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The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966)
🕑 Added 2022-04-10 23:07:42 +0000 UTC
The first of Jancsó's films to really break through in the West, The Round-Up seems to suggest things to come. The film is explicitly about the situation in Hungary following the failed 1848 revolution. With the Habsburgs firmly back in power, the military was rounded up dozens of defeated rebel soldiers and their fellow-travelers, essentially toying with them until they receive the order of exactly what to do with them. The director's unique style of blocking and spatial organization is very much in evidence here, as the action takes place at an expansive, open-air prison called "the earthwork," situated in an empty field. This allows Jancsó to alternate between intimate two- and three-shots and high aerial views featuring large phalanxes of men and women in strict formation.
That's to say, the relatively thin plot permits Janscó to depict a very Foucaultian exercise of power, where men are lined up, marched in circles, collected and separated, their existence in space subject to seemingly pointless regimentation. If there is an objective, aside from constant mindfuckery, it is the management of a perceived threat by making the enemy completely legible. On this side of the line, power; on that side, subjugation.
What's most interesting here, though, is that at this point Jancsó employs rather extensive editing. We are not yet in the realm of long plan sequences that eventually become this director's trademark. While the stark monumentality and geometrical crowd control is ever-present, The Round-Up displays this visual code with rather conventional decoupage. If we think of The Round-Up in terms of a director honing his substantial formal chops, this makes perfect sense. If Jancsó didn't have his expansive choreography firmly in place, his roving camera and extended takes would not be possible.
Thematically, The Round-Up is surprisingly direct. Inasmuch as there are characters and a story, it's about moral compromise. One condemned man (János Görbe) is told by the wardens that if he can finger another prisoner who has killed more men than he did, he'll go free. So the subsequent interactions are organized around this would-be kapo and the men in charge trying to wheedle confessions out of other prisoners, a scenario complicated by the baroque regimentation of the earthwork. People are often in close proximity, but they aren't allowed much privacy, and when men are plucked from the group, the officers subdivide them further, using the Prisoners' Dilemma to sow suspicion among the captives.
This strategy is the main focus of The Round-Up's final half-hour. Having identified one chief officer among the rebels, a man named Veszelka (Zoltán Latinovits), a group of just-arrived officers on horseback pull him aside, offering to let him join the Habsburg military. They allow him to display his skills as a soldier, fighter, and horseman and, duly impressed, ask him to select his own regiment from among the prisoners at the earthwork. At first, Jancso seems to be suggesting that loyalty is flexible, and soldiers will gladly ply their trade for any flag of convenience.
This is not The Round-Up's endgame, however. In the end, this is just another capricious exercise of power, neither dramatic nor sinister. Fascism, per Jancsó, is just a set of gestures and formal maneuvers, every individual subsumed within a larger pattern and so unable to see the grand design. I suspect that the renewed interest in Jancsó at this particular moment may have something to do with Hungary's current situation under Viktor Orbán, and the hope that Jancsó may provide a glimpse of how to resist.
