Audience Member
The movie starts as a deep look into the heart of a horrible, corrupted man, but halfway thorugh Jancsó forgets about depth and meaning, and rather makes his film an uninteresting cliché about how criminals are actually the good guys, because they love their mother country.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/22/23
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Audience Member
The year is 1869 in Hungary - the government has decided to deal with uncontrolled elements in order to stabilize the system. In an improvised prison which has elements of a concentration camp a large group of people is detained. Among them there are highwaymen, but also a group of Hungarian rebels (followers of Sándor Rózsa), and a lot of peasants. The Austrians do not know who is a robber, a rebel, or a peasant, and devise various forms of pressure, blackmail, psychological games, betrayal and cruel manipulation.
The movie observes all this from the side, remaining cold and distant, which allows us to understand the distance that the torturers, the Austrian soldiers and officers, have in relation to their victims, to the prisoners, and their humiliated mothers, wives and sisters who daily bring food for the prisoners.
The famous Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó builds, without many violent scenes, step by step, an agonizing story of dehumanization, ruthless repression and ice-cold cruelty of one essentially colonial system which decided to locate and destroy its opponents. And finally, in a superb twist, he shows that a political enemy is the greatest enemy.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
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s r
Something ground breaking for cinema. I really enjoyed the whole tie into the Kossuth rebels and the ties to communism. It's amazing that they allowed this to even be made at the time. Brilliant directing and acting all around. It is long, but I enjoyed it for sure.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
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Audience Member
Stunning, unsettling and visually haunting.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
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Audience Member
Ultimate in hungarian new wave cinema. photography and the long shot are absolutely stunning. a moving portrayal of the psychology of hopelessness.
Miklos Jancso's, Szegény Legények, (The roundup), is etched against a bleak canvass of realism. It is the end of an unsuccessful uprising, the authorities have broken the population's spirit and the prisoners are being rounded up. The starkness reverberates in his impunity to strike a chord between viewer and endless scenery, captured in the stills of the continuous long shot. Overbearing and hyper extended, Jancso uses the long shot to reinforce a sense of super-realism. He does not create hierarchy through camera angle. Instead, he forces the viewer to make endless judgments through a constant battle of objectivity and subjectivity, established ultimately, through the neutrality of the medium camera shot. The viewer is not a passive player. Jancso drives the film through the manipulation of the emotions of the viewer. It is precisely through establishing a sense of emotional turmoil, of an active participation, that he is able to ultimately drive the components of the film. Jancso is a master, and his sense is revealed in several key moments in the film. It is specifically the continuous long shot and the unedited camera sequence that interplay with each other to form the components of Jancso's style. His depiction of the surrounding scenery, the prison juxtaposed against the officer's building and the interaction of prisoner versus authority documented through the use of minimalist editing styles are the components that ultimately draw the viewer into this Kafkaesque world and leaves him there writhing and sick.
In the first sequence we are presented with an establishing continuous long shot. Here, Jancso is depicting the mood of the film. The scenery is fiercely minimalist. the horizon is a strong horizontal, suggesting order. The prisoners, although at this point they are merely specks in the distance, are being rounded up and escorted to the compound. The camera shot does not waiver. There is a brooding sound of wind hitting plains. There is a sense of anticipation and tension. The continuity is ultimately interrupted with the sounds of hooves crashing on the earth. Six gendarmes enter the scene, three on each side of the frame, symmetrically riding up to the prisoners, again establishing a sense of order. This provides an incredibly complex emotional turmoil. The tension is heightened. The horsemen symbolize authority. By disturbing the continuity of the shot, Jancso creates tension by introducing authority. The horse's rhythmic charge heightens the sense of anticipation and the mood is ultimately manipulated. The gendarme provide a heightening sense of tension juxtaposed against a stark background. The scenery ultimately leaves the viewer with a feeling of helplessness, sadness and hopelessness. There are no trees, there are no houses to break the uninterrupted continuity of emotion. The viewer is successfully manipulated. The first forty seconds of the film ultimately establishes the mood in the viewer. We are in effect presented with the theme of the entire film, hopelessness challenged by an irreconcilable authority.
Jancso also creates continuity of sequence through the continuous long shot. Without dialogue Jancso is able to essentially tell the story of one character against the manipulation through camera sequencing of another character. The shot is set up with the officer's barracks in the central focal point of a crane shot. The building is a whitewash structure set against the background of a brooding environment. From the bottom we see a prisoner being escorted by a gendarme towards the barracks. Towards the camera frames upper left another figure approaches the house and in the camera frames middle right there is another figure approaching the prisoner and his escort. The shot in itself is beautifully rendered. There is a succinctness to its choreography, there is an intended purpose. Essentially what Jancso does here is the trickery of a master magician. Without knowing any of the characters other than the prisoner and the escort from the previous scene, the identity, or rather the general purpose and mood of the new characters are unequivocally felt and established. No, we do not necessarily know exactly who these new characters are, there is really no need to know. Jancso instead, reveals an anticipation of emotion. You are left with a sense of tension and anxiety. Once the new characters are revealed in the next scene, the viewer is left with a sense of complete knowledge, as if the sequence of these characters were shown simultaneously in the previous scenes. Obviously this was not the case, yet we are left with a sense of this and more importantly, this is realized without any dialogue.
Another aspect that Jancso is able to bridge is the idea of the juxtaposition of the structures against the backdrop of the scenery. Again, Jancso succeeds in communicating an idea through the manipulation of the continuous long shot. The prison is always only partially revealed. The structure is impaled against the backdrop of the horizon, but we are never left with a sense of size. There is an undeniable mystery to its purpose. This, ultimately heightens the idea of despair and hopelessness, imparting a rather grim notion of the prisoners' fate. Also, the prison is always represented in an angular contrasting intersection, diagonal to the horizontal line. Order is breached, the angularity of the structure suppresses any sense of normalcy and the prisoners are ultimately an extension of this idea. Again, the notion of hopelessness, despair and sadness are fortified with a mere manipulation of the continuous long shot.
In contrast to the prison, the officer's barracks are framed in full view in the beginning. The building is white against the backdrop of the minimalist scenery, suggesting firstly, the establishment of hierarchy and secondly, the notion of righteousness through the judgments of the law. Interestingly, when the prisoners are led to the barracks, the suggestion of order is breached and turned upside down. Now, the structure is shown in an angular partial view much like the prison itself, suggesting perhaps that there is something wrong with the pronouncements of authority, perhaps the law is corrupt.
The unedited continuous camera sequences of the prisoners interacting with authority and other prisoners provide a continuity with the continuous long shots in the film. Much like the long shots, the medium shots of the prisoners in long uninterrupted camera sequences are simply a microcosm of the unending barren scenery provided by the previously explained long shots. In fact, the sense of despair is essentially personalized in these moments and we are left with a continuous plot of hopelessness. This is firstly recognized abstractly in the long shots and then summarized and understood in the medium shot sequences. The camera follows without manipulating the viewer. The viewer is ultimately left to interpret the scenes for themselves. The depiction is a heightened objectivity, a super-realism that is brought about by an economy of editing. The camera almost always stays at eye level in a medium shot of the scene. The prisoners are a metaphor for the scenery in the long shots. The two are one in the same. The focal point is almost always the crowd, there is no idea of the individual. He is ultimately lost in the vastness of the scenery. The correlation is both beautiful visually and freeing intellectually. The geography of the area is essentially a personification of the individual despair that is manifested through a communal idea of penance. Although the notion of objectivity is portrayed by the camera with long uninterrupted sequences, it is ultimately left to the viewer to make personal, subjective decisions about the state of affairs. Objectivity is only in the idea of portrayal not interpretation.
Jancso sets up the film through the long shot. The mood is established and a heightened sense of realism is portrayed through his ability to manipulate objectivity. The constant medium camera on individuals and groups alike also provide a feeling of heightened realism. We are panning and tracking with the camera. We are one not only with the individuals but also with the tensions presented through the barren minimalist scenery, juxtaposed against despairing, hopeless lives. As viewers we constantly look for the hero, or the anti hero, but are continuously denied by Jancso's manipulations. In a sense the individual is manifested by the viewer through the psychological construct of the communal; this essentially becomes our hero. The films inevitable hopelessness is disparaging, yet ultimately freeing once a broad range of human emotions are accepted. The long shot and the medium uninterrupted camera sequences provide a base for bridging this idea. It is ultimately in the camera's objectivity that we ironically find our voices. The human condition is not merely the idea of victory in the face of adversity. Jancso complicates the situation. Humanity is a construct of a multitude of emotions. It is ultimately through the acceptance of our tainted humanity that we inevitably find our individual voices. And although Jancso created a situation where humanity ultimately failed, it is through this failure that we are able to free ourselves completely. In the end it is Jancso's masterful camera work with the long shot sequences that set the tone and psychology of the film. There is a scarcity of dialogue, yet the feeling and emotion of the film is never compromised.
Bibliography
1. Horton, Andrew James "Miklós Who? A Round-up of Miklós Jancsó's career." Kinoeye - New
Perspectives on European Film. (2001)
2. Malcolm, Derek. "Miklos Jancso: The Round-up." The Guardian. (2000)
3. Schwartz, Dennis "A necessarily heavy but unforgettable viewing experience." Ozus's World -
Movie Reviews. (2004)
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/18/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Photographically brilliant, cold and bleak drama from which nonetheless it's hard to deem anything of any real human interest, or human worth.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
Full Review
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