Alicia I love this movie so much

Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Lawbolisted Powerful

Console best movie i've ever seen.

jgcorrea Jancso, a Bolshevik film mentor and beneficiary of state interventionism in the arts in Hungary during the Iron Curtain period, literally followed the classic "September Protocol," i.e. the theoretical, Manichaeist dogma of the Stalinist Era laid out by Zhdanov and then adopted by the Communist Parties on a global scale. The first step in Leninism, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was to establish, through censorship and state sponsorship, the complete control of cultural production with the aim of destroying Western thought ("Bourgeois or burzhooi", they called it) based on Jewish- Christian prophecies as well as on Roman law and Greek philosophy. In fact, all red cultural policies were born out of such distortions, namely: totalitarian Zhdanovism, engaged art, demented Gramscism, tenets of the Frankfurt School, Mao's destructive Cultural Revolution and so forth, not forgetting the message that every dictator used to state in the congresses of the communist militancy about the promotion of cultural production: "Comrades, anything for the sake of the Revolution, nothing outside the revolution!" But ¨the Round-up¨ is much more and much less than this, it is an unbearable parade of long shots where each image seems to reflect the hatred that this mediocre director always nurtured against the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

chaos-rampant Jancso does it. When Jancso does it, it's a mixture of getting it right and perceptibly missing, both at the same time. He is not perfect, nor seems to strive for it. But he surely has some of the best ideas about films in all of cinema. In the actual films, it seems as if you are watching pure intuition, the sketch rather than the finished film. I am saying this as a good thing. He sculpts in air, most do in marble.He gets just the last note off here, so you leave this thinking of the ways you would do it - a good thing again. It is the scene of betrayal of the whole rebel troop (until then in disguise), which he does in a rather awkward manner.But what powerful devices before that!The main setting is a forced labor camp in the middle of nowhere. We start with a 'real place', the white stucco on adobe walls reflecting barren sunlight. This is gradually abstracted into something else, by repetition and time. It is done so well, it deserves to be studied.The place as the totality of existence: there is no way out, people languish in mindless work and routine, having to please a higher moral authority that decides life and death. Love is always kept at arm's reach. They are all sinners in that place, most of them murderers. It is a bleak view of life, very Hungarian, but you can work with it. A man who must find another prisoner to take his place in the executioner's scaffold, someone worse than him. Someone who has killed more. He does the rounds of the place pleading with officers, cajoling, betraying, a spineless coward despised by everyone. A second man who in order to be set free, has to convince he is not someone else and is betrayed by the first as that person.A father and son playing a game of storytelling chess with the prison warden.So much is handled in just the right way here, I had to hold my breath. The point is that there is no way out of life, except dead. And there are different ways to go, some of them more dignified. The only certain thing is that we all have to go, and you get to see the pain and humiliation of clinging to life that is transient. There is no glory to this, just the way it has to be. Everything else are games that pass the time, storytelling, fiction, deceit and ritual - see if the same invented rituals and thrills do not resurface across poker tables and the films we see.We are eventually unsure if the scoundrel really was guilty, or merely framed. We are unsure if the other man is not who he says. Whether father or son strangled him. Whether or not the rebel leader was among the group.We are in the dark about pretty damn near everything - except that games have been played, with the losers removed from the cosmic round.

Balthazar-5 Life comes along at a variable pace, and we are constantly re-positioning our gaze to obtain the optimum information in order to understand the situation we are in. This is replicated in the cinema through the mise en scène and editing of the scenes. Since the 1930s there has been an either explicit or implicit debate as to whether editing within the scene is a good or bad thing, with Andre Bazin rooting for the unity of the image against montage (editing). Fifteen years before this film, Hitchcock set down a marker with 'Rope' (and to a lesser extent 'Under Capricorn') that scenes, indeed whole films can be made without much in the way of editing, by simply organising the action and camera movement to reveal the same information in a more continuous way. Enter Miklos Jancso. With this film he became something of a celebrity in intellectually active film circles by structuring it to be shot in the main, in long takes. Does it work? Well, it works in one way, and that is that it draws attention to the Hungarian plains in which it was shot and which, during the numerous long slow pans that we see, seem to stretch forever across the landscape. Looking at it again after almost forty years, I find it difficult to believe that it made such a big kerfuffle. Long held takes DO enhance suspense - hence Hitchcock's temporary enthusiasm for them - but they seem artificial as they do not mimic the action of the eye, which is always on the lookout for something more interesting elsewhere (hence Hitchcock's enthusiasm being only temporary!). The 'rounding-up' of prisoners that it portrays is an OK subject for a film, but I think we would have been much more emotionally involved with the characters if we had been treated to reaction shots and the like. Still, see it as a theoretical/historical curiosity.

vodkabird The setting was suitably stark; I loved the scenes around the old woman's house; so desolate and bleak. I enjoyed the Kafkaesque aspect of it and the bluff and double bluff between the protagonists. The main character could have been a real influence on Lynch's Henry in Eraserhead; a victim and a loser.Having said that, the film didn't grip me but it did what it set out to do, I suppose.