Happy Birthday, Miklós Janscó! Born today in 1921, this Hungarian actor, screenwriter, producer and film director achieved international prominence from the mid-1960s onwards.
In 1944, Jancsó studied law in Pécs (the fifth largest city in Hungary), receiving his degree in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), Romania. He later took courses in art history and ethnography, which he continued to study in Transylvania.
Post-graduation, Jancsó served in World War II and was briefly a prisoner of war. Upon release, he later registered with the legal Bar but avoided a legal career.
After the war, Jancsó enrolled in the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. In 1950, Jancsó received his Diploma in Film Directing.
Around this time, he began working on newsreel footage and reported on such subjects as May Day celebrations, agricultural harvests and state visits from Soviet dignitaries.
In 1954, Jancsó first started directing films by making documentary newsreels.
Between 1954 and 1958, he made newsreel shorts whose subjects ranged from a portrait of the major Hungarian novelist and social realist Zsigmond Móricz in 1955 to the official Chinese state visit in 1957.
The year after Janscó made his first full-length feature film, he then returned to documentary filmmaking. This included a collaboration with his second wife, Hungarian screenwriter and film director Márta Mészáros.
In 1959, Janscó met Hungarian author and screenwriter Gyula Hernádi, who collaborated on Jancsó's films until his death on July 20, 2005.
While Janscó's 1965 Hungarian black and white drama/war film 'Így jöttem' ('My Way Home') received modest international attention, it was his next feature that became a huge hit domestically and internationally.
This was the 1966 Hungarian black and white war/drama film 'Szegénylegények' ('The Round-Up'). Today, it is often considered a significant work of world cinema.
'The Round-Up' premiered at the 19th Cannes Film Festival in May 1966. Upon release, the film was a huge international success.
Hungarian film director, screenwriter and film critic Zoltán Fábri called it "perhaps the best Hungarian film ever made." English film critic and historian Derek Malcolm included 'The Round-Up' in his list of the one hundred greatest films ever made.
In Hungary, the film was seen by over one million people (in a country with a population of almost ten million).
The following year, Janscó wrote and directed the first film of which he is best known. This was the 1967 Hungarian black and white war/drama film 'Csillagosok, katonák' ('The Red and the White').
In this minimalist anti-war film, a faction of Hungarian soldiers on the side of the Russian Red army, led by a determined Hungarian commander (Jozsef Madaras), fight against the pro-Czar white army in a remote Russian field near a dense wood along the Volga River.
As the tide of battle ebbs and flows, a small group of compassionate nurses, including Olga (Krystyna Mikolajevska), do not differentiate between the sides, transporting all wounded soldiers to the nearby wood and treating their injuries.
Internationally, 'The Red and the White' was Jancsó's biggest success, and later received critical acclaim in Western Europe and the United States.
Towards the end of the 1960s and especially into the 1970s, Jancsó's work became increasingly stylized and overtly symbolic.
In the late 1960s, Jancsó's films veered more towards symbolism; the takes became longer and the visual choreography became more elaborate. This found full fruition in the 1970s, when he took these elements to extremes.
This highly stylized approach (in contrast to the more realist approach of the 1960s) received widest acclaim in the second and final film of which Janscó is best known for directing. This was the 1971 Hungarian war/drama film 'Még kér a nép' ('Red Psalm').
The literal translation of the title is "And the People Still Ask", a quote from a poem by Hungarian poet and liberal revolutionary Sándor Petőfi.
In this experimental envisioning of a peasant revolt in 1890s Hungary, hundreds of farmworkers rebel against landowners in hopes of receiving improved working conditions.
Socialists Nagy Mária (Andrea Drahota), Lovas Imre (Tibor Molnár), and Hegedűs Bálint (Jozsef Madaras) continually recite manifestos, laborers play protest songs and beautiful country girls liberate themselves of their clothing. Even soldiers sent to stop the revolt are swept up in the joyous rebellion. However, when the peasants push their politics, violence erupts.
Filmed in very long, carefully and masterfully choreographed takes by Hungarian cinematographer János Kende, the film features only twenty-six shots in a runtime of eighty-seven minutes.
One year later, 'Red Psalm' won Jancsó the Best Director award at the 25th Cannes Film Festival in May 1972. Like 'The Round-Up', the film focused on a doomed uprising.
Writing for the Chicago Reader, American film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum argues that 'Red Psalm' "may well be the greatest Hungarian film of the 60s and 70s."
In 1979, Jancsó received awards for his life work. In 1990, Jancsó again received awards for his life work. This occurred at the 43rd Cannes Film Festival in May and the 47th Venice International Film Festival in September, respectively.
Jancsó passed from lung cancer in Budapest, Hungary on January 31, 2014. He was 92. Fellow Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr ('Sátántangó') called Jancsó "the greatest Hungarian film director of all time."
Jancsó's films are characterized by visual stylization, elegantly choreographed shots, long takes, historical periods, rural settings, and a lack of psychoanalyzing. A frequent theme of his films is the abuse of power.
His works are often allegorical commentaries on Hungary under Communism and the Soviet occupation, although some critics prefer to stress the universal dimensions of Jancsó's explorations.
A key figure in the development of the new Hungarian cinema, Jancsó earned international recognition for his films.
These best reflect Jancsó's tendency toward abstraction and contain a distinctive combination of revolutionary viewpoints and highly structured, formal cinematic style.
Imagery is more important than dialogue, which is used sparingly to encourage audiences to contemplate Jancsó's underlying message.
His trademark style of directing tends to place actors in geometric patterns that mirror the landscapes around them.
Janscó had been active from 1950–2014.
#borntodirect
@DVDBeaver
@SecondRunDVD
@bampfa
@JonathanRosenba
@theguardian
@filmcommentmagazine
@facetschicago
@Britannica
@letterboxd
No comments:
Post a Comment