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Agnus Dei (Miklós Jancsó, 1971)
🕑 Added 2022-04-13 16:43:06 +0000 UTC
Obviously it's a bit premature to make any grand declarations about Jancsó, seeing as I've only seen three of his films, one so long ago I can barely remember. But seeing Agnus Dei closely on the heels of The Round-Up, I feel like I've now gotten a fairly solid sense of the style, the brand, the atmosphere. I joked about this on Twitter, but I was also somewhat serious. This is a director whose major moves I can theoretically appreciate, but with Agnus Dei I found their application rather stultifying.
Most prominent in Jancsó's work, of course, is the mobile camera. The director apparently joked once that he made films this way because he enjoyed shooting more than editing, and although that's clearly a self-deprecating remark, one can see some truth in it as well. In Agnus Dei, even more so than in The Round-Up, Jancsó organizes the filmic action in a big open field, permitting the camera to observe a variety of focal points within an overall ritual. And while I don't want to start making proclamations about what cinema should or should not be, Jancsó's approach does involve some significant formal sacrifices.
This is a film about rapid political shifts in Hungary following a failed revolution in 1919, so in a way it's a conceptual extension of The Round-Up's consideration of the aftermath of 1848. A renegade priest, Vargha (Jószef Madaras), is held captive by a group of communist soldiers, then set free. Within the film's ninety minutes, we see the power structure change numerous times: the priest builds a movement, then the nationalists, then the communists are defeated, Vargha seems to build an alliance with the nationalists, breaks that alliance and becomes supreme leader, only to be betrayed by another rebel, Feher (Daniel Olbrychski). All of these machinations are depicted on the same open field, with men on horses riding up and shooting people, then others taking power through deceit.
It's next to impossible to keep track of all the factions and who is in control for how long. If you don't know the ins and outs of Hungarian political history, it's easiest to see the whole thing as an allegory, the sudden rise and fall of various groups suggesting that Hungarian politics has been a progression of impossible dreams and fascist realities. Jancsó is a bit like Glauber Rocha in this respect, playing out national history as a kind of puppet dance, driven by unseen forces. And, I suppose, the long roving takes could be Jancsó's way of depicting a larger, more cosmic continuity in the face of surface-level coups.
As one watched Agnus Dei, it becomes fairly easy to see how Jancsó and his regular cinematographer, Janós Kende, generate the Jancsó style. There is one main camera in the center of the action, and Kende simultaneously pans back and forth while carefully adjusting the zoom lens. This gives the illusion of a mobile camera, but if you look closely, Jancsó never breaks the 180-degree rule, nor does the camera weave in between people or objects. While this is certainly impressive in its way, and emphasizes highly choreographed mega-scenes with shifting points of attention, what it doesn't do is employ the frame. The portions of each shot, as it wanders from station to station, are negligible, treated like empty road between destinations.
To me, this gives Jancsó's film a more theatrical, or again, ritualistic atmosphere, one that both draws undue attention to the camera and undermines its capabilities. After all, Jancsó's practical decision to film in an open field -- the technique would have significant trouble indoors -- makes both The Round-Up and Agnus Dei landscape films of a sort. But there's never any sense that Jancsó is interested in the space itself, except perhaps as a contested territory. The constant camera movement prevents us from getting a real sense of the space of action, which is rather perverse when you think about it.
This makes me wonder whether Jancsó's human-centered but anti-subjective cinema fell out of favor because hypnotic ritual, a depiction of slavish, inevitable activity, became an inadequate way to depict or analyze social and political reality. There's a hint of the Living Theater in Agnus Dei, or even a minimalist riff of Alejandro Jodorowsky. All of this comes from a tradition that found its clearest expression in Antonin Artaud, who thought performance should be primal and irrational, yoking those elements to whatever subject matter one might adopt. It's a strangely apolitical strategy, since it implies that human existence is driven by unseen forces that can never really be understood. Having said that, I am more curious than ever to see The Red and the White, the Jancsó film that has remained solidly in the canon even as works like Agnus Dei are largely forgotten.
