Miklós Jancsó
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Miklós Jancsó (Vác, September 27, 1921) is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter.
| Miklós Jancsó | |
|---|---|
.jpg/220px-Jancso(atHome).jpg) Jancsó at his home, 2000 |
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| Born | September 27, 1921  Vác, Hungary |
| Years active | 1950–present |
| Spouse(s) | Katalin Wowesznyi (1949–?) Márta Mészáros (1958-?) Zsuzsa Csákány (1981-present) |
Jancsó achieved international prominence in the 1960s. His most famous works include The Round Up (Szegénylegények, 1965), The Red and the White (Csillagosok, katonák, 1967) and Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1971). His most famous films are characterized by visual stylization, elegantly choreographed shots, long takes, historical periods, rural settings and a lack of psychologizing. A frequent themes of his film is the nature of power and how it is abused. While his most famous works are all set in historical periods, they are usually read as allegories of contemporary Hungary under Communism, although some critics prefer to stress the universal dimensions of Jancsó's explorations of power. Towards the end of the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, Jancsó's work became increasingly stylized and overtly symbolic.
His 1980s films were not successful and at the time some critics accused Jancsó of simply rehashing visual and thematic elements from his previous films. However, more recently these works have been re-evaluated and some critics consider this period to contain Jancsó's most important works.
In the late 1990s, Jancsó's career revived with a series of improvised low-budget films that were witty and self-deprecating. As well as doing relatively well at the Hungarian box office for art house fare, these films have been popular with a new generation of younger viewers.
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[edit] Biography
After graduation he studied law in Pécs, receiving his degree in Kolozsvár (Cluj) in 1944. He registered with the legal Bar but avoided a legal career. He moved to the capital Budapest in 1946. He marries Katalin Wowesznyi in 1949; their two children are Nyika (Miklós Jancsó Jr., b.1952) and Babus (Katalin Jancsó, b.1955). He received his Diploma in Film Directing at the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest in 1950. After divorcing Katalin Wowesznyi, he married film director Márta Mészáros in 1958. In 1959 he met Hungarian author Gyula Hernádi, who went on to collaborate on Jancsó's films until his death in 2005. In 1968 Jancsó met Italian journalist and script authoress Giovanna Gagliardo in Budapest; they moved to Rome, where he worked for nearly a decade, with short periods in Budapest. In 1980 he separated from Gagliardo and married film editor Zsuzsa Csákány in 1981. They had a son, Dávid, in 1982. Miklós Jancsó has been honorary scholar at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest since 1988, and was guest teacher at Harvard between 1990 and 1992.
As well as making feature films, Jancsó has made a number of shorts and documentaries throughout his career and from 1971 into the 1980s also directed work for the theatre.
[edit] Films
Film critics usually split up Jancsó's films by decade.
[edit] 1950s
Jancsó started his career by making documentary newsreels. Although these films are of little interest in understanding Jancsó's aesthetic development, they gave the director the opportunity to master the technical side of film-making while also enabling him to travel around Stalinist Hungary and see firsthand what was happening there.
In 1958, he completed his first full-length feature film, The Bells Have Gone to Rome. Jancsó now dismisses this early work.
[edit] 1960s
After the false start of his first film, Jancsó did not make another feature until 1962, with Cantata(Oldás és kötés). However, it was not until his next film, My Way Home (Így jöttem, 1964) that his career started to show signs of promise.
While My Way Home had been received modest international attention, his next feature, The Round-Up, was a huge hit domestically and internationally and is often considered one of the greatest works of world cinema (for example, critic Derek Malcolm includes the film in his list of the 100 greatest films ever made). In Hungary, the film was seen by over a million people (in a country with a population of 10 million).
The Round-Up takes place shortly after a failed Hungarian uprising against Austrian rule in 1848 and the attempts by the authorities to weed out those who took part in the rebellion. The brutal, dictatorial methods depicted in the film were read as an allegory for the clampdown that happened following Hungary's failed 1956 uprising against Russian-imposed Communism. The film was shot in widescreen in black and white by regular Jancsó collaborator Tamás Somló. Although it is Jancsó most famous film, The Round-Up does not exhibit many of his trademark elements to the degree to which he would later develop them: thus, the takes are comparatively short and although the camera movements are carefully choreographed they do not exhibit the elaborate fluid style that would become distinctive in later films. The film does, though, use Jancsó's favourite setting, the Hungarian puszta (plain), shot in characteristically oppressive sunlight.
Jancsó's next work The Red and the White (Csillagosok, katonák, 1967) was a Russian-Hungarian coproduction to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Jancsó, though, set the action two years later during the Russian Civil War and, rather than producing a celebration of the Communist's military struggle to control Russia, he made an anti-heroic film depicting the senselessness and brutality of armed combat. The film was eventually banned in the Soviet Union and not shown for decades. Internationally this film was Jancsó's biggest success, critically acclaimed in Western Europe and the United States. Along with Red Psalm (1971) it is featured in the book "100 Films You Must See Before You Die".
In 1969, Jancsó shot his first work in colour, The Confrontation (Fényes szelek, 1969). It also was the first film to introduce song and dance as an essential part of the film, elements that would become increasingly important in his work of the 1970s and his recent Pepe and Kapa films.
[edit] 1970s
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. With regards shot-length, for example, Elektreia (Szerelmem, Elektra, 1974) consists of just 12 shots in a film lasting 70 minutes.
This highly stylised approach (in contrast to the more realist approach of the 1960s) received widest acclaim with Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1971), which won Jancsó the Best Director award at Cannes in 1972. Like The Round-Up, Red Psalm focusses on a doomed uprising.
In the latter part of the 1970s, Jancsó started work on the ambitious Vitam et sanguinem trilogy, but only the first two films, Hungarian Rhapsody (Magyar rapszódia, 1978) and Allegro Barbaro (1978) were made as critical reaction was muted. At the time, the films were the most expensive to have been produced in Hungary.
During the 1970s, Jancsó divided his time between Italy and Hungary and made a number of films in Italy, the most famous of which is Private Vices, Public Virtues (Vizi privati, pubbliche virtù, 1975), an interpretation of the "Mayerling affair". His Italian films, though, have been critically derided. Unlike Jancsó's 1980s films, there has been no general critical reassessment of his Italian works and they remain the most obscure part of his filmography.
[edit] 1980s
The Tyrant's Heart (A zsarnok szíve, avagy Boccaccio Magyarországon, 1981) can be considered a transitional film between the famous historical works of the 1960s and '70s and Jancsó's later, more ironic and self-aware films. While it still has a historical setting (a 15th-century palace in Hungary), the film's ontological inquiry groups it more easily with the director's later period. The film deliberately undercuts the audience's ability to construst a notion of reality in the plot, which contradicts itself and includes many post-modern interventions to raise questions about its own manipulative nature.
Later in the decade, Jancsó dispensed with the historical rural settings of the Hungarian puszta and shifted to contemporary urban Budapest. Thus Season of Monsters (Szörnyek évadja , 1986) became the first Jancsó film with scenes in of contemporary Budapest since Cantata 23 years earlier. Although this film is set in a contemporary environment, very little of it is set in the city and much of it still on the puszta. While some new visual tropes were introduced (including a fascination with television screens that show clips of later or earlier action in the film), others, such as candles and naked women, were preserved. In later films of the decade Jancsó continued to use the surrealistic-parodistic style he developed in "Season". These films - at last - are set in an urban environment.
Although some critics reacted positively (Season of Monsters, for example, won an honourable mention at Venice for creating "a new picture language"), critical reaction generally to these films was very harsh indeed, with some critics labelling them as self-parody. More recently, critics have been kinder to these dense and often deliberately obtuse films, with some considering his 1980s work to be his most compelling, but a full rehabilitation has been hindered by the fact that these works are very rarely screened.
[edit] 1990s and 2000s
In the early 1990s, Jancsó made two films that thematically can be grouped with the works from the 1980s, God Walks Backwards (Isten hátrafelé megy, 1990) and Blue Danube Waltz (Kék Duna keringő, 1991). Although they continue the work of the previous decade, they are also reactions to the Hungary's new post-Communist reality and explore the inherent power struggles.
After a long break from making full-length features, Jancsó returned with The Lord's Lantern in Budapest (Nekem lámpást adott kezembe as Úr Pesten, 1999), which proved to a be a surprising come-back for the director. The film largely (but not entirely) dispenses with long takes and choreographed camera movements, and for this Jancsó started working with a new director-of-photography Ferenc Grunwalsky (who is also a director in his own right). The loose plot follows two gravediggers Pepe and Kapa as they try to make sense of the shifting realities of post-Communist Budapest. Despite mocking young Hungarians for their shallowness, the film proved a minor hit with them, helped by the performances by some of Hungary's top music acts in the film.
The success of The Lord's Lantern has led to a succession of Pepe and Kapa films (six so far, the last in 2006 at the age of 85). Although all of these films are rooted in the present, recent ones have also seen Jancsó return to his earlier love of historical themes, including depictions of the Holocaust and Hungary's devastating defeat to the Ottomans in 1526, usually in the context of criticising Hungarians for not understanding the meaning of their own history. These films are highly popular among young cinephiles, mainly for the post-modernist, contemporary approach to filmmaking, the black, absurd humour and the appearance of several popular alternative and/or underground bands and persons.
Jancsó has also cemented his reputation by making appearances in a number of films. As well as appearing as himself in the Pepe and Kapa films, he has also had guest roles in works by young, up-and-coming Hungarian directors.
[edit] Awards
He was awarded Best Director for Red Psalm in Cannes 1972. In 1973 he was awarded the prestigious Kossuth Prize in Hungary. He received awards for his life work in 1979 and 1990, at Cannes and Venice respectively.
[edit] External links
