Miklos Jancso graduated from the Hungarian Film Academy in 1950, at the age of twenty-nine. After making some short films, he directed a fairly orthodox feature in 1958. His second feature, Cantata (1962), a story of a young doctor seeking to rekindle his relationship with his peasant father, was filmed in the manner of Antonioni, a key influence on Jancso. Not until the mid-1960s did he emerge as a distinct auteur.
Jancso's major films concentrated on upheavals in Hungary's tumultuous history: World War II, military coups, and popular rebellions. He follows Soviet Montage cinema in creating drama out of collective action and historical movements. In Jancso films, individuals have little psychological identity. Instead, they become emblematic of social classes or political factions. The drama emerges out of the ways in which they are caught in a historical process.
Distancing us from the characters, the films avoid subjective devices like fantasy and refuse flashbacks and flash-forwards. What comes to the fore are naked displays of power. In The Red and the White (1967), after a peasant woman has numbly obeyed a Cossack officer's order to strip, a superior appears and curtly orders the troops to execute the officer. In The Round-Up (1965), the occupying Austrians promise a peasant that he can escape execution if he can find a partisan who has killed more men than he has. Before suffering torture or execution, victims must march in file, form circles, strip or lie down or swim a river—that is, undergo absurd ceremonies that merely display their subjection to the will of authority. Coming from a generation appalled by the revelation of wartime atrocities and the Nazi death camps, Jancso suggests that power is exercised through public humiliation and minute control of the victim's body.
Jancso's manner of treatment suits his dramas. After My Way Home (1965), he exploited abnormally long takes; the average shot in Silence and Cry (1968) runs two and a half minutes. Jancso presents the moment-by-moment oscillations in power by means of a dynamic camera that renders every situation fluid and filled with tension. To illustrate even a single Jancso shot would require several
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World History
