Miklós Jancsó (Hungarian: [ˈmikloːʃ ˈjɒnt͡ʃoː]; 27 September 1921 – 31 January 2014) was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. Jancsó achieved international prominence starting in the mid-1960s with works including The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, 1965), The Red and the White (Csillagosok, katonák, 1967), and Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1971).
Jancsó's films are characterized by long takes, historical and/or rural settings, and the recurring theme of the abuse of power. His works are often allegorical commentaries on Hungary under Communism and Soviet occupation, although some critics prefer to stress the universal dimensions of Jancsó's explorations. Towards the end of the 1960s and especially into the 1970s, Jancsó's work became increasingly stylized and overtly symbolic.
Miklós Jancsó was born to a Hungarian father, Sándor Jancsó and a Romanian mother, Angela Poparada. After graduation he studied law in Pécs, receiving his degree in Kolozsvár in 1944. He also took courses in art history and ethnography, which he continued to study in Transylvania. After graduating, Jancsó served in World War II and was briefly a prisoner of war. He registered with the legal Bar but avoided a legal career.
After the war, Jancsó enrolled in the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. He received his Diploma in Film Directing in 1950. Around this time Jancsó began working on newsreel footage and reported on such subjects as May Day celebrations, agricultural harvests and state visits from Soviet dignitaries.
Jancsó first started directing films in 1954 by making documentary newsreels. Between 1954 and 1958 he made newsreel shorts whose subjects ranged from a portrait of Hungarian writer Zsigmond Móricz in 1955 to the official Chinese state visit in 1957. Although these films do not reflect 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 Hungary and see firsthand what was happening there.
In 1958, he completed his first full-length feature film, The Bells Have Gone to Rome, which starred Miklós Gábor. In the film a group of Hungarian schoolboys are pressured to join the army by Nazi Germans and fight against the Russians on the eastern front. As the schoolboys begin to learn about and understand the Nazi regime, they reject the Germans offer. Jancsó now dismisses this early work.
Jancsó then returned to documentary film-making, including a collaboration with his wife Márta Mészáros. In 1959 he met Hungarian author Gyula Hernádi, who collaborated on Jancsó's films until his death in 2005.
After contributing to the film Három csillag with Zoltán Várkonyi and Károly Wiedermann in 1960, Jancsó's next feature film was Cantata (Oldás és kötés) in 1963. The film starred Zoltán Latinovits and Andor Ajtay, and was written by Jancsó from a short story by József Lengyel. In the film Latinovits plays a young doctor with humble roots who grows tired of his more intellectual life and career as a surgeon in Budapest. He decides to revisit his place of birth: his father's farm in the Hungarian plains and is affected by the connection to nature that he had forgotten in the city. He meets his former teacher, who reminds him of long forgotten childhood memories. In the end Latinovits learns to appreciate both his easy life in the city and the country life of his youth that made it all possible. The film received mixed reviews from film critics in Hungary, but won a prize from the Hungarian Critics Circle.
Jancsó's next film was My Way Home (Így jöttem), released in 1964. It was his first collaboration with screenwriter Gyula Hernádi and starred András Kozák and Sergei Nikonenko. In the film Kozák plays Jozak, a teenaged deserter of Hungary's Nazi-run army at the end of World War II. He is twice captured by the Red Army, where he is put in charge of watching over a flock of sheep. There he befriends a young Russian soldier (Nikonenko), who is dying of a stomach wound. The two friends, who cannot communicate through language, begin to act like young boys and innocently play games together, forgetting their roles of captor and prisoner. The Russian soldier finally dies of his wound and Jozak again begins his journey home, wearing his dead friend's Soviet army uniform to stay warm.
While My Way Home had received modest international attention, his next feature in 1965, The Round-Up (Szegénylegények), was a huge hit domestically and internationally and is often considered a significant work of world cinema. The film was again written by Hernádi and starred János Görbe, Zoltán Latinovits, Tibor Molnár, Gábor Agárdy and András Kozák.
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 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 favorite setting, the Hungarian puszta (plain), shot in characteristically oppressive sunlight.
The Round-Up premiered at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and was a huge international success. Hungarian film critic Zoltán Fábri called it "perhaps the best Hungarian film ever made." Film critic Derek Malcolm included The Round-Up 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).
Jancsó's next work The Red and the White (Csillagosok, katonák, 1967) was a Hungarian-Soviet co-production to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October 1917 revolution in Russia and the subsequent Hungarian Revolution of 1919. Jancsó set the action two years later during the Russian Civil War and, he made an anti-heroic film depicting the senselessness and brutality of armed combat. The film starred József Madaras, Tibor Molnár and András Kozák and was written by Jancsó.
Along with The Confrontation, The Red and the White would have premiered at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was canceled due to the events of May 1968 in France. Internationally this film was Jancsó's biggest success, and received critical acclaim in Western Europe and the United States. It won the Best Foreign Film award from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics. Along with Red Psalm (1971) it is featured in the book "1001 Films You Must See Before You Die".
Jancsó then made Silence and Cry (Csend és kiáltás) in 1968. The film stars András Kozák as young revolutionary who goes into hiding in the country after the failed 1919 Hungarian Revolution. Kozák is hidden by a sympathetic farmer who is suspected by and constantly humiliated by the White Army. The farmer's wife is attracted to Kozák and begins to poison her husband. Kozák's morality compel him to turn the farmer's wife over to the White Army. This was the first film that Jancsó shot with cinematographer János Kende and was co-written by Gyula Hernádi and Jancsó.
Also in 1968, Jancsó shot his first work in color, 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. The film stars Andrea Drahota, Kati Kovács and Lajos Balázsovits.
The film revolves around real events that took place when Hungary attempted to renovate its education system after the Communists came to power in 1947. In the film revolutionary students from one of the communist People's Colleges start a campaign to win over students from an older Catholic college. The campaign begins with songs and slogans, but eventually turns to violence and book burning.