Miklós Jancsó (born 27 September 1921; died 31 January 2014)

 
„At the 1966 Cannes film festival, a movie whose title sounded like a western – but was actually Hungarian – caused a sensation and launched its director into the international cinematic scene, where he was to remain for a decade. The film of hypnotic beauty and daring technique was The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, literally translated as The Outlaws) and the director was Miklós Jancsó, who has died aged 92.

Jancsó's highly personal style had blossomed in this, his fifth feature. The Round-Up is set on a bleak Hungarian plain in 1868, when Austro‑Hungarian troops tried to break the unity of the Hungarian partisans by torture, interrogations and killings. There is little dialogue as horsemen drive the people to and fro, with power continually changing hands. Jancsó's ritualistic style manages to make the particular Hungarian situation into a universal parable of evil, ending with a cry of hope.

There are few directors so akin to a choreographer. His cinema does not conform to narrative or psychological conventions, but opens other areas that are usually found in the screen musical. His films are elaborate ballets, emblematically tracing the movements in the fight for Hungarian independence and socialism. In these ritual dances of life and death the Whites defeat the Reds, the Reds defeat the Whites. Tyranny is everywhere, and men and women, stripped of their clothes, are vulnerable and humiliated – nudes in a landscape. People survive in groups, often singing and dancing. 

Sometimes the groups split up and realign, moving in different directions. The camera weaves in and out like an invisible observer, sometimes dancing with the people, sometimes following them across the plains, tracking them down, shooting them. A tracking shot takes on new meaning in Jancsó's films…”

Ronald Bergan, The Guardian

lhttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/31/miklos-jancso

 

(AP) Jancso's death after a long illness was announced by the Association of Hungarian Film Artists. Known for his long takes and for depicting the passage of time in his historical epics merely by changes of costume, Jancso won his Cannes award for Red Psalm, about a 19th-century peasant revolt. In the 1960s, critics ranked Jancso alongside great directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. However, it was his use of scantily clad women, symbolizing defenselessness, which drew big audiences in prudish communist Hungary.

Jancso was born Sept. 27, 1921, in Vac, a small town north of Budapest. His parents were refugees from Transylvania, once a part of Hungary. “My mother was Romanian. In civilian life, the family members were friends, but politically on opposite sides ... For me this was a great lesson, that conflict, much less violence, will never solve the nationality problems,” Jancso said.

Between April and November 1945, he was a Soviet prisoner of war. He joined the communist party in 1946. “I was always concerned with the problem of the individual can navigate through history,” Jancso said, summing up the central focus of his films.

After directing a series of short films in the 1950s, his 1963 Cantata drew the attention of the wider public to his exceptional talent and innovative style. In the early 1970s, Jancso lived in Italy during which he made Vices and Pleasures, about the double suicide of Rudolf, Archduke of Austria, and his mistress in 1889. Because of scenes depicting orgies, the movie was banned in Italy and Jancso was sentenced to four months in prison. He was later acquitted on appeal.

Among his most successful films were The Round-up (1965), The Red and the White (1967) and Silence and Cry (1968).

He also directed the French-Israeli coproduction, Dawn, made in 1986 from Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel’s book about Jews seeking their identity in Israel.

“The most noble aesthetic pleasure is the discovery of truth,” Jancso told Filmvilag magazine.

Between 1999 and 2006, he made a series of six films dealing with the often absurd adventures of Kapa and Pepe, two comical anti-heroes played by actors Zoltan Mucsi and Peter Scherer. The use in the films of songs from Hungarian pop band Kispal es a Borz helped the films gain cult status.

Jancso was a professor of the Budapest Film Academy, and between 1990 and 1992 he was a visiting professor at Harvard's Institute of Communications.

He received lifetime achievement awards in Cannes in 1979, Venice in 1990 and Budapest in 1994.

Jancso is survived by this third wife, Zsuzsa Csákány, and four children. His second wife was Marta Meszaros, also a film director. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.