The Round-Up

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │ Miklós Jancsó’s international breakthrough came with this unusual, hypnotic historical drama, hailed by fellow Magyar director Zoltán Fábri as "perhaps the best Hungarian film which has ever been made." In the 1860s, forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire round up a group of peasants and, through a ritualistic process of interrogation, torture and execution, attempt to weed out partisans who had participated in Hungary’s 1848 revolt against Hapsburg rule. The film’s Hungarian title translates literally as "The Hopeless"; Richard Roud suggested The Roundup was "as if Bresson had filmed Kafka’s In the Penal Colony." Using long takes, relentless tracking shots, and extreme depth of field, Jancsó enacts a daring formalist dance of shape, pattern and abstraction — "set against a pitiless sky and a plain so vast that it seems to show the curvature of the earth" (Time). "For many critics his unparalleled masterpiece — all the elements of his style come together in an abstract historical parable about the nature of revolution and counter-revolution...The film was interpreted by many as an allegory of the retaliations that followed the 1956 revolution" (András Bálint Kovács).  "Each meticulously composed shot conveys Jancsó's preoccupation with humans dislodged from convention and victimised by history" (Charles L.P. Silet). B&W, 35mm, in Hungarian with English subtitles. 95 mins.