Admission Free

Miklos Jancso's first film to gain international attention, The Round Up (1965) deals with the diabolical entrapment and destruction by psychological and physical torture of a group of 1848 Hungarian nationalists in revolt against the Austro-Hungarian empire. According to Amos Vogel: “A poisonous lyricism - anti-romantic and reflective of the truths of the 20th century - permeates his inexplicable charades of inexorable cruelty, submission, betrayal, and repression, in which victims and oppressors constantly change places and no one remains uncorrupted by the exercise of violence. Beginning with Round Up, his best, Jancso's stylized tragic-epic works have all concerned themselves with the problems of power and oppression, in images of searing plastic beauty and in sequences of implacable violence and terror set against ominous, brilliant landscapes of the most cruel black and white. These are visual metaphors of truths better expressed obliquely, the anguished statements of a pessimistic humanist haunted by the problem of totalitarianism, war, and the corruption of power.”