Unlike Marketa Lazarová, the last 1960s masterpiece to be disinterred from the vaults by Second Run, Miklós Jancsó's 1965 film The Round-Up did at least open in British cinemas – though as it's never been shown on terrestrial television or released on video until now, recent opportunities to see it have been few and far between. That this neglect has nothing to do with the film's quality is obvious from the stunning opening shots, setting the action (and 'action' is very much the operative word: spoken content is minimal) on a typically vast, featureless Hungarian plain only occasionally studded with bleached-white buildings which are as likely to be prisons and stockades as domestic dwellings. It's nominally set in the late 1860s, where those few holdouts from the 1848 Kossuth rebellion were hunted down and, if not killed outright, subjected to intolerable psychological pressure from the authorities – who in turn were manipulated by their own bosses in an equally (if not more) cynical fashion. An opening title says “they weren't too particular about their methods”, but that hardly applies to Jancsó, who achieved something only matched by the other great 1960s European auteurs like Antonioni, Bergman and Tarkovsky: he created an entirely new, instantly recognisable and thrillingly distinctive cinematic language whose lack of imitators has ensured that it's barely dated at all. Even the fact that it's clearly an oblique allegory of the aftermath of the then-recent 1956 Hungarian uprising is barely relevant – he's dealing with universal scenarios of oppression, presented in a way that owes more to dance choreography than conventional dramatic mise-en-scène, with complex arrangements of humans and horses operating simultaneously on multiple planes (Sergio Leone is Jancsó's only rival when it comes to inspired use of the Scope frame, and Leone hadn't come near this level by 1965). On a first viewing, The Round-Up is often so intoxicating that the underlying message barely registers, but it's a near-perfect blend of style and substance. Second Run's DVD includes a brand new interview with Jancsó and a booklet essay by Hungarian cinema specialist John Cunningham.
A true masterwork of world cinema, set in the mid 19th century, when Austrian soldiers representing the triumphant Hapsburg empire trap and interrogate the Hungarian partisans whose revolt against the empire's rule has petered out. The cold, formal and distanced beauty of the film's choreography on the Hungarian plains make this an astounding work of art.
My Way Home (Jancso, 1965)
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The Round-Up
