II still have no idea on how to post images and how to actually deliver true director ‘intros’ so I’m sorry if this seems lazy or amateurish.
No mention of his films?
The Red and the White is the best anti-war film ever made.
No Edwin, excellent write-up, it’s good that you focused on basic ingredients before introducing us to his films in the next weeks, so many directors to catch up. Bresson maybe but Mizoguchi and Dreyer’s mysticism are what clearly influenced Jancso and a lot of other long-shot experts like Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos or his contemporary Tarr.
An antithesis of the divine and the earthly? My Way Home emphasizes on that regardless of the entrance scenery or the denouement, possibly a near-theatrical approach to nature and its onward position to life’s mysteries. Oh, that was more evident with Electra but he was lucky to have turned his deus ex machina (I won’t reveal which one) into an industrial advance as a comment of capital’s victory in spite of the revolt. So are his 80’s and 90’s mostly….reserved? I won’t say he gave up his private revolt but he may have become a silent sniper without turning his back in his beliefs and hopes.
And for the love of objectivity and crystal-clear introspection, let’s spare the absolutist positions for once: ‘The Red and the White is the best anti-war film ever made.’
Alright…and my director’s pick is as great and anti-war as Jancso’s entire filmography…what’s your point with that remark?
The first Jansco I ever saw was The Round-Up which made its U.S. premiere at the 1966 New York Film Festival. At the end the Hungarian National Anthem is sung and the audience at Lincoln Center was filled with Hungarians who stood up and sang it lustily.
And speaking of lust, in recent years Jansco has been making soft-core porn. Quite a change from his earlier work, though that was scarcely without its erotic component.
My first was The Red and the White, which I just saw the other day, and from the opening tracking shot of the soldiers by the river i could sense the influence he had on some of the directors you mention above. I think Robert hits the nail on the head with his brief appraisal of the film.
Can’t wait to see more.
If Theo Angelopolous wasn’t influenced in The Days of ‘36 by Jancso, particularly from The Round-Up, then they are at least kindred spirits. There’s another influence.
I’ve been trying to go from the beginning on, and I haven’t penetrated into the middle parts of his career yet, but so far everything has been great, and the dramatic shift in his style over a relatively short period of time is interesting to see, as well.
The Round-Up is in my top10, and The Red and the White, and Red Psalm are up there as well. Amazing director, one of my greatest influences. Hopefully your selections will give me the push to see some of his works that I haven’t already explored. I’m very glad he is getting showcased this year!
I didn’t get to mention Angelopoulos since I’m not too familiar with his filmography.
I hate taking things from research that I don’t have particular knowledge of. Anyway, Robert, I do agree with Dimitris that do have to keep some objectivity in my write-ups, and for that I won’’t use totalitarian statements such as ‘the best anti-war film of all times’. Plus,his films will each be discussed over the weeks as part of the Cup so I don’t see why I should post them as well on the introduction.
Not surprisingly, Angelopoulos was compared to Jancso but denied his influence.
I liked the comment by Thesecretlivesofcats on the Red Psalm page where he raised the idea that Cimino, may have wanted to be something like an American Jancso as well.
I also can understand where Robert is coming from about The Red and the White in that it is an anti-war film in the sense that it isn’t as much about any individual in a war and suffering per se, but about the absurdity of the very enterprise on an abstract level. It gets around many of the complicating issues many war films have in making the activities seem either exctiting directly or inspiring from a sense of sacrifice, injustice being fought, or any other kind of personalization which can complicate the emotional reception to the film as it might pertain to its “message”.
Haha, Cimino resembles more the Hollywood studio era of the 40’s and 50’s rather the European flavor of the 60’s epic mastery. I may be wrong though since I’ve only seen 2 Cimino films and I always had the impression he was a genre director. Jancso was more of a spiritualist in his aesthetics.
Plus,his films will each be discussed over the weeks as part of the Cup so I don’t see why I should post them as well on the introduction.
I noticed the same complaint on Max’s Frans Swartjes introduction where he only mentioned his primary pick and it struck me as nonsense: the threads themselves indicate they’re small intros to the directors and neither their films nor their verbose opinions. I find they’re irrelevant complaints to what the directors and the tournament represent.
Well, while I think Cimino is a different sort of animal than Jancso, I think there is some similarities to be found in what Cimino was interested in regarding US history and what some of the directors like Jancso were interested in showing regarding the History of their own countries. Heaven’s Gate and The Deerhunter were the two films referenced by the person who made the post, and for those two films there is an interest in a sweep of history that goes beyond the concern for the characters. While I think Jancso’s films are more interesting, and Cimino has his own interests he is pursuing, I think there is something to the comparison in that Cimino’s approach to the US is decidedly outside the norm and that difference I think is closer in spirit to someone like Jancso than it is to other US directors in many ways, although one can perhaps see some influences from say Griffith as well regarding Heaven’s Gate at least. I’m sure there are others who are more in tune to Cimino than I though, so I wouldn’t go too far in any given comparison since I haven’t seen either film for many years now, the statement just caught my eye ‘cause it kinda felt right and I hadn’t thought about it before.
@Edwin N I won’’t use totalitarian statements such as ‘the best anti-war film of all times’.
Good for you – it is a tournament pitting unique art objects against one another, which is ridiculous anyway.
I’ll stick with my totalitarian statement about the film – there isn’t anything like it.
One reason to mention films now is so people can get the time to watch them.
Good luck with the tournament.
some people might think late Jancso is ‘soft core porn’. others might be of the opinion that a film like “Lord’s Lantern in Budapest” is a shrewd recasting of the Cabinet of Dr Caligari or “God Walks Backwards” is a spectacular, visually dense meditation on the nature of power and the repressive state, or the whole of the Kapa and Pepe series as the most brilliant, satirical-allegorical document of the post-communist ruins of eastern europe. unfortunate!!!
as the most brilliant
In the vernacular of this thread, that thought could be branded ‘totalitarian’, which would be unfortunate.
Hungarian cinema’s position however is abundant and extra-dynamic in terms of socio-political arguments and impact within cinema’s scope, if one searches enough and I’m quite sure Manas (aka Chasing) has seen more than enough Russian, Lithuanian, Polish and Czechoslovakian films to state that (again, as part of a sub-genre)
YOU on the contrary are stating that Red and the White is THE best anti-war film of all time(s) which is a travesty if you haven’t seen at least a partial catalogue of films from all over the globe because I’d counter-argue you with Glory Sky by Kanellopoulos and Three by Petrovic. Are we both right? No….Do taglines like yours above help the film’s future popularity? Not at all…they’re more or less overshadowing its anti-war thematics for the sake of an overblown critical stance on a lesser-known nation’s grand masterpiece just because you haven’t seen enough films from Hungary and from other countries of the world to say that.
How come it’s not part of your “cinematic totem”, I wonder….
So saying this is the best anti-war film of all-time (hyperbole, granted) actually hurts the films popularity and overshadows the very anti-war thematics being praised? Not sure how that works. Why should we call it a grand masterpiece then?
How come it’s not part of your “cinematic totem”, I wonder….
It’s not about the medium per se.
Glory Sky by Kanellopoulos and Three by Petrovic
Those films aren’t even close.
The reason is the way-in-which the anti-war idea is expressed – you don’t know what that idea is, so we might as well stop here.
Praising a film because of one characteristic means nothing, especially when it comes from a country where people have seen few to none works and I’m thankful enough to have been exploring this country for the past 3 years, starting on my own and then the World Cup boosted my confidence with Metzaros and Zoltan Fabri and others besides Tarr and Jancso. I even have to thank my free film club where I was a regular visitor for a period which enthused my love for Jancso.
We can explore the tyrannical / military confuzio of the film, we can criticize the political stance of both sides, the White Guards’ and the Red Army’s unscrupulous methods to cease the troops and the country-people of one another through force, we can categorize how death plays a catalyst role in the film’s secondary sequences like the cold-blooded murders near the lake and how death becomes a vivid entity inside the film’s timeline. We can do all that but we certainly cannot fall in the trap of plagiarism. Many who haven’t seen it MIGHT expect the “greatest anti-war film of all time” and I can easily say that I’ve seen “greater” films of that topic. So Peabody or any “expert critic” who might say this are more trustworthy than I am?
No, they serve an advantage. That advantage means that Jancso accomplished something that no other Hungarian and non-Hungarian filmmaker can achieve. That’s a major exaggeration, especially when a person like Peabody hasn’t seen anything at all" from that region, Eastern and Southeastern Europe.
Those films aren’t even close.
Have you seen them? How can you say that with yet another short, totalitarian statement?
…and if I’m not capable to “grasp” that message, that idea, please enlighten. I’m sure a wise, old man like you are can enlighten a poor, non-Anglophone as I am.
Peabody, i take out the “most” :)
in any case, i used the qualifier “most” not as an absolute, but to allude to the fact (something i have already said in an older Jancso thread) that Jancso is one of those few older eastern european masters who managed to break new ground and achieve a new, vital, cinematic language after the collapse of Communism, and, i think, managed to negotiate the complicated realities of post-Communist Hungary/east europe. it is strange that powerhouse eastern european filmmakers like Skolimowski, Kieslowski, Wajda, Jires, even Chytilova and Marta Meszaros lost their critical edge where Jancso managed to rise like a phoenix out of the ashes. i value Jancso’s later, post-80s work not less, but more, than his classic, operatic work from the 60s and 70s, because unlike any other eastern european master, Jancso’s recent work parodies, critiques and re-evaluates his own earlier work, which, apart from all the technical mastery involved, takes a lot of moral courage on the part of an artist. so, it was particularly frustrating (to put it mildly) to see all that being relegated to ‘soft core porn’!!
@ Chasing Butterflies
Well, ya know I do try to avoid superlatives – let’s see if I can do that here:
The Red and the White is THE anti-war film ever made.
“ever made” seems to be okay though…..ha ha
Many who haven’t seen it MIGHT expect the “greatest anti-war film of all time” and I can easily say that I’ve seen “greater” films of that topic.
The problem of expectations is real, but the other side of that expectation coin is that people would hopefully realize that they need to work up to this film.
In the case of this film, I think that would have to be done anyway, because it is departure from other anti-war films experienced.
Have you seen them?
Have you? the only possible a way to know that is in discussion of the film.
I have asked you on PM to discuss films and you were never willing to do it.
Alluding to a vast knowledge of films may be self-satisfying for you, but it really doesn’t impress me if you can not discuss what you have seen.
You can’t blame Dmitri for not wanting to engage you in discussion, Robert. Have you read your posts?
Are they bad Jean?
Does The Red and the White make viewers less likely to support wars?
This is as absurd as a Ionesco play.
I asked cos great claim(s) have been made for it as an anti-war film and i wonder if it works as well on an emotional level as it does in portraying the apparently absurd confused to and fro of a war, with not very much differentiating the sides, whether reactionary or revolutionary; figures caught in a barely understood bigger picture. The camera moves are very impressive of course, intellectually as well as visually it’s satisfying and probably my favourite Jancso ahead of My Way Home and Silence and Cry.
I’m intrigued by this soft porn/phoenix-like re-evaluation late period mentioned above. Not much is heard of his later films, his reputation seems to rest on his mid 60s-early 70s films.
The first one I saw is RED PSALM which is really stirring stuff.
Edwin N
In an interview with Cahiers du Cinema in 1996, Luc Moullet specified that communist ideology has drifted from it’s application into a political regime since the latter had rhymed with totalitarianism, derived from it’s primitive, much more keen on equality ideology of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Jancso did indeed believe in that theory: His films have been widely regarded as anti-communist and his patriotism led Hungarian and later European film critics to believe he had a penchant for radicalized republicanism.
His films were violently repressed and attacked for their paradoxic political sidings, but there was clearly a misunderstanding: There is no denying Jancso was a nationalist, but calling him a chauvinist was quite barbaric. In a decade(the 60s) where auteur film was solely concentrated on finding new ways of expressions, questioning the essence of cinema and it’s philosophy meaning or breaking the boundaries of censorship, Jancso had only found his art in filming his native land in all it’s bleakness and shadowy meadows, whilst enjoying the sound of patriotic chants and symbolic folkloric dance.
This wasn’t pure nostalgia for values-built Hungary but for freedom as well. Jancso didn’t intend to create any sort of political propaganda in his films, but did indeed wanted to show what his country had become and on what it was originally built. Proclaiming that communism is slowly eating away what’s left of Hungary isn’t in fact a cry for fascism but one eager to find all it’s past liberties.
There was nothing closer to freedom than Jancso’s films, where in a minute all of their narrative construction are flushed away and we find the protagonists dancing around the fire or running through infinite prairies singing songs of their ancestors.
Metaphysical questionings are as well an essence in Jancso’s work, who countlessly drowned into atheism are witnessing war’s horrors and so forth into ‘the light’-Christianity,
The camera is always directed towards the infinite sky, posing a rather ironic look at his characters, constantly driven by anger towards their God for what he made them go through or what he’s making their country go through.
In filming the desire of freedom and the eternal tilting and questioning of the human soul incorporated in a particular environment.
Miklos Jancso’s 60s work was heavily concentrated on the poor workers of Hungary and their struggles towards attaining freedom and metaphysical satisfaction. He also discussed historical facts and anti-war thematics in realistic approach.
His 70s work was pretty different since his directing began showcasing high-stylization and heavy symbolism, transmuting his films into near-astractism.In the 80s/90s he was said to have ‘gone back to his old roots’ by taking back some historical subjects but they drowned in expensive costumes and cheap imagery which made them the target of European critics.
He was said to have been esthetically influenced by the minimalist cinema of Robert Bresson( Which is clear in his early work- both in the way he directed actors as ‘models’ and the way he filmed, with long slow shots and distant framings) and the symbolism of 30s Dreyer films but he influenced a wide generation of filmmakers, especially in the way he tackled metaphysical issues, including Andrei Tarkovsky who said to have been influenced by Red Psalm when directing The Sacrifice, Serguei Paradjanov,Bela Tarr for Damnation and Satantango and finally Carlos Reygadas, who designates The Roundup as to being along with Ordet and some Bergman films his main inspiration for Silent Light.