The Round-Up

The Round-Up’s screening at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival was a revelation. The audience fell in love with the Hungarian film set in the 1860s, which uses an utterly modern style to tell a story from the country’s past. Jancsó’s political allegory speaks about the veterans of the 1848 revolution, imprisoned in the middle of an endless puszta. Tricks, provocation, and torture which set the rhythm of their fearful days, push the inmates to their wits’ end. We often look at these events from a distance: groups of people are shown with a geometric precision and morph into abstract compositions. One of the film’s admirers, Martin Scorsese, confessed: ‘I have never really been exposed to such a sensibility in the camera movements before (…) and the ending of The Round-Up is one of the greatest summations of a picture ever created’. We are showing Jancsó’s groundbreaking film 10 years after the director’s death.

Sebastian Smoliński

Miklós Jancsó (1921–2014) was one of the most outstanding Hungarian directors. He started as a documentary filmmaker, making about a dozen short films. In the 1960s, his works were frequently presented at the most prestigious film festivals. He was nominated to the Palme d’Or in Cannes five times. In 1972 he won the best director award there for Red Psalm (1972) and an honorary award for his achievements in 1979. His other films include The Red and the White (1967) and Silence and Cry (1968).

4K reconstruction made in 2020 by the Hungarian National Film Fund in collaboration with the Hungarian Society of Cinematographers.