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.
It is just after the first world war, and some blurred archive photographs that precede the action allude to the nationalist government that overturned the Hungarian Soviet republic in 1919 and now pursues an anti-Communist manhunt of Hungarian soldiers. One of these is István (András Kozák), a fugitive hiding out on a farm owned by two sisters called Teréz (Mari Töröcsik) and Anna (Andrea Drahota); driven perhaps mad in the tension and isolation, they are secretly poisoning Teréz’s husband Károly (József Madaras) and his elderly mother. An army officer, Kémeri (Zoltán Latinovits) is aware of István but appears to turn a blind eye, in return for implied sexual favours from the women and also because as a soldier he can’t help admiring István’s gallant war record at the front.
Ultimately, it will become clear that István is appalled at what he can see of the women’s secret homicidal activities, and has had to make a decision about how he can bring them to justice without endangering himself. But this is very far from being the central dramatic point of the film. What is more important, moment by moment, is the miasma of fear and horror that settles on the landscape. Soldiers, led by a secret-police commandant in civilian garb, menace the locals. Houses are torn down as collective punishment and as a grim lesson in what happens to those who do not co-operate. Wrongdoers, military and civilian alike, are made to stand in a yard for long periods or do “rabbit jumps”.
The commandant also makes Károly and other civilians inspect two dead bodies – people the authorities have clearly killed – forcing them to touch the corpses and handle the dead men’s personal effects, including their glasses, watches and wallets, and then hold up their hands to an official photographer, as if to confirm their fingerprints on the relevant items and their supposed guilt. And yet this bizarre ritual is also clearly meant to humiliate and degrade, to acquaint them intimately with fear, and to underline their fellowship with the defeated dead. In this film, the silence and the cry are the same thing.
