Connoisseur of Chaos

"I belong to the generation of Hungarian film directors for whom it was perhaps the hardest to find the way to an artistic self-expression." So admits Miklos Jancso, one of the oldest and youngest film makers in Hungary. Old, because at 47 he is a political aeon away from the newly defiant East European youth. Young, because his reputation is only now emerging from the guarded borders of his homeland.

Though The Round Up is Jancso's fifth feature, it was preceded in America by his sixth, The Red and the White.

(TIME, Sept. 27). Both reveal a savage irony and a cold, implacable loathing for war—and for the species that causes it. In a sweep of severe, formal landscapes, The Round Up recounts the misadventures of roving Hungarian patriots in 1868. With mechanical authority, Austrian troops traverse the nation, rounding up the freedom fighters in an unending search for their leader. Even 100 years ago, captors were instinctively aware that mental anguish was far more effective than the knout or the noose. Alternating terror with false promises, the Austrians turn innocent men against each other. Betrayal becomes the order of the day; dignity and honor are exchanged for the reprieve that never comes.

Sculptor in Soil. In place of a plot, Jancso exhibits portraits of an embryonic police state, set against a pitiless sky and a plain so vast that it seems to show the curvature of the earth. In his cold eye, war is an aleatory art in which values are as random as bullets. A military band plays an exhilarating march; a moment later the tune is whistled by a doomed man. A woman is run, naked, through a line of whippers; her lover, unable to watch, jumps to his death. Other prisoners follow his example like an audience seeking exits during a fire. "Let's have order here," decrees the commandant, a connoisseur of chaos and a predecessor of the concentration-camp officers who would one day perform the same tasks with greater efficiency.

Perhaps from disdain, perhaps from a remove of age and philosophy, Jancso never ties his story or his sympathies to any main character. To him, all the high cheekbones and fierce mustaches, all the tired, tragic faces are one. The viewer must be content (or disturbed) with a vision trained on people but not on persons. Though Jancso is sometimes eclectic, he borrows only from the best, from the wintry compositions of Ingmar Bergman or from Goya's acid Disasters of War. At his most original, the director resembles neither film maker nor painter. In his own deep-dimensioned, black and white montages, he seems a sculptor who scrapes his material from the soil of his native land and gives it a cast of permanence.