The Pacifist

La pacifista

France, West Germany, Italy

1970

85 Min

Color

Italian

Currently 3.2/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

|

SCR Giovanna Gagliardo, Miklós Jancsó

CAST Monica Vitti, Pierre Clémenti, Peter Pasetti, Piero Faggioni, Gino Lavagetto, Daniel Olbrychski

This highly symbolic and enigmatic political drama by Hungarian director Miklos Jancso was produced by a consortium from Italy, France and West Germany. This film is considered to be an homage to Antonioni as it uses his favorite leading actress (Monica Vitti) and his cameraman Carlo di Palma. This film was made during a time when Jancso was not allowed to make films in his native Hungary. In the middle of the crowd, while covering an Italian political protest by leftists, The Journalist (Monica Vitti), a pacifist, finds herself surrounded by a quite different group of people who jostle her, remove her recording equipment from her and set her car on fire. She complains to the police about this. However, when the police bring one of the young men before her for her to identify him, she says he is not one of her attackers. This leads to her having a romantic relationship with the young man. The group, and the young man, are young Italian neo-fascists, and the young man has been given the job of assassinating a leftist. He is too gentle to do this, and his group kills him right before The Journalist’s eyes. She goes to the police again, but they begin to believe that she is insane, even when she is forced to kill her boyfriend’s assailants right there in the police station. She is formally declared mad, and is taken off.

Director

Miklós Jancsó

A key figure in the development of the new Hungarian cinema, filmmaker Miklós Jancsó earned international recognition for his films Szegénylegények/The Round-Up (1965), Csillagosok Katonák/The Red and the White (1967), and Csend és Kiáltás/Silence and Cry (1968). These films best reflect Jancsó’s tendency toward abstraction and contain a distinctive combination of revolutionary viewpoints and highly structured, formal cinematic style. Imagery is more important than dialogue, which is used sparingly to encourage audiences to contemplate Jancsó’s underlying messages. The director tends to place actors in geometric patterns that mirror the landscapes around them.

Born in Vac, Hungary, Jancsó studied ethnography and art history while earning his law degree in 1944. He spent several years in Transylvania doing ethnographic research before enrolling in Budapest’s Academy of Dramatic and Film Art, where he graduated in 1950. Jancsó began filming numerous newsreels… read more

A key figure in the development of the new Hungarian cinema, filmmaker Miklós Jancsó earned international recognition for his films Szegénylegények/The Round-Up (1965), Csillagosok Katonák/The Red and the White (1967), and Csend és Kiáltás/Silence and Cry (1968). These films best reflect Jancsó’s tendency toward abstraction and contain a distinctive combination of revolutionary viewpoints and highly structured, formal cinematic style. Imagery is more important than dialogue, which is used sparingly to encourage audiences to contemplate Jancsó’s underlying messages. The director tends to place actors in geometric patterns that mirror the landscapes around them.

Born in Vac, Hungary, Jancsó studied ethnography and art history while earning his law degree in 1944. He spent several years in Transylvania doing ethnographic research before enrolling in Budapest’s Academy of Dramatic and Film Art, where he graduated in 1950. Jancsó began filming numerous newsreels and documentary shorts until 1958, when he made his feature debut with A Harangok Rómába Mentek/The Bells Have Gone to Rome (1958). The film is one of the few in Jancsó’s repertoire that does not reflect his signature style. In 1963, he earned international acclaim for his medical drama Oldás és kötés/Cantata (1963).

Many of Jancsó’s films examine the terrible aftermath of war. Although his first films offered sympathetic explorations of the human characters, his later works became increasingly concerned with the use of imagery for its own sake. Jancsó’s landmark films of the ‘60s won many international awards and special recognition at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1972, he again earned international acclaim and the Best Director Award at Cannes for Red Psalm. Seven years later, Jancsó won a lifetime achievement award from the prestigious French film festival. He continued to make films throughout the rest of the century, earning particular acclaim for a number of increasingly enigmatic works, including Szeressuk Egymast Gyrekek…A Nagy Agyhalal/Let’s Love One Another…The Great Brain Death (1996) and Nekem Lampast Adott Kezembe Az Ur Pesten/The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest (1999). —allmovie guide

read less