The relative plotlessness of Silence and Cry, which carries over and progresses still in The Red and The White and Red Psalm, seems more like an evolution of style than the conscious decision that I perceived it to be, as The Round-Up is both the earliest and the most plot-driven film of the four in this retrospective. Not quite Jancsó’s break-through film, it’s not difficult to see why he made it so big after this. It isn’t as spatially and compositionally beautiful as Silence and Cry, but the action of the film is so much more engaging (the word ‘engaging’ is very much relative to the rest of Jancsó’s work that I’ve seen, as there is still not much going on here). The plot, which might have been partially borrowed for Hillcoat’s The Proposition, begins with the head of an army trying to weed out the worst of his lot of men who participated in guerilla violence. One man, who killed three men, is told that if he can find another man in the lot who killed more men than he did, then he will be pardoned. The film tracks his search, and recreates the forts in which these men were held captive, including dark cages where men would be stored without light or contact with the other prisoners. The army proves to be quite corrupt, of course, and takes every chance they can to abuse their power. The film shows the injustices toward a large group of men, and has emotional success because it follows a couple of select men and develops their characters and situations, a trait I thought was detrimentally absent in his next couple of films.
The film’s cinematography, which as I mentioned is not as striking here as it was in Silence and Cry, opts for shorter takes, but focuses more on patterns than the follow-up film’s study on depth and placement in space. In particular, line-ups of soldiers and prisoners, especially when they are in motion, create a kind of Op art effect on the screen, much in the way a field of cotton can be so dazzling when one drives by in a car, as the repetitious order of everything looks so artificial in nature, and is so exact that subtle patterns appear. Watching the army march is wonderful, especially to focus on the light that comes through between each men’s legs. Against the back-drop of the Hungarian planes, rolling hills, and intermittent forests (whose trees are similarly ordered), Jancsó draws inevitable comparisons between the men’s behavior and the peace and freedom of nature.
Jancsó’s films have a motif of men shooting men in their backs as they are walking away from a conversation or meeting. It’s an obvious but effective metaphor for how Jancsó believes power is handled when it is obtained by corrupt men.