Miklós Jancsó’s mysterious film from 1968 is a deeply strange somnambulist ballet. It shows a piece of Hungary’s political history implicitly juxtaposed with the postwar Soviet present, in which Czechoslovakia and Hungary have been crushed. The brutality of the anti-Communist powers of 1919 depicted in the film would have been an officially acceptable subject, but the indictment of brutality is clearly transferable. And it is an impenetrable psychological trauma with weird erotic overtones, like an absurdist bad dream transcribed by Kafka.
The scene is the vast Hungarian plain, with a desolate wind always blowing, on which the characters perform their roles as if on a gigantic stage; it is a single unitary space which appears to extend, Sahara-like, to the far horizon in all directions. People do not quite enter and exit in the conventional fashion, but rather can often be seen gradually arriving from an impossibly long way away, and leave by progressively dwindling to a vanishingly small dot in the distance. Jancsó’s distinctively sinuous camerawork glides and swoops elegantly around the action in a series of long unbroken takes.
