1860s: the government of the Austro-Hungarian empire is about to finish off the last remnants of Kossuth’s rebellion, the freedom fighters, the men of Sandor. This is the point of departure for a cruel cat and mouse game and a lesson about crushing identities (the ending is one of the most chilling moments of History fulfilled). The spectator is not given easy targets for identification; psychology is swept away (although at the same time it is impeccable) – so the film operates with absolute concentration on the system and History, bureaucracy and opportunism, and thus also of utopias that didn’t have much of a chance.
Then or now. We are at the core of the speciality of Hungarian film of the 1960s. While the events of The Round-Up take place in the historical period of 1860s, according to Jancsó, “everybody in the audience knew that the real story was about the 1950s and 1960s; it was simply convenient to point out to any interrogator from Moscow or East Berlin that it was “a historical film, not about our time”…
There are good grounds for the sameness: the puszta that stretches almost into eternity is timeless. The Round-Up was the first instance of a “method” that would become the legend of modern cinema. In the words of the director: “Nowadays even a child can film a long scene. Not then. We shot 12-minute scenes with a 35mm camera, we needed a complicated set of tracks; we started shooting early in the morning and shot until the day was darkening”. It was virtuosic: “Our method meant some kind of madness, and depended of all of us, technicans and actors alike, being friends – otherwise what we did wouln’t have been possible.” (This is a nice paradox: camaraderie behind cameras, homo homini lupus – History – In front of them).
It meant the renewal of montage, which was now performed within the single-shot sequence – an act Marcel Martin has called “virtual montage”. The magnificent black and white Scope image shows us plain History, and man trapped by History: film as a prison space. Michel Estève writes: “Breaking up the linear narrative, contracting duration, the ellipses impose the suffocating, agonizing climate of the prison. The contrast established by the photography, of sets and costumes alike, between the blacks and whites, very hard, very cold, emphasize the executioner’s cruelty. No musical score, but self-evident realism from the sound track: wind, rain, horses’ hooves, prisoners’ irons, The fort’s triangular court, the hallway where the first partisan who will be shot enlisted, the interrogation room, the suspects’ cells – a prison-space tightens around the prisoners. Conversely the space could dilate, with wide shots and depth of field opening up the Hungarian puszta, but that view offers only a dream, an illusion of liberty: the space (the plain) opens only onto death”.
If a cinema spectator wants to watch History as film can reveal it, Quo Vadis? (et al.) is the light answer while The Round-Up is probably the most engrossing: a key moment in the art of Miklós Jancsó, and especially in modern cinema, when form, method and theme are totally one.

Peter von Bagh