungarian director Miklós Janscó, and perhaps Apocalypse Now, it joins the tiny league of war movies you could call hypnotic. And this tells you the strange—and I think utterly fascinating—place where Che lives. It feeds you waves of historical data, builds incredible tension, and puts you in a trance all at once.

There’s a fireside discussion where Mario Monje, leader of Bolivia’s Communist Party, suggests that Guevara will fail because Bolivians don’t want a foreigner for a savior. Someone counters with the fact that Bolivia isn’t even named after a Bolivian—Simón Bolívar was Venezuelan. But the disconnect between such sly arguments and the reality of popular sentiment looms large over Guevara’s Bolivian campaign. It’s simplistic, but maybe there’s something to the notion that Cuba was simply desperate enough, and the Bolivians not quite, or if so, perhaps their hunger was of a more particular nature. While carefully placing such discussions at the forefront, neither Soderbergh’s direction nor Del Toro’s largely stoic performance overtly support any one reading, but their evocation of the star-crossed atmosphere and litany of struggles surrounding the fiasco is haunting.

It’s been 50 years since the Cuban Revolution, yet its legacy, like that of its protagonists, remains no less fraught, no easier to assess. The final images of Che Part Two return us to where Part One began, with Guevara, clean-shaven, with triumph still far ahead, leaning on the rail of that leaky little boat with its 82 men. Guevara says nothing in this sequence, but glances over toward Castro, who stands confidently near the bow. There is a quality about Guevara’s stare that’s hard to guess at, a flicker of something. It could be suspicion.