“Jancsó is one of the strongest — and strangest — personalities in world
cinema since the war.” RICHARD ROUD

“An obsessive genius...Unquestionably one of the most original film talents
to emerge [from] the East European film renaissance and its intersection with
Western contemporary cinema.” AMOS VOGEL

”An astonishing director...In the 1960s and early 1970s, Jancsó was one
of the most famous filmmakers in Europe.” DEREK MALCOLM

APRIL 1-6 │ NEW 35mm PRINTS!  │ One of the cinema’s masters of widescreen composition and elaborately choreographed long-take sequence shots, Miklós Jancsó (b. 1921) has been described as "the most important Hungarian director of all" (Mira and A. J. Liehm) and "the key Hungarian filmmaker of the sound era" (Jonathan Rosenbaum). His fervid, transfixing, highly stylized and intensely formalist films are noted for their balletic, brutal study of repression, rebellion and revolution. Power and politics are destructive forces in Jancsó’s singular cinema, which is highly allegorical and can approach abstraction in its use of ritual, spectacle, massive scale and geometrical patterning to depict human events. His dramas explore, obsessively, turbulent events of Hungary’s past history; the historical settings serve as pretexts for Jancsó’s true subjects: repression in the contemporary, post-1956 Hungary in which he lived; and, more universally, our capacity as humans to inflict very great cruelty upon one another. The Liehms write of Jancsó’s "hatred for everything that deserves to be hated," always "expressed with supreme formal mastery."

Jancsó was the recipient of a Special Prize for his entire body of work at Cannes in 1979 (he had won the festival’s Best Director award in 1972 for Red Psalm), and was accorded a similar honour — a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement — at Venice in 1990. It is no exaggeration to say that he was one of the world’s leading filmmakers in the 1960s and early 1970s, when "he was generally considered a worthy equal to the likes of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman" (Lloyd Hughes, The Rough Guide to Film). That Jancsó is less well known today speaks to the shifting winds of critical fashion, but also reflects the fact that his films — which demand to be viewed on the big screen — have simply become difficult to see: good 35mm prints of Jancsó’s works have not been available in Canada or the U.S. for decades. This presentation features new 35mm prints, imported from Hungary, of four of Jancsó’s greatest achievements.

"Hungary’s greatest living filmmaker...The four films in [this] indispensable retrospective are cut from much the same, sublime cloth, together constituting a holy pantheon upon which the director’s formidable reputation largely rests...All of the films in this series qualify as essential viewing, and the chance to experience 35mm prints on the big screen is a rare and beautiful thing." — Lance Goldberg, LA Weekly

Acknowledgments: Pacific Cinémathèque is grateful to Katalin Vajda of Magyar Filmuni in Budapest and Béla Bunyik of the Hungarian Film Festival in Los Angeles for making this presentation possible.