Miklós Jancsó

Although his ancestors link him to Transylvania, integrated into Romania, Miklós Jancsó was born in Vác, a small town near Budapest, in Hungary, on September 27, 1921. István Szabó assures of him that “he occupies a unique place in Hungarian culture . (…) Like Bartók in music and Attila József in poetry, Jancsó expressed the spirit and historical destiny of the nation from him in the cinema ”.

He loved the theater and would have liked to receive some kind of training in that regard, but those studies did not exist and he did, instead, study Law. Then the Second World War would arrive, some of whose memories surely influenced the young soldier’s composition of one of his first feature films, My Way Home (1964). In any case, once the war was over, the possibility of training in theater and cinema already existed, and it was following the advice of his mentor Béla Balázs, which is why he ended up training as a film director at the recently created Academy of Interpretive Arts, where he studied. graduated in 1950.

He had to gain experience shooting boring documentaries and propaganda pieces in praise of the prevailing Stalinist rule, a suffocating Marxist and totalitarian atmosphere whose influence he could not escape. For his wife at the time, Márta Mészáros, he wrote the screenplay for Szerkezettervézes (1959), but in general all of his work from those years was considered of little value, it did not go beyond what is a learning stage.

He will never stop making films, but the 1960s and 1970s are the best known and most fruitful of his long and uneven career as a filmmaker. His first full length, The Bells Have Gone to Rome , dates from 1958, but it had little impact. Italy has always influenced him, and in fact from his next film, Cantata (1963), traits that would make him related to Antonioni are often mentioned.

His first notable film, and perhaps the most optimistic of those he has made -for me the best, since it focuses on a person, and this makes it closer-, is My Way Home , set at the end of the Second World War. , and which narrates with remarkable poetic spirit the improbable friendship between two boy soldiers, one Hungarian, the other Russian. Already here are the long sequence shots typical of Jancsó, which characterize so many of his films, and which imply not only a mixture of technical display and sensitivity, but also a circular way of looking at the world slowly, with the idea of ​​inviting contemplation. and to try, perhaps, to change it.

As Jancsó himself explains, Los desesperados (1965), whose script is signed by Gyula Hernádi , a regular collaborator, is not just historical cinema. A revolutionary movement in the mid-nineteenth century, with the repression and the consequent accusations, is also a way of looking at the present, where the ideals of a better society are often stifled; the Marxist Jancsó sees how the so-called socialists crush the changes that they themselves say they advocate. Although the film impacts, there is a depersonalization in what we see, the director -and therefore the viewer- care little about individual destinies.

Reds and Whites (1967) brings the director closer to recent history, the Soviet authorities entrust him with a quote about the Russian revolution on its 50th anniversary. Jancsó opts for an aesthetic approach similar to Los desesperados, where we see the Hungarian volunteers who fight with the Bolshevik Reds, and the whites who defend the tsarist order, commit tremendous cruelties, and at the same time, ironically, have gestures of “chivalry” or “revolutionary bonhomie”. The long sequence shots continue, and the lyricism combined with crude violence, or the humiliation of the weak at the hands of those who have, even if only for a while, the power in their hands. silence and crying(1968) talks about the brief communist regime that arrived in Hungary at the end of the First World War, and, law of the pendulum, the subsequent involutionism, with the inevitable violence. Confrontation (1969) is instead a contemporary film, which reflects the youthful convulsions of the time, with even longer sequence shots than usual.

In the 1970s, Jancsó made films in Italy, La pacifista (1970) and Roma quiere otro César (1973). He revisits the Greek myths in Elektra (1974) and also delivers one of his best-known titles, Red Psalm (1972), for which he was considered best director at Cannes; shot in color, it speaks of the uprising of the peasants against the landowners, the marked symbolism of some images is novel, sometimes surreal.

Like many other filmmakers from the East who experienced their moment of international glory in the 1960s, Jancsó continued to make cinema that only reached a minority, sometimes avant-garde and experimental, and decidedly personal, rarely seen, even in his own country. In the two installments of Stone Message, shot on video in 1994, covers the life of the Transylvanian Jews, and the city of Budapest. In 2002 she assured “I am terribly old, I am several hundred years old. And now I’ve realized that the only thing you can do with the world is laugh at it. I used to take myself very seriously, because I thought it was possible to change the world, but not anymore.” What has not prevented him from continuing to make films, it would seem that the camera is one more limb of Jancsó’s body, and even his children have followed him in his film adventures, although without the impact of his father.