The Round-Up (1966) User Reviews (15)

Radey's infamy. Jancsó's portrayal of a cruel, bleak torture centre

[oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx · 8/10 · 5 January 2009]

With these early films of Miklós Jancsó (people don't realise he's still making films, with one slated for 2009, and his technique is now totally different) where he shows dehumanised power systems, there's always a dual interest for me. You get the kind of political comment, but you also get the love of nature as a counterpoint, I think one observer noted of the Red and the White, that the main character was the river Volga. Perhaps he's proffering country walks as an alternative to power games, as wise a suggestion as any you'll see in a film.

Anyway in the Round-up we have a whitewashed stockade out on the Hungarian plains. One Count Gedeon Radey has been given the task by the "Apostolic Emperor" of rounding up all the bad sorts, the outlaws. This is back in the late 1800s, we are led to believe that the monarchy has become ignorant and hard-hearted to the populace in the countryside, banditry and revolt foment. Radey interns all these "bad sorts" in the stockade. He wants to find out which of them are undesirables, which he does through a series of psychological games. It's reasonably clear that all the men rounded up aren't ignorant thieves, one for example has travelled extensively and speaks four languages.

It's almost fetishistic the setting, you've got an achingly beautiful shimmering plain of grass that reminded me of when I was a child, strange sensations linked to nature and story-telling. Then you've got all these military men with their advanced piping, tabs, epaulets and sabres. The wild birds are trilling throughout the entire film, except at night when the cicadas chirp. The wind flutters the black feathered cockades on the hats of the officers. You can feel the flaming June heat radiate off the whitewash. Jancso appears to have fetishistically had the sets reconstructed from drawings in historical documents, along with a gibbet that Pasolini would have been proud to display in Salo.

We see for example a man being lead out of solitary confinement, a soldier asks him his name, and the man replies "You already know, Varjù, Bèla" the soldier replies almost lovingly, "Ah yes, Bèla Varjù, you've had many a beating from me haven't you?". Horses ride in circles, men are marched in circles, insanity abounds. The film is basically an exercise in dehumanisation. For me it's not offering much in the way of commentary, unlike the Red and the White which is setting out the aleatory nature of war. The Round-up is perhaps a protest about what went on in the past, an ode to the dead who died for a free Hungary.

The important person in the film is Lajos Kossuth, although you'll never see him. He is one of the famous personages in Hungarian History. He became famous via a series of letters he wrote that were very well received whilst he was a deputy to a Count at the National Diet. He was a liberal of note, he wanted an end to feudalism, and he wanted taxation of the aristocracy, and to remove their right to pass their lands and castles and such like on from one generation to the next without taxation. Anyway he had an interesting life which I'm sure you can read about elsewhere. And his was the spirit of the majority of the interned, although there were brigands too. I think it's key to understand history in the movies of Jancsó, otherwise, in this case you might be led to believe that all the prisoners are simply bad people.

Radey, I believe is only seen once in the film, but he stands against the spirit of Kossuth and behind the "apostolic emperor".

This is not a nasty film in the sense that it doesn't stand up much to the level of horror you would see in a modern exposition on the same subject, or anything like the torture porn of current sensation. That for me I think is a good thing. There is one scene though of terrible evil genius. Every day womenfolk are allowed to come to the stockade and deliver food for the prisoners. One man who is threatened with strangulation unless he turns informant peaches to the authorities that one of the women is in league with a rebel leaders (she is probably his sweetheart). It is arranged for many of the rebels to be sat high atop the stockade wall (perhaps 50ft high). They are then forced to watch this women whipped to death as she runs down a corridor of sadistic soldiers on the open plain. It is too much for three of the men who plunge head first down to their deaths. The techniques of the Radey and his soldiers are ingeniously cruel, they make you complicit in your own demise and the demise of comrades, they bewilder you. It may surprise you that throughout the entire film the soldiers appear almost gentle.

Obviously, essential watching.

Definitely A Film You Won't Forget

[JohnF-8 · 8/10 · 19 February 2001]

Miklos Jancso's The Round Up is not concerned with character development or a complex plot. While this may annoy some, it suits this film perfectly fine. The movie feels very cold and remote, almost Kubrickian in content and style. Surprisingly, there is very little violence in the film although it seems like that the film is very brutal. Perhaps this is because of emotional hopelessness most of the characters experience in the film. A very worthwhile experience overall, rent it, although just don't be prepared to come away smiling.

Raw, simple, visually stunning

[pocketapocketaqueep · 9/10 · 15 April 2014]

I took a punt on this one needing out of the house on a holiday Monday. It was short enough, ranked in certain quarters as a classic, and had made it onto those most worthy of cinéaste lists as an undeservedly overlooked masterpiece. It sounded like one of those films, like Koyaanisqatsi, that, like Twain's classics, everyone wants to have watched and nobody much wants to watch; one which I would sit through with a lot of deep and meaningful thoughts in my mind, which would stay with me for years but be approximately as enjoyable as the last three fifths of all those long form essays on climate change, crypto currencies or the situation in the Ukraine I mean to get round to. Some of the write ups on it made it sound as if there was barely any dialogue.

In fact, though the dialogue is reasonably sparse, there are few long scenes without any dialogue. Indeed it is important enough that the subtitles caused me problems. I have been watching films with Czech subtitles for a few years now and have few problems with that from a language point of view. What I do tend to notice, though, is that the comprehensibility of subtitles varies widely. Sometimes subtitles flash up and are cancelled so quickly you don't have time to scan them. This can be the case even where they are not replaced with others. The viewer in these films begins to distrust the subtitles and scans the text quicker than is natural, taking little in even in those moments where the subtitles remain in place. This is far more often a problem than the poor idiom often seen in Czech subtitles. I don't know much about the technology of subtitles, but it looked as if the text was applied to the copy of the film in this instance, probably many years ago, and being essentially burned into the film itself, parts of the text disappeared for a number of frames. I missed a number of exchanges because of this and would like to watch the film again with English subtitles for this reason.

I'm in two minds, too, about the need to read up on the background of the film beforehand. As with a Forward in a classic novel, I find that knowing too much about a film before first seeing it can detract from its immediacy. With The Round-up, though, I might perhaps have benefited from knowing a little more. At least with a film, and certainly a film of this length, I can see it again more easily than I might find time to read a Victorian novel.

Knowing as little as I did about the background, however, it is certainly true that was plenty to keep my interest, both on the human level (which in places I would have understood better had the subtitles been a touch better), and on the visual level. As far as the human level goes, there are scenes here that could gainfully be projected in lectures on game theory and the prisoner's dilemma. The psychological methods used by the captors are brutally effective and it is impossible to watch without thinking how well you would fare in such circumstances. Purely aesthetically, both the landscape here and the people are so full of character. János Gajdar's face is just one of those that fills the screen and though stoic, almost static much of the time, speaks of many years of rough breaks and a dangerous contained emotion.

They don't make films like this anymore in part because they don't make men like that anymore.

THE ROUND-UP (Miklos Jancso', 1966) ****

[Bunuel1976 · 10/10 · 21 March 2008]

I have made of this most notable of Hungarian films a personal holy grail ever since I laid eyes on an illustrated two-page spread found in an old British magazine of my father's entitled "The Movie" – and now, over 20 years later, I have finally managed to track the thing down and, thanks to the valiant R2 DVD label Second Run, add it to my ever-increasing eclectic home video collection. For the record, despite knowing of its imminent release on DVD, I was seriously contemplating traveling to London for last week's big-screen showing of THE ROUND-UP at the Curzon Mayfair (with Jancso' in attendance, no less) – but, alas, it is just as well that I didn't go because of what occurred over here a couple of days prior to the event: a tragically unnecessary death in the family which, worse still, turned into a national tragedy (with long-term social and legal repercussions to boot). But life, pitiless and unjust as it is, has to go on and, slowly but surely, I have now jumped back into my old routine of film watching and reviewing...

Although there have been other noteworthy Hungarian film-makers before (Paul Fejos) and since (Istvan Szabo), Miklos Jancso' is still perhaps the most important. Ironically, while he was the first one I personally became aware of, my viewing of THE ROUND-UP has actually been my very first encounter with his work – although, now that the first step has been taken, it will be followed by three more in a few days' time. Sometimes it can happen to a film buff that the actual experience of watching the movie, about which one has heard a lot and eagerly longed for, turns out to be underwhelming but, thankfully, this has not proved to be the case for me with THE ROUND-UP. Indeed, the phrase "unlike anything you've ever seen before" is often freely banded about by unimaginative film reviewers – but this description is unquestionably apt when applied to Jancso''s masterpiece.

In that enticing and insightful article I mentioned above written by Jancso''s first assistant director on the film itself (and which I immediately re-read upon the film's termination), it is stated that while THE ROUND-UP was based on factual events which had taken place in Hungary in 1869 and could have easily been shot on the actual locations of castles and fortresses, Jancso' sought a different visual approach altogether with regards to sets and costumes – "half-way between reality and abstraction", as he brilliantly puts it. Since I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with other observations he made on the film, I don't see why I can't quote him some more: "It has a coherent, easy-to-read story – comprehensible at a single viewing – and at the same time a deep, intellectual, almost abstract parable".

The abstraction being alluded to is not restricted to visual (literally, black and white) terms alone – where the stark whiteness of the prison-fortress walls and the hooded Hungarian convicts memorably contrast with the black capes and uniforms of the Austrian oppressors – but also to its very narrative style: while it becomes clear early on that the subject of the relentless interrogations is the identification and capture of legendary rebel leader Sandor (who never actually appears in person but whose presence permeates the entire film), people appear and disappear with insistent frequency and, although there are definite characters which take precedence over others, there is no true main central figure one can clearly identify with and root for.

Thematically, it is oppression and degradation which are the key elements: right from the animated prologue at the start displaying a succession of torture devices, we later watch men made to stand in the rain and a woman stripped naked and whipped to death with canes (the sight of which sends her despairing spouse leaping to his death). But the oppressors' ultimate weapon of humiliation is treachery: through vain promises of instant freedom, prisoners – and, at one point, a grieving mother and, later still, father and son – are repeatedly induced to betray one another (via abrupt, silent motions) but, instead of liberty, they are rewarded with a bullet in the back, the retribution of their own people and, in the supremely ironic finale, cold-blooded mass extermination. In this context, the character of Gajdor is especially poignant (and even amusing in a blackly comedic way) as he pathetically keeps reminding his captors that, even though he has already fingered several worse criminals than himself, he is a prisoner still. Interestingly, this paradox can also be applied to the ingenious location of the prison-fortress (within which practically the whole film is set) – rebuilt specifically for this production in the middle of uninhabited plains that stretch as far and wide as the eye can see.

Miklos Jancso' is renowned for his rigorous visual style and, even from this one sampling of his work – albeit that which is generally perceived as being his chef d'oeuvre – to say that I was rightfully impressed would be putting it mildly. The constantly moving camera, on the one hand encircling the prisoners as if it was one of them and encompassing wide vistas of soldiers astride their horses on the other, necessarily limits the utilization of close-ups to the barest minimum – as if purposefully adopting the impassive stance of an historical observer. For this viewer, it literally wove a mesmeric spell the likes of which I have only experienced once before during a movie – Robert Bresson's A MAN ESCAPED (1956) which, perhaps significantly, also deals with incarceration.

Thundering hooves, wailing women

[lizard-18 · 10/10 · 21 February 1999]

The plot description doesn't say it all, by any means. Thundering hooves, veiled and wailing women, desolate landscapes with waving seas of grass and the occasional forbidding stone fortress or burned house, this movie appeals to nearly all of the five senses. It's been three years since I saw it first, and scenes still flash vividly through my head. The harsh faces of the guards, the equally harsh faces of the prisoners. Blunt and brutal deaths. And overhead, the sun burning down, always.

The cosmic round

[chaos-rampant · 12 October 2012]

Jancso does it. When Jancso does it, it's a mixture of getting it right and perceptibly missing, both at the same time. He is not perfect, nor seems to strive for it. But he surely has some of the best ideas about films in all of cinema. In the actual films, it seems as if you are watching pure intuition, the sketch rather than the finished film. I am saying this as a good thing. He sculpts in air, most do in marble.

He gets just the last note off here, so you leave this thinking of the ways you would do it - a good thing again. It is the scene of betrayal of the whole rebel troop (until then in disguise), which he does in a rather awkward manner.

But what powerful devices before that!

The main setting is a forced labor camp in the middle of nowhere. We start with a 'real place', the white stucco on adobe walls reflecting barren sunlight. This is gradually abstracted into something else, by repetition and time. It is done so well, it deserves to be studied.

The place as the totality of existence: there is no way out, people languish in mindless work and routine, having to please a higher moral authority that decides life and death. Love is always kept at arm's reach. They are all sinners in that place, most of them murderers. It is a bleak view of life, very Hungarian, but you can work with it.

A man who must find another prisoner to take his place in the executioner's scaffold, someone worse than him. Someone who has killed more. He does the rounds of the place pleading with officers, cajoling, betraying, a spineless coward despised by everyone.

A second man who in order to be set free, has to convince he is not someone else and is betrayed by the first as that person.

A father and son playing a game of storytelling chess with the prison warden.

So much is handled in just the right way here, I had to hold my breath. The point is that there is no way out of life, except dead. And there are different ways to go, some of them more dignified. The only certain thing is that we all have to go, and you get to see the pain and humiliation of clinging to life that is transient. There is no glory to this, just the way it has to be. Everything else are games that pass the time, storytelling, fiction, deceit and ritual - see if the same invented rituals and thrills do not resurface across poker tables and the films we see.

We are eventually unsure if the scoundrel really was guilty, or merely framed. We are unsure if the other man is not who he says. Whether father or son strangled him. Whether or not the rebel leader was among the group.

We are in the dark about pretty damn near everything - except that games have been played, with the losers removed from the cosmic round.

Ideological in a stylistic way

[Balthazar-5 · 7/10 · 7 May 2005]

Life comes along at a variable pace, and we are constantly re-positioning our gaze to obtain the optimum information in order to understand the situation we are in. This is replicated in the cinema through the mise en scène and editing of the scenes. Since the 1930s there has been an either explicit or implicit debate as to whether editing within the scene is a good or bad thing, with Andre Bazin rooting for the unity of the image against montage (editing). Fifteen years before this film, Hitchcock set down a marker with 'Rope' (and to a lesser extent 'Under Capricorn') that scenes, indeed whole films can be made without much in the way of editing, by simply organising the action and camera movement to reveal the same information in a more continuous way.

Enter Miklos Jancso. With this film he became something of a celebrity in intellectually active film circles by structuring it to be shot in the main, in long takes. Does it work? Well, it works in one way, and that is that it draws attention to the Hungarian plains in which it was shot and which, during the numerous long slow pans that we see, seem to stretch forever across the landscape. Looking at it again after almost forty years, I find it difficult to believe that it made such a big kerfuffle. Long held takes DO enhance suspense - hence Hitchcock's temporary enthusiasm for them - but they seem artificial as they do not mimic the action of the eye, which is always on the lookout for something more interesting elsewhere (hence Hitchcock's enthusiasm being only temporary!).

The 'rounding-up' of prisoners that it portrays is an OK subject for a film, but I think we would have been much more emotionally involved with the characters if we had been treated to reaction shots and the like.

Still, see it as a theoretical/historical curiosity.

No way out

[xaggurat · 10/10 · 22 May 2007]

Szegénylegények is one of the best films I've seen. Even though it is not very violent or graphic, I went through same emotional scale as I did watching Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo. Group of men, subdued and prisoned, are submitted to different traps by their jailers to find their leader. There's no way out, just another trap after another. A friend who I watched it with commented that it's like Kafka without any humor.

Black & white film suits The Round Up perfectly. Contrast in photography, white buildings and dark figures give a very cold feeling, which contributes to movie's hopeless atmosphere.

From the Habsburg empire via the Soviet Union to the European Union

[frankde-jong · 6/10 · 29 November 2023]

The two best known films of Niclos Jancso are situated during a war. "The red and the white" (1967) is situated during the Russian civil war and the background of "The round up" (1966) is an Hungarian uprise against the Habsburg empire.

I deliberately used the words "situated during a war" because both films are not war films in the strict sense of the word. "The round up" plays in an internment camp in which the guards try to find out the role the different prisoners have played in the uprising. We see no fighting but a lot of torture, often of a psychological nature. Another similarity with "The red and the white" is the role nudity and the accompanied humiliation plays in this torture.

Films are often categorised as either plot driven or character driven. The films of Jancso are neither. They are sometimes characterized by the interplay between landscape and characters. "The round up" is a perfect example. The internment camp is situated extremely remotely at the Hungarian puszta. In the internment camp the prisoners are sometimes obliged to walk in circles on the courtyard, a bag put over their heads. This gives a remarkable geometry from which the title of the film is derived.

The most striking aspect of the film however is it's continued historical relevance. The film is explicitly about the oppression of the Hungarian people by the Habsburg empire. Without any doubt it is implicitly also about the oppression of the Hungarian people by the Soviet Union from 1945 onwards. Think also about the films Sergei Eisenstein made about "Ivan the Terrible" (1944, 1958). Stalin loved this films until he realised that part two was also about himself.

So far the historical relevance seems to end in 1989. Recently however some Hungarians, at least the followers of Victor Orban, seem to consider the European Union as a new oppresser. Since the Brexit in 2016 there is renewed interest in the disintegration of the Habsburg empire as a possible (worst case) scenario for the European Union.

Kafka in the Puszta

[dromasca · 9/10 · 24 December 2018]

Cinematography in Eastern Europe during the 40 years of the Communist regimes was subject to very close ideological and artistic supervision, as the rulers understood very well the power of cinema as a propaganda tool, either explicit in the newsreels or documentary films or implicit as mass entertainment. Yet, talents of exception existed, cinema schools and exceptional directors and actors made memorable movies which fought censorship and bureaucratic intrusion to make films written in their own language - a language that was eluding direct critics of the oppressive systems but were yet establishing through image and visual metaphors the communication between the artists and their audiences. Although lesser known than their Polish and Czech counterparts, the Hungarian school had also at least two top level directors - Miklós Jancsó and István Szabó, and was also continuing a school of film makers and cinematographers who had made it to Hollywood in the first half of the century. 'The Round-Up' (the original title is 'Szegénylegények' which would translate approximately as 'The Poor Lads') is one of the best if not the best film of Miklós Jancsó, considered also as one of the best Hungarian movies ever made. I have seen it 52 years after its release, and all the reasons and the exceptional qualities are still here.

In one of the few concessions that Jancsó may have made to the ideological kommissars the introductory part of the film places the story in a very specific historic moment - 1869, two decades after the revolutions that shook Europe in the middle of the 19th century and which led to the formation of the dual Austro-Hungarian empire. As the last pockets of resistance were liquidated, the remaining patriots were gathered in a sort of concentration camps in the middle of the endless Hungarian plains (the 'puszta'). No means were spared to identify and eliminate the heads of the revolt, including torture, blackmail, and the use of informing traitors. However everything in the tone, the style, the text indicates that Jancsó was aiming higher and was telling an universal story, one which is the same as the one told by many survivors of camps and prisons under authoritarian regimes at many times and in many places in the world. But even if the allusions to the lost fight for freedom are to be read in the context of the Hungarian history, we should not forget that the film was made in a country that only ten years earlier was invaded and its revolution crushed by another neighboring empire - the Soviet Union.

There are several reasons that make the watching of this film a cinematographic experience that is hard to forget. First of all the cinematography. 'The Round-Up' is filmed in black-and-white and the perfect composition of each frame, the dynamic of the movements and the aesthetic expression remind the early films of Ingmar Bergman. The setting is majestic with the horizon of the Hungarian plains visible almost all the time and building a permanent contrast with the concentrationary universe the characters are living in. There is a lot of suffering and there are some hard scenes in the film, but all these are sublimate and the heroes (even the villain ones) seem to keep a trace of dignity at any moment. The dialogs bring to mind Kafka and other writers who brought up in a more or less visible manner the absurd language of the bureaucratic and repressive systems. At the time of its release and more than half of century later 'The Round-Up' stands as a powerful and straggled shout for freedom.

an ardent cri de coeur that mercilessly yanks the fig leaf off human cruelty

[lasttimeisaw · 8/10 · 19 January 2020]

"In the third act, cunning skulduggery is played up to reveal the naïveté of the corralled preys, a false promise takes an about-face to take the winds out of those elated's sails, a cog in the wheel doesn't have a prayer to be reprieved, Jancsó's allegorical upbraiding (especially in the wake of Hungary's failed 1956 uprising against Soviet Russia) hits like a gut punch, miracle never occurs to the defeated, persistence can hardly be parlayed into other people's mercy, not least in the political imbroglio."

read my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore.

Some Films Are Only for Filmmakers

[blacklove · 3/10 · 31 March 2007]

Do I believe that some films are only for filmmakers? Yes! This is a film only for the absolute lover of cinema. Not for those who proclaim loudly, "I love movies!" but have never seen a film by Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, and Federico Fellini. In fact, if you have never heard those three names, or if you have only heard those names but are not familiar with their work (and are not interested in their work), then you are not a lover of cinema and The Round Up is not the film for you!

The Round Up is directed by Miklos Jancso (pronounced "Yahn-cho") who is considered to be one of the first stars of the Hungarian New Wave. Jancso had studied law (holds a doctorate), ethnography, and art history before he entered the Budapest Academy, from which he graduated in 1950. The style for which Jancso would become famous- a style of extended long takes sustained by rhythmic tracking movements of the camera and optical traveling through the zoom lens- was displayed to the world at Cannes in 1966.

Incidents of historical events from the Hungarian past are the focus of many Jancso films, and is the focus of The Round Up. It is a film about the political police of the Austro- Hungarian monarchy as they attempt to unmask Sandor Rozsa, the chief of a Rebel army group during the 1848 Revolution, which was led by Lajos Kossuth, who is now operating as a local bandit. The police round up hundreds of prisoners who are mostly peasants, herdsmen, suspected outlaws, but most of them innocent civilians. From then on the viewer gets to see scenes of interrogation, torture and political terror to force inmates into mutual betrayal.

This is a film that is aesthetically stark and visually stunning. The mise en scene camera work will impress most filmmakers, but their is no linear three act structure storytelling here. This is another reason why I say this is a film only for cinema lovers. What you get from this film is great visual style, not a manipulated emotional connection to the story. Yes, it is horrific to see scenes of torture, but because you don't get to truly know and identify with one or a few characters emotions don't resonate.

This film is only to be watched to observe a director with great visual style. The Round Up demonstrates that Jancso was a master of the Hungarian New Wave aesthetic whose cinematic structure was dependent upon widescreen composition, the long take, and the zoom lens.

Introduction of Jancso's mature personal symbols and stylistic obsessions are put forth in this film, they include: the use of nudity to signify humiliation, the totally impersonal depiction of cruelty and violence, the menacing image of incessantly circling horsemen on the empty spaces of the plain; the balletic choreography of the camera and groups of actors within the frame; the replacement of characterization through dialogue with bureaucratic jargon, slogans, and songs; and a densely interwoven music track combining folk and classical melodies with incidental sound.

To sum up, this is a work for those only interested in seeing great artistic visual style!

Works Cited: Cook, David A. "A History of Narrative Film, Third Edition" 721-722 Emory University: W.W. Norton and Company 1996

Famous Miklós Jancsó builds, without much violence, agonizing story of dehumanization, repression and cruelty

[politfilm · 10/10 · 24 May 2019]

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.

The Trial of Lynch?

[vodkabird · 3/10 · 21 August 2003]

The setting was suitably stark; I loved the scenes around the old woman's house; so desolate and bleak. I enjoyed the Kafkaesque aspect of it and the bluff and double bluff between the protagonists. The main character could have been a real influence on Lynch's Henry in Eraserhead; a victim and a loser.

Having said that, the film didn't grip me but it did what it set out to do, I suppose.

Dated history revisionism as per the Warsaw Pact tenets

[jgcorrea · 1/10 · 26 November 2017]

Jancso, a Bolshevik film mentor and beneficiary of state interventionism in the arts in Hungary during the Iron Curtain period, literally followed the classic "September Protocol," i.e. The theoretical, Manichaeist dogma of the Stalinist Era laid out by Zhdanov and then adopted by the Communist Parties on a global scale. The first step in Leninism, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was to establish, through censorship and state sponsorship, the complete control of cultural production with the aim of destroying Western thought ("Bourgeois or burzhooi", they called it) based on Jewish- Christian prophecies as well as on Roman law and Greek philosophy. In fact, all red cultural policies were born out of such distortions, namely: totalitarian Zhdanovism, engaged art, demented Gramscism, tenets of the Frankfurt School, Mao's destructive Cultural Revolution and so forth, not forgetting the message that every dictator used to state in the congresses of the communist militancy about the promotion of cultural production: "Comrades, anything for the sake of the Revolution, nothing outside the revolution!" But ¨the Round-up¨ is much more and much less than this, it is an unbearable parade of long shots where each image seems to reflect the hatred that this mediocre director always nurtured against the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.