Directed Miklós Jancsó
Written by Gyula Hernádi
Starring János Görbe, Zoltán Latinovits, Tibor Molnár
Running Time: 90 minutes
Available on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber on April 12

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

I have been trying to track down a copy of the 1966 Hungarian film The Round-Up for a couple of years and lo, Kino Lorber is premiered its new 4K restoration at the New York Film Festival. This movie has been on my white whale list for so long, I can’t even remember what inspired me to track it down in the first place. I think it might have had something to do with an ambitious personal project to watch a movie from every country. While Hungarian cinema is synonymous with Béla Tarr, Tarr is on record calling Miklós Jancsó “the greatest Hungarian director of all time.” Regardless of why it was on my radar, it was apparently there for good reason because The Round-Up is a captivating piece of 1960s European art cinema. 

Given that my knowledge of 19th century Hungarian history is nonexistent, I was curious to see if the film would provide enough context to know what exactly I was watching. Fortunately there’s a little voiceover preamble that briefly explains the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and how 20 years after the fact the remaining freedom fighters and folk heroes were rounded up by the Austrian powers-that-be and put into prison camps. The Round-Up takes place at one of these prison camps located in the desolate Great Hungarian Plain. It feels like the prison camp may as well be located on another planet. Despite this prison camp being a mere fort staffed by feather-capped dandies with impressively groomed mustaches, it feels more inescapable than any of cinema’s high security prisons. 

The opening sequence of the film shows a prisoner walking out into the great expanse of the plain accompanied only by the howling wind that is always present on the film’s soundtrack, only to see him shot down in the distance. In addition to showing the futility of escape, this sequence also hints at the 90 minutes of mind games and psychological torture we’re about to bear witness to as the guards manipulate the prisoners in a desperate attempt to find the rebel leader Sándor Rózsa. Inmates are pit against each other in a Kafkaesque nightmare ostensibly designed to comment on the oppressive Soviet control of the Eastern Bloc. It’s an exercise in pure futility that culminates in one of those masterfully bleak endings the Eastern European filmmakers do so well.

Miklós Jancsó’s work here is stunning. The stark black-and-white widescreen cinematography adds a wasteland quality to the sun-stricken expanse of the Plain. Inside the camp Jancsó relies on close-ups of the most interesting faces he can find amongst the prisoners and guards. There is no more interesting face than that of János Görbe who portrays the closest thing the film has to a protagonist in Gajdar János who is desperately trying to find an outlaw who has killed more men than him in an effort to obtain a pardon. Of course this is a hopeless endeavor, but the desperation Görbe displays on his unforgettable mug is the driving emotional force in a film that often feels like cold cinematic brutalism. 

Kino Lorber’s new 4K restoration of The Round-Up is breathtakingly gorgeous. So many of the DVD release of these midcentury Eastern European classics suffer from so-so transfers from unsatisfactory prints and this one looks incredible. The stark black and white really pops and makes for a wholly engrossing experience. While I am happy that I finally got a chance to see this film after doggedly attempting to track down a copy, it’s baffling that such an obvious masterpiece has been resigned to obscurity for so long. Mercifully, it looks like it won’t have to stay there much longer.