THE ROUND-UP (MIKLÓS JANCSÓ, 1966)
SZEGÉNYLEGÉNYEK
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
6:30 PM
Thursday 07 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:25 PM
Thursday 14 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 90 minutes
Country: Hungary
Language: Hungarian with English subtitles
Cast: János Görbe, Zoltán Latinovits, Tibor Molnár, Gábor Agárdi, András Kozák, Béla Barsi
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
6:30 PM
Thursday 07 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:25 PM
Thursday 14 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 90 minutes
Country: Hungary
Language: Hungarian with English subtitles
Cast: János Görbe, Zoltán Latinovits, Tibor Molnár, Gábor Agárdi, András Kozák, Béla Barsi
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
‘An absolute masterpiece of still-innovative, formally challenging political cinema.’ – Hamish Ford, Senses of Cinema
In the barren landscape of the Hungarian steppe, a large group of men and women live out their days in an open-air prison, accused of having participated in the Hungarian uprising of 1848. When the Austrian guards hear rumours that the legendary bandit and revolutionary hero Sándor Rósza may be hiding out in the camp, they launch a campaign of interrogation, and the prisoners become pitted against one another in the hope of saving their own skins.
Miklós Jancsó’s first feature to receive major international recognition, The Round-Up offers his first of many stylised representations of the past comprising movements of bodies through the frame. Taking advantage of the tonal depths of Tamás Somló’s black-and-white widescreen cinematography, his camera dances through complex set pieces that are both beautifully choreographed and, in their bleak testament to the absurdity of authoritarianism, devoid of romanticism.
Introduced by Nicky Hannan at Ritz Cinemas and Cerise Howard at Lido Cinemas.
‘An absolute masterpiece of still-innovative, formally challenging political cinema.’ – Hamish Ford, Senses of Cinema
In the barren landscape of the Hungarian steppe, a large group of men and women live out their days in an open-air prison, accused of having participated in the Hungarian uprising of 1848. When the Austrian guards hear rumours that the legendary bandit and revolutionary hero Sándor Rósza may be hiding out in the camp, they launch a campaign of interrogation, and the prisoners become pitted against one another in the hope of saving their own skins.
Miklós Jancsó’s first feature to receive major international recognition, The Round-Up offers his first of many stylised representations of the past comprising movements of bodies through the frame. Taking advantage of the tonal depths of Tamás Somló’s black-and-white widescreen cinematography, his camera dances through complex set pieces that are both beautifully choreographed and, in their bleak testament to the absurdity of authoritarianism, devoid of romanticism.
Introduced by Nicky Hannan at Ritz Cinemas and Cerise Howard at Lido Cinemas.
FILM NOTES
By Hamish Ford
By Hamish Ford
Hamish Ford is Senior lecturer in Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle. He writes on modernist world cinema and is co-editor of A Companion to Ingmar Bergman (Wiley/Blackwell, 2025).
The Round-Up offers an early distillation of the qualities for which Hungarian director JANCSÓ Miklós* became an acknowledged master of modernist cinema: narratively attenuated filmmaking, and long, virtuosic tracking shots featuring large casts of bodies in complex choreographed, almost wordless set-pieces. It is a masterpiece of innovative, formally challenging political cinema.
The film introduces, with trademark precision and trans-historical provocation, the key subject essayed across Jancsó’s best-known work – power: its defining of reality and recent history, its arbitrary and often absurd directives, its degrading treatment of the human body, and ultimately its impermanence. A brief prologue informs us via voice-over that The Round-Up is set in Hungary at the end of the 1860s, at the dawn of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Delivered over historically specific and thematically suggestive diagrams, this prologue encapsulates the film’s setting and immediate back-history – most importantly, the nationalist and revolutionary fervour in Hungary and across Europe exploding in 1848-9 – and later post-revolutionary scenarios. This includes The Round-Up’s own Communist bloc production context and the gradual loosening of restrictions after many years of oppression and reprisals by the restored pro-Soviet Budapest government, following the failed 1956 Hungarian uprising. The largely abstract on-screen portrayal of power, and its cold application at the behest of far-away state agents determined to thwart “another” 1848 or 1956, could almost be set anywhere, any time.
The original Hungarian title translates as ‘The Hopeless Ones.’ This refers to the film’s anonymous prisoners kept within a kind of rural internment or concentration camp, mysteriously referred to as the Earthworks, in the midst of the great Hungarian puszta (steppe). It also connotes a population at large kept in chains, no matter the political situation or era. The men and women on screen are suffering the long after-effects of the resurgent state’s paranoia in the wake of the nationalist and revolutionary period two decades earlier. The military – with Hungarians now doing Austria’s (and soon the new Austro-Hungarian Empire’s) bidding – appears obsessed with Sándor Rózsa, a real figure encapsulating revolutionary, nationalist guerilla fighter, and betyár (outlaw). In the film Rózsa is never seen, remaining semi-mythical. Yet whether he is real or otherwise, dead or alive, present or absent, seems ultimately unimportant, as this folk-icon symbolises the spirit of ongoing resistance. At one point a prisoner tells his father he has never seen Rózsa, only to be corrected: ‘You have seen him often.’ Meanwhile, soldiers continually harass the prisoners as to whether the fabled rebel leader is present at the camp, despite appearing to know he is not. The state’s real enemy, it turns out, is less Rózsa than his followers and the idea he represents, as the chilling final scene so sharply illustrates: it is the people per se.
The prisoners are incarcerated within both the claustrophobic confines of the Earthworks buildings and courtyard and the great puszta beyond, which initially seems to tease them with the possibility of freedom. In fact, the power of the state is so complete that even the tantalising openness of nature is illusory. If anyone makes a break for it, there is nowhere to hide. Jancsó largely offers us a cinema of the out-of-doors. One early scene aside, the horror all happens under a glorious sunny sky. In a deeply authoritarian context, freedom lies nowhere, even on the puszta.
The precise nature of the images rendering such a starkly hermetic world is crucial. The first of many Jancsó films shot in 2.35:1 widescreen, The Round-Up’s striking compositions emphasise the extreme rectangular frame, often abstractly rendering a rigorous and restricted mise en scène. These images offer enormous graphic interest and a strong emphasis on texture – of clothing, stone, wood, grass, stucco, earth, grass, and sky. If this constitutes an almost avant-gardist cinema of de-narrativised formal emphasis, the breathtaking shots and staging of bodies in space also amount to a true cinema of spectacle. The Round-Up shows Jancsó’s solidifying interest in elaborate crane-mounted tracking shots as a key structuring principle. Long shots are marked by extensive potential mobility, the camera always seeming poised for lateral and swooping vertical movement.
Janscó works with narrative attenuation and stark downplaying of character and psychology. In the early scenes, a protagonist seems possible – a farmer who fruitlessly tries to negotiate with military officers by offering to inform on fellow prisoners so as to lessen his own punishment. But the dual drivers of individual agency and narrative progression are voided quickly. In addition, the sense of a “group protagonist” (in line with loose communist principles) – and thereby “authentic” revolutionary action – never seems viable here. No single person or group is remotely free enough to drive meaningful change. Only the distant imperial state can do so.
Throughout, narration by the camera appears largely undermined by its radically “objective” nature. Although we get more close-ups than in Jancsó’s following films, so that skin and hair become additional sources of fascination for the camera, no single on-screen figure is of any importance for long. The result is a kind of figural cinema with multiple undifferentiated bodies treated primarily as graphic components of the image, morphing easily into others, in a process with no significant narrative outcome. This choreography of massed and more intimate arrangements of bodies set against a stark built environment and wide-open nature, with the human figures or camera (or both) typically moving, suggests a visual (but hopeless) dance.
Rather than lessening clarity, this stark, abstract, formalist filmmaking generates trans-historical thematic articulation and a challenging political cinema. A “realistic” soundtrack devoid of non-diegetic music [music with no clear source in the fictional world on screen] accompanies the film’s scenario and highly stylised images. The near constant chirp of birds invokes nature’s obliviousness to human degradation. On screen, doorways, gates and walls are given repeated emphasis, with many shots suggesting the proscenium arch. The cumulative result is a highly “presentationalist” (rather than simply “representing” an assumed reality) and reflexive political modernism, but without the more obvious markers of “distanciation” or “alienation” familiar from the work of radical Western directors. Instead, we are faced with Jancsó’s unique kind of “cinema of cruelty”, driven by a rigorous and revolutionary humanist impulse embedded in the The Round-Up’s setting and production, and echoing troublingly across historical and political contexts.
*In Hungarian, family names precede given names.
The film introduces, with trademark precision and trans-historical provocation, the key subject essayed across Jancsó’s best-known work – power: its defining of reality and recent history, its arbitrary and often absurd directives, its degrading treatment of the human body, and ultimately its impermanence. A brief prologue informs us via voice-over that The Round-Up is set in Hungary at the end of the 1860s, at the dawn of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Delivered over historically specific and thematically suggestive diagrams, this prologue encapsulates the film’s setting and immediate back-history – most importantly, the nationalist and revolutionary fervour in Hungary and across Europe exploding in 1848-9 – and later post-revolutionary scenarios. This includes The Round-Up’s own Communist bloc production context and the gradual loosening of restrictions after many years of oppression and reprisals by the restored pro-Soviet Budapest government, following the failed 1956 Hungarian uprising. The largely abstract on-screen portrayal of power, and its cold application at the behest of far-away state agents determined to thwart “another” 1848 or 1956, could almost be set anywhere, any time.
The original Hungarian title translates as ‘The Hopeless Ones.’ This refers to the film’s anonymous prisoners kept within a kind of rural internment or concentration camp, mysteriously referred to as the Earthworks, in the midst of the great Hungarian puszta (steppe). It also connotes a population at large kept in chains, no matter the political situation or era. The men and women on screen are suffering the long after-effects of the resurgent state’s paranoia in the wake of the nationalist and revolutionary period two decades earlier. The military – with Hungarians now doing Austria’s (and soon the new Austro-Hungarian Empire’s) bidding – appears obsessed with Sándor Rózsa, a real figure encapsulating revolutionary, nationalist guerilla fighter, and betyár (outlaw). In the film Rózsa is never seen, remaining semi-mythical. Yet whether he is real or otherwise, dead or alive, present or absent, seems ultimately unimportant, as this folk-icon symbolises the spirit of ongoing resistance. At one point a prisoner tells his father he has never seen Rózsa, only to be corrected: ‘You have seen him often.’ Meanwhile, soldiers continually harass the prisoners as to whether the fabled rebel leader is present at the camp, despite appearing to know he is not. The state’s real enemy, it turns out, is less Rózsa than his followers and the idea he represents, as the chilling final scene so sharply illustrates: it is the people per se.
The prisoners are incarcerated within both the claustrophobic confines of the Earthworks buildings and courtyard and the great puszta beyond, which initially seems to tease them with the possibility of freedom. In fact, the power of the state is so complete that even the tantalising openness of nature is illusory. If anyone makes a break for it, there is nowhere to hide. Jancsó largely offers us a cinema of the out-of-doors. One early scene aside, the horror all happens under a glorious sunny sky. In a deeply authoritarian context, freedom lies nowhere, even on the puszta.
The precise nature of the images rendering such a starkly hermetic world is crucial. The first of many Jancsó films shot in 2.35:1 widescreen, The Round-Up’s striking compositions emphasise the extreme rectangular frame, often abstractly rendering a rigorous and restricted mise en scène. These images offer enormous graphic interest and a strong emphasis on texture – of clothing, stone, wood, grass, stucco, earth, grass, and sky. If this constitutes an almost avant-gardist cinema of de-narrativised formal emphasis, the breathtaking shots and staging of bodies in space also amount to a true cinema of spectacle. The Round-Up shows Jancsó’s solidifying interest in elaborate crane-mounted tracking shots as a key structuring principle. Long shots are marked by extensive potential mobility, the camera always seeming poised for lateral and swooping vertical movement.
Janscó works with narrative attenuation and stark downplaying of character and psychology. In the early scenes, a protagonist seems possible – a farmer who fruitlessly tries to negotiate with military officers by offering to inform on fellow prisoners so as to lessen his own punishment. But the dual drivers of individual agency and narrative progression are voided quickly. In addition, the sense of a “group protagonist” (in line with loose communist principles) – and thereby “authentic” revolutionary action – never seems viable here. No single person or group is remotely free enough to drive meaningful change. Only the distant imperial state can do so.
Throughout, narration by the camera appears largely undermined by its radically “objective” nature. Although we get more close-ups than in Jancsó’s following films, so that skin and hair become additional sources of fascination for the camera, no single on-screen figure is of any importance for long. The result is a kind of figural cinema with multiple undifferentiated bodies treated primarily as graphic components of the image, morphing easily into others, in a process with no significant narrative outcome. This choreography of massed and more intimate arrangements of bodies set against a stark built environment and wide-open nature, with the human figures or camera (or both) typically moving, suggests a visual (but hopeless) dance.
Rather than lessening clarity, this stark, abstract, formalist filmmaking generates trans-historical thematic articulation and a challenging political cinema. A “realistic” soundtrack devoid of non-diegetic music [music with no clear source in the fictional world on screen] accompanies the film’s scenario and highly stylised images. The near constant chirp of birds invokes nature’s obliviousness to human degradation. On screen, doorways, gates and walls are given repeated emphasis, with many shots suggesting the proscenium arch. The cumulative result is a highly “presentationalist” (rather than simply “representing” an assumed reality) and reflexive political modernism, but without the more obvious markers of “distanciation” or “alienation” familiar from the work of radical Western directors. Instead, we are faced with Jancsó’s unique kind of “cinema of cruelty”, driven by a rigorous and revolutionary humanist impulse embedded in the The Round-Up’s setting and production, and echoing troublingly across historical and political contexts.
*In Hungarian, family names precede given names.
THE RESTORATION
Source: National Film Institute – Film Archive Hungary
A 4K restoration from the original 35mm negative, done by the National Film Institute - Film Archive Hungary
Director: Miklós JANSCÓ; Production Company: Mafilm; Screenplay: Gyula HERNÁDI; Photography: Tamás SOMLÓ; Editor: Zoltán FARKAS; Production Design: Tamás BANOVICH; Costume Design: Zsuzsa VICZE // Cast: János GÖRBE (Gajdar JÁNOS), Zoltán LATINOVITS (Veszelka IMRE), Tibor MOLNÁR (KABAL).
Hungary | 1966 | 90 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Hungarian with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+
A 4K restoration from the original 35mm negative, done by the National Film Institute - Film Archive Hungary
Director: Miklós JANSCÓ; Production Company: Mafilm; Screenplay: Gyula HERNÁDI; Photography: Tamás SOMLÓ; Editor: Zoltán FARKAS; Production Design: Tamás BANOVICH; Costume Design: Zsuzsa VICZE // Cast: János GÖRBE (Gajdar JÁNOS), Zoltán LATINOVITS (Veszelka IMRE), Tibor MOLNÁR (KABAL).
Hungary | 1966 | 90 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Hungarian with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+