Since material shapes the requirements for its representation,
the methods of directors may change from film to film. Reports
on a director at work are thus beset by the impossibility
of generalising, except in the case of directors who tend
to make the same film over and over again. It is fortunate
that some of the great masters fall into this group, and
repetition may end up being a cause why Fellini and Bergman
will end up in a pantheon not accessible to capable men like
Bogdanovich or Coppola.
Certainly this is not to say that Miklós Jancsó is
a great director just because one tends to be unable to distinguish
among his films. But the fact that what distinguishes them
from each other is largely an increasing intensification
of stylistic abstraction, helps one to remember their chronology; The
Round-Up (1965), his fifth feature, held all the
formal promise of the later work, but lining up the best
of the films which followed it and analysing the degree to
which each managed to perfect certain stylistic elements,
even a layman observer will recognize that their sequence
could be none but this: The Red and the White(1967), Silence
and Cry (1968), The Confrontation (1968), Agnus
Dei (1970) and Red Psalm (1971).*
These stylistic elements are: a reduction in the number
of shots, a pre-montage in the camera, an increase in the
number of possible levels of interpretation, elimination
of the obvious, and calculated interaction of the following
dialectic elements: foreground and background, sound and
silences, prolongation and condensation of time, the logical
and the illogical, the rational and the poetic. The visual
cement is provided by Jancsó’s extraordinary
camera movements, by now his trademark, the refined orchestration
of sensual impacts, causing a constant assault on our habitual
lines of vision.
A particle of light travels reflected from an object to
the lens in our eye, is caught as a lance on a pivot in the
iris, its laser rigidity painting movement on to the retina.
Our mind is thus accustomed to assume that a movement on
the retina corresponds to a movement ‘in reality’.
In film and photography the lines are broken, because we
regard a secondary image, with its own movement in the case
of film, without physical connection to the primary image
it purports to reproduce. Try to move a lens of minus 4 or
5 dioptries, through which you are seeing a reduced image
of reality, up and down in front of your eye, and ‘reality’ will
move with it; that is the basic effect of the cinecamera,
except that we have become accustomed to accepting its falsifications.
The effect has often been analysed in moral terms, but rarely
technically; we know that reality in the cinema is illusion,
but we chalk this up to a mystic quality of the medium or
the abstraction necessitated by the need to choose a viewpoint.
Jancsó is the first who has not only perceived the
technical root of the phenomenon but is using it creatively.
All this sounds considerably more complicated than it is,
like all analysis after the fact. In practical, film-making
terms, Jancsó is reducing traditional elements to
a minimum and creating heightened motion consciousness; thus
approaching, in cinema, a Hegelian definition, whereby each
form of art has a single, central vehicle. For Jancsó,
the definition of film is the art of movement. All else only
serves its purpose: time manipulation, decor, colour, story,
sounds and drama. But shining with pristine presumptuousness,
it is the movement of the camera that creates his style.
A few weeks ago, Jancsó, his girl friend and collaborator,
Giovanna Galleardo and myself were driving back in a small
car from the Puszta to Budapest, after rain had washed out
a day’s shooting on his latest film, My Love,
Elektra, and lightning had struck the decorations,
burning the straw roofs. It was a Sunday, and on the following
Friday Jancsó was to leave for Rome to begin working
for Carlo Ponti on his next film, The Blood Countess,
to be shot in Italy near Parma. Half of Elektra (four
shots) was in the can, leaving four more shots to go. The
rain usually takes two days to dry. Jancsó had to
finish the film before leaving. I was amazed at his calmness.
He explained that he would finish the film on Tuesday and
Wednesday, shooting two shots a day instead of one, and still
make his plane. ‘Are you going to come back later for
the montage, then?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he answered, ‘I
will do it on Thursday.’
Considering that he overlaps action at the beginning and
end of each shot, and that his main aim in cutting is to
make even the seven cuts that this picture will require as
invisible as possible, the feat seemed realistic. But the
simplicity is misleading; this nonchalance (and the good
story that it makes) is only possible because by the time
he shoots, the work of making the film has already been practically
finished. Putting it on film and sticking it together is
only a requirement of the commercial need to get it seen.
This shift to ‘pre-cameratic’ creativity is another
key to his style. My Love, Elektra (the
translation is mine; the film may eventually be released
under another title) is based on a play by Laszlo Gyurko
that has been running continuously in repertory in Budapest
for the past five years. The play is an adaptation of the
Greek original, and Jancsó has again adapted the adaptation,
resurrecting both Elektra and Orestes more than once in the
course of the ‘action’ and providing – in
the script version, at least – a 20th century finish,
where a red (‘of course, red,’ he says) helicopter
carries the pair off and returns them to a world where perhaps
tolerance may become possible, after all. A hope upon which,
mercifully without elaboration, the film is to end.
Jancsó is working as usual with Gyula Hernádi,
his favourite scriptwriter, a noted figure on the Hungarian
literary scene. The camerawork is by Janós Kende,
who has shot all the recent Jancsó films, including
the ones made in Italy , and who must be considered as the
third foot of the creative triangle. It is, essentially,
the friendly, run-in collaboration of these three, the smooth,
by now often wordless understanding they have of each other
as people and of the material Jancsó throws up, that
is at the base of the uncanny, almost oily accuracy of the
finished products. Every angle, every meaning, every movement
is worked out in elaborate detail as the rehearsals advance.
The finished ‘kép’ (the pronunciation
of which, a long, drawn out k-e-h-p, most suitably conjures
up its meaning; it approximately translates to ‘one-shot
sequence’, or, as Pasolini terms it, a ‘piano-sequenza’)
is only the crystallisation of innumerable eliminations.
In My Love, Elektra, the eight képs
run to an average length of between 10 and 12½ minutes.
There is a script; it runs to about 50 pages and is based
on the play, thus consisting almost entirely of dialogue.
Every ten pages or so Jancsó has marked the top of
a sheet with a scribble in his strong, somewhat angular but
quite fanciful handwriting: 1st kép, 2nd kép,
and so on. The spoken lines are theatrical, stylised, meandering
monologues, some running to three or four pages of typescript.
There is a bare indication of action, but no camera movements,
no indication of focal length, no lighting instructions.
Obviously, since the whole film is shot in a daylight exterior.
The set is essentially the Puszta, the Hungarian plain.
The word itself just means empty, or devoid of, the place
where naught is. It is the Apai Puszta, the ‘small’ puszta around
the town of Kecskemét , more exactly the village of
Kunszentmiklós , and Agnus Dei was
shot here; the house which was the central element of decor
in that film appears in the background of this one. I am
being assured that the name of the village (‘the place
of Saint Miklós’) predates Jancsó’s
choice of it as a favourite site.
These plains are absolutely flat, grassy, clay alluvial
deposits. Where a tree creates a perpendicular exception,
you may be sure it has been planted by human hands. The rain
doesn’t make mud; it makes a slippery, grey mush, on
which horses slip and fall, and which provides the raw material
for the unfired clay-and-hay bricks of which Jancsó’s
decors are built. These are a bare minimum of structures:
a gigantic hay loft open to the air on three sides, an open
court which is basically just a thick mud-wall enclosure,
some clay brick columns topped by a thatched lean-to and,
in the distance, some round, pointed trulli , resembling
those of Puglia , indicating the location of a well. Most
of the structures are white-washed, resembling both the typical
Puszta house and the Greek originals where Elektra might
have been set.
In fact, the visual aspect of the place is indeterminate.
This could be the Hungary of the Middle Ages or the Greece
of antiquity. The culture of which we see manifestations
is, as Hernádi points out to me, ‘vaguely nomad-agricultural
mystic’ and not historically defined. As such, My
Love, Elektra fits in well with Jancsó’s
other Puszta films like Agnus Dei and Red
Pslam, which, while defining their period, liberally
transgressed both history and rationale.
The king is played by József Madarás, the
perennial epileptic priest from other Jancsó films,
and Elektra herself by Mari Töröcsik, who played
the daughter in Károly Makk’s Love.
What Jancsó has woven into the story is his central
concern for the violence that men do to each other and the
futility of it, recreating in this legendary setting his
relatively conventional anti-Stalinist theme. We see the
familiar hordes of peasants, chased by horsemen carrying
torches emanating red smoke; the naked peasant girls (this
time accompanied by naked men) going through elaborate, inconclusive
rites, marching across the horizon in flashes of nude line-ups;
an incongruous aside of a reflecting pool in which body paint
has been applied hippie-fashion to the more attractive of
the nude female backsides; and the ever-encroaching, circling
whirlpools of bland-faced lackeys of dictatorship, just allowing
the space for the straight lines of old women in white to
march by, before unleashing their whips and cracking them
ever closer to the group of the innocent, misled herd of
the erstwhile faithful.
Essentially the work of putting all these by now familiar
elements together is akin to that of an orchestra conductor,
rehearsing one of his own compositions with his chamber group.
Nobody seems much concerned with the content; it is all a
matter of how the form chosen can best express it. There
is no interference from the group in the message department;
it is quite clear that Jancsó is the master provider
and the apostle in one. As another Hungarian director, with
a smile but not without envy, called him: the socialist prince.
The working day starts when the sun goes down .
In the small houses of the village where the crew live, the
members of the inner circle stir and move down towards the
end of the lane where Jancsó and Giovanna share a
house with Kende. There may or may not be dinner, depending
on whether anybody has thought of shopping. The assistant
director (one of three) usually cooks; sometimes Yvette Biro,
former editor (recently removed from office by party decree)
of Film Kultura, Hungary ’s intellectual
film monthly, and Jancsó’s old friend and collaborator,
does the chores. Hernádi, Kende, Gyurko (who is there
the whole time, hoping against hope to salvage some part
of his play), some of the actors, the set nurse, a singer
and his girl, Yvette, Giovanna, myself, and an occasional
technician or grip, sit around the table idly sipping a variety
of Tokay wines and other spirits. Somebody has actually popped
some corn, the singer’s guitar gives out a few hesitant
chords. It’s the start of the session from which tomorrow’s
shooting will eventually grow.
The cross-fertilisation of historical epochs utilised in
this film expresses Jancsó’s view that the problems
of mankind have not changed, and that despite the patent
hopelessness of our social and political cul-de-sac, there
is no reason to think that mankind will not again save itself
by the thin strands of its perennial hope for a better tomorrow.
In this Elektra he is using musical elements
from Westerns, and the theme song is actually a composition
made up by a young Hungarian folk singer about the mythical
hero Lee Van Cleef has become for thousands of Hungarian
moviegoers. Jancsó is not only using the music: the
whole song is in the film, including the reference to the
actor by name. The first evening I am there is spent in rehearsing
the song, over and over again, with everyone finally joining
in the singing, and in adjusting the rhythm and the words
to the exact needs of the scene in the film where they will
be used. It is tomorrow’s scene, and it is a scene
between Elektra and Orestes. As the wine and music get to
all of us, slowly and warmly the problems are solved. In
the end, long after midnight , with the damned song engraved
forever in everyone’s head, but the film assured of
another well-ordained kép, we trundle home, each to
his own Puszta farmhouse.
If you want to follow the creation of a sequence from its
inception, you have to get up early. By the time I disentangle
myself from the well-meaning daughter of my landlord, with
whom communication is by word-kép, or single-word
sentences, and realise that the loo is in the yard and breakfast
not on the programme, the few cars that go to the set have
long since left. I have to go with Giovanna, who speaks little
Hungarian and thus is allowed latecomer’s privileges,
usually having a car sent back for her around 9.30. This
means that Jancsó has been rehearsing for two-and-a-half
hours by the time I arrive. It also means that the five hundred
extras, who have come down from Budapest in a special train
and a fleet of smoky buses, have been up since shortly after
midnight . There is no overtime, but the day rate is still
better than the factory, the school or the shops.
Of the thirteen girls and six men who will appear nude
in the scene (apart from two of the main actors, who do the
same), one is an amateur actress from a small street theatre
group in Buda, a few are models, one is a strip-tease artist,
and the rest are either from the school of actresses or have
been picked at random from among Budapest shoppers. To appear
in a Jancsó film is like a ticket to stardom; the
aura that attaches to me just because I appear to be a friend
of his is immense. Weeks later, when I call up the Hungarian
embassy in London for help with the translation of a Hungarian
word, the switchboard operator, remote from her homeland
but evidently imbued with national spirit, recognises the
word as being part of the title of a film, and proudly adds ‘…directed
by Jancsó.’
The actual preparations for the day’s kép
begin with the laying of the track. There is always a track,
sometimes 60 or 70 feet long, curving in and out of the buildings,
like a children’s train set. But considering the complexities
and acrobatics which the camera performs along its lines,
these are remarkably simply, sometimes forming half an ellipse
or the form of two ‘J’s, joined at the top and
standing on each other, or just half or three-quarters of
a slightly squashed circle. On these tracks the camera rides
at the end of a counterweighted beam, extending some ten
feet outwards, and itself balanced on a hydraulic telescoping
lift, that can raise it twelve or fifteen feet in the air.
If you have ever dreamt of floating through the world free
from restrictions of weight or space, this would be the vehicle
you would have to use. As it is, it carries only your eyes.
As Kende, who operates his own camera, including the zooming,
and only has an assistant to help pull focus, rides atop
this contraption with his eyes glued to the finder, the rehearsal
starts. It can take a whole morning, and sometimes a whole
day, often leaving just enough time before the light goes
to shoot the take. The best description I can think of that
might resemble the movements being rehearsed is a fish tank
full of water, enormously enlarged to include the entire
set with actors, camera, tracks and crew, with the camera
representing a delectable lady-fish aimlessly gliding about
in her three-dimensional realm, pursued by every living thing
in sight.
For despite the fact that ostensibly it is she, the camera,
that observes what surrounds her and moves to do so, in reality
every movement is being planned for her and every action
exists only for her approval. Thus order is reversed: it
is reality which is set in motion by deft manipulation in
order to be at the right place at the right time. As soon
as she has passed them, actors jump up, throw off a costume
or don another, run ahead of her along her planned path,
and crouch down again ready for another fleeting close-up.
Whole herds of horses, over whom she has passed, gallop in
a wide circle behind her back to catch up again with their
own image where it has been planned on her itinerary. And
central actors, courted by he concentric embrace, move against
her in their own curves, creating that doubly broken line
of vision which makes some viewers dizzy. That is why the
line of the track can be relatively simple: the major part
of the movement is orchestrated for the camera in a ballet
of calculated fabrication.
Lines are spoken, but in whisper tones; they will be dubbed
in later at the correct levels. The whole thing is a military
operation of exacting accuracy. No deviations are permitted,
a few inches off and a shot might have to be repeated. The
same goes for the sun: a few degrees Kelvin off, and the
colours of the shots won’t match. I have spent entire
days waiting for just that degree of cloudiness that the
previous kép was shot in. On the day in question,
the 500 extras had to return to Budapest without having worked,
for just this reason. It may seem simple to say that everything
is shot in one set in one light and in only eight shots with
the whole montage created within the frame, but it isn’t
as simple to put this into operation.
The instructions to the actors are primarily choreographic.
The main personnages are more often than not in
the foreground, sometimes in full close-ups, while action
of no less importance goes on at twenty yards distance behind
and unsharp. There is a great deal of play with shifting
focus, and a good deal of zooming, but the zoom is not used
to approach or repulse an object or a face, but to change
framing, and to arrive at the next object in the camera’s
path with a shorter or longer focal length then saw the preceding
one. The differing psychological effects created by different
focal lengths of the camera lens are taken into consideration;
unlike many directors, who use zooming in its banal, TV-application
of changing distance from the viewpoint to the object, Jancsó uses
it to see a face in greater or lesser distortion, and with
greater or lesser flattening (the first being caused by the
short and the second by the long focal lengths). Thus, what
the actors are told is only where to be at exactly what point,
where to look and what to do, and how long to remain there.
Since they have often participated in the previous evening’s
session, they know what is expected of them in terms of dramatic
content without Jancsó having to insist unduly.
This spatial choreography, however, requires constant cues,
and thus necessitates constant communication between crew
and actors during the shooting. This is accomplished by a
network or walkie-talkie systems, which activate loudspeakers
hidden all over the set. Each crew member carries a broadcasting
unit, some set for unison and some for diversity wavelengths.
The air is filled with a constant crackle and electronic
interference, and on the afternoon of the rainstorm a stranded
loudspeaker in a lonely puddle in the middle of nowhere in
the Puszta continued for an hour to broadcast happy weather
reports being exchanged between ham radio sailors at sea
off Sardinia . The wavelength had got tangled up in a resonance
band. Needless to say, the Tyrrhenian sea was calm and the
sun was shining. Fortunately, batteries manufactured in Hungary
have a way of running down very quickly. After a while, only
a sad occasional pip-squeak drifted in to us, huddled under
makeshift straw roofing and freezing in clothes soaked by
a cloudburst.
An uncanny dues ex machina atmosphere thus pervades
the set. Everything is subjected to the tyranny of the camera
path, and everyone who sees something about to go wrong begins
to scream into his walkie-talkie, adding to the general din.
Jancsó himself is more irascible than one would expect
under the suave exterior of the socialist prince, who in
his private life and interviews seem totally imperturbable.
He is wont to scream at the top of his voice and let loose
the worst of Hungarian curse words (also one of the commonest
of that language of the steppes, and meaning the sexual organ
of a horse). But he returns equally fast to total equilibrium
when his outburst has done its work of pulling things back
into shape.
While rehearsals can go on a whole day, shooting is short.
Each kép is usually repeated only four or five times,
rarely going to seven or eight takes. The same night the
exposed film is developed, after having been rushed to the
studio in Budapest , and after four days of shooting, I was
able to view the first half of the film in rushes. It is,
of course, unlike any screening of rushes I had ever attended:
seeing the four shots, I had seen the first half of the finished
film. The Hungarians use Kodak emulsions, but they develop
it themselves, and they develop it excellently well. Within
hours of its arrival, positive rushes are printed. Work-print
seems as good in quality as a corrected one.
Although the cutting can be taken care of in a single day,
that doesn’t of course mean that the film will actually
be ready to be projected as soon as it’s been edited.
In fact, the whole process of finishing it takes a lot of
work, and it is only because over the years Jancsó has
managed to develop a faithful and well-trained staff of collaborators
that he can afford to be absent from Hungary while the film
is being looped for synchronisation, dialogues are being
re-recorded, the soundtracks are mixed and finally a print
is married. Clearly he will have to return to Hungary when
some of this work has been done, and the film will not, in
effect, be ready to be seen before the autumn or early winter.
But all these are technical necessities which Jancsó considers
essential but extraneous to his creative work, and it is
the warm and fertile moment of the evening discussions which
precede the shooting and the detailed, critical preparation
of the camera movements that make up the exciting moments
of film-making for him. There is always singing and a bit
of drinking, friends drive down from Budapest , it is a real
festivity. In fact, when he is not shooting, the circle of
his friends and collaborators in Budapest is a little less
alive, a little less connected to the stream of life. He
has the ability to make each and every person feel important,
never contradicts anyone directly, and achieves his devotions
obliquely; like a truly encompassing creator he is automatically
at the centre of all activities he shares. Even when he sings,
as he often does, with a smile of ridicule but also an air
of nostalgia, the old partisan songs from his youth, people
join in without the comments which in today’s Hungary
normally greet expressions from the romantic days. In a country
that has come a long way from one form of Stalinism and has
still not accepted that it is heading for another, the leisurely
disdain for the generation of the war is one of the few ways
of manifesting a rebellious spirit.
In 1945 Miklós Jancsó was 23, and was active
in the free university movement of those days; Confrontation is
his real story. He was formed under Stalinism, and it has
remained, in one form or another, a major influence. ‘I
am an expert of Stalinism,’ he says, ‘but that
no longer interests anybody today. I am no longer young.
I have done many things in my life, all useless. I no longer
believe in big causes. Now I want to do different things,
cook, for example. And to discover physical relationships,
direct relationships. In my films I want to show that humanity
can’t go on the way it’s going. On the other
hand, I have played Christ long enough. What’s the
point? We know how the end will come. In fact, sometimes
I think we’re a bit ahead of schedule.’
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*
This list does not include the two films Jancsó made
in Italy in 1973/74, with the help of Italian television, Technique
and Rite and Rome Wants Caesar Back,
nor Winter Wind (Sirocco,
1969, a French co-production), which I have not seen, nor La
Pacifista (1970), which I dislike. It thus contains
all his totally Hungarian films and none of the ones made
elsewhere.
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© Copyright
Gideon Bachmann 1974 . No part of this article may be reprinted
without permission of the author.
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