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The Revolution, visualized by Miklós Jancsó as political credo, fertility festival, busy day at the fair. The stage is the sun-dappled Hungarian meadow ca. 1890, the camera starts out close (brown doves held to a woman's bosom) then keeps its distance, tracking and panning and tilting continuously as the fable unfurls in monumental takes. "La Marseillaise" rewritten, "rights for the people, homeland for the workers," resistance peaceful up to a point: The Count sends a bailiff to buy off the rebellious serfs, the bonfire receives the bribe of wheat along with the bailiff himself. Mounted brigands, infantrymen and priests attempt to quell the uprising, clashing tones of uniform to add to the swirling palette of cobalt babushkas and rivers that literally run red. Ebb and flow of the collective, Dovzhenko plus MGM. (Sidney's daisy-chains and concentric circles in Annie Get Your Gun are evident, subsequently taken up by Bertolucci in Novecento.) "Socialism, thy kingdom come," killings and resurrections, strolling troubadours and slogging locomotives and talismanic close-ups of loaves of bread. Songs, prayers, whips, streamers, swords into plowshares and vice-versa, cycles of subjugation and revolt around the maypole (cf. Hagmann's The Strawberry Statement). "The land belongs to no one but the fruit belongs to all." Reaching the sublime culmination of his style, Jancsó turns to poetic mysticism, the faith of insurrection—an officer is shot dead only to be revived moments later by the kiss of a maiden, whose own bloody wound has miraculously flowered into a crimson cockade. (Venus and Adonis has this, "an image like thyself, all stain'd with gore.") Ecstatic or grave, "new social system" or new cinema, it begins with an invitation to the dance. Cinematography by János Kende. With Andrea Drahota, József Madaras, Tibor Orbán, Erzsi Cserhalmi, Tibor Molnár, Mari Csomós, Jácint Juhász, Gyöngyi Bürös, and Márk Zala.
--- Fernando F. Croce |