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Some twenty years after the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, "the last vestige of active resistance" scrutinized in the cold laboratory of a prisoner camp. Habsburg engravings dissolve to a low horizon dotted with riders, the void of the gray plain is so endless as to make the walls of the compound virtually unnecessary. Torture, betrayal, bogus pardons, tricked confessions, the entire authoritarian panoply to squash rebellion, the Austrian commissar is "not particular about his methods." The imprisoned farmer (János Görbe) endures the Kafkaesque comedy of looking for a more guilty man to take his place at the gallows, he rattles around the yard asking his comrades how many murders they've committed. (He's unceremoniously killed midway through, as corrosive a joke on audience identification as Psycho.) The leanest and most concentrated of Miklós Jancsó's visions of history and cinema as infernal mechanisms, a noose worn like a tie. Battered stucco, black capes, wooden verticals, digit-like figures in deep, hard space. A flash of feminine nudity as a local woman is whipped between rows of soldiers, inmates protest by throwing themselves off the roof of the fort. (Amid screams, the warden's steely command: "Restore order.") Terse camera movements to complete the closed circle, a soundscape to match the taciturn dialogue—hooves, chirping birds, bullets, dueling lashes, the rattling of shackles, the groaning of gates, a military band in the distance. "Outlaw honor" and its folly under the sun (cf. Lumet's The Hill), a most austere game of bluff between weathered peasants and robotic captors. A rebel song gives way to the imperial anthem at the close, just the sound of the ruthless architect finishing his théâtre de l'absurde. Cinematography by Tamás Somló. With Zoltán Latinovits, András Kozák, Tibor Molnár, Gábor Agárdi, József Madaras, and János Koltai. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |