Electra My Love
Szerelmem, Elektra
Hungary, 1974, colour, 71 mins
- Director: Miklós Jancsó
- Screenplay: Gyula Hernádi, based on the play by László Gyurkó
- Photography: János Kende
- Production Design: Tamás Banovich
- Costume Design: Zsuzsa Vicze
- Editor: Zoltán Farkas
- Sound: György Pintér
- Music: Tamás Cseh
- Cast: Mari Törőcsik (Elektra); György Cserhalmi (Oresztész); József Madaras (Aegisztosz); Mária Bajcsay (Kikiáltó); Lajos Balázsovits (Vezér); Gabi Jobba (Krisotemis); József Bige; Tamás Cseh; György Delianisz; Balázs Galkó; Tamás Jordán; Zsolt Körtvélyessy; János Lovas; Sándor Lovas; Csaba Oszkay; László Pelsöczy; János Raimann; Iván Szendrő; Tamás Szentjóby; Tomasz Takisz; Balázs Tardy; Frantisek Velecký; Gyöngyvér Vigh
There was always something inevitable about Miklós Jancsó’s Electra My Love (a literal translation of the Hungarian Szerelmem, Elektra, though it’s also known as Elektreia). In the films from The Confrontation (Fényes szelek, 1968) to Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1971), he had been refining an approach to film that could best be described as ritualised, his characters more akin to mythological archetypes than flesh-and-blood humans. And since Jancsó’s earlier work had more than their fair share of moments resembling Greek tragedy, what could be more natural than adapting an ancient Greek source?
In fact, Jancsó’s film was derived from László Gyurkó’s stage play, which offered a radical re-reading of the ancient Elektra myth. Jancsó in turn transports it to his beloved puszta, and while the film initially seems to be set in a timeless never-never land, by the end the costumes and music are recognisably Hungarian. It marks the most extreme refinement of his post-Confrontation style: there are just eight principal shots, each lasting an entire reel of film, with four additional fill-in shots making up a total only just scraping double figures.
As with Red Psalm, the narrative plays second fiddle to everything else, so it’s worth outlining in full - this is not the kind of film where spoilers matter. At a fifteenth-anniversary commemoration of her father Agamemnon’s death, Electra (Mari Törőcsik) is told by her younger sister Chrisothemis (Gabi Jobba) to put it behind her and move on. Electra indignantly replies that she must never forget the primary reason for her opposition to the tyrant Aegisthus (József Madaras). A mere woman, she cannot raise a hand against him herself, but she lives in hope that her exiled brother Orestes will return. Aegisthus plays various psychological games with her, in an attempt to convince her that Orestes is dead, but when he turns out to be alive, his appearance inspires the people to overthrow Aegisthus. After killing Aegisthus and his supporters, Orestes and Electra die and are resurrected, free to foment revolution elsewhere.
Jancsó’s hyperstylised approach sets the protagonists against a backdrop of not only the puszta but some five hundred extras. Their intricately plotted movements run through every scene, and the big set-pieces are closer to ritual theatre than cinema. Though there’s nothing quite as formally astonishing as the massacre towards the end of Red Psalm, the film is bursting with memorable images: the line of women wending their way round a spiral path around a mount studded with candles, Orestes running through a sea of prone bodies, the usurped Aegisthus treated as a plaything by being forced to balance on a large ball (which in turn encapsulates his own shaky hold on both power and, ultimately, life), the deliberately anachronistic (and clearly symbolic) red helicopter that descends like a firebird at the end to carry Electra and Orestes off, and seemingly endless lines of horses galloping across the screen from the opening to the closing seconds.
There are plenty of contemporary political allegories to be drawn. The frequent use of Hungarian folksong (performed onscreen) invites us to read the film as a portrait of Hungary under rulers as ruthless yet insecure as Aegisthus (apparently Gyurkó’s play was explicitly inspired by the Stalinist era. When Aegisthus proclaims a Feast of Truth, encouraging his subjects to offer direct criticism without fear of reprisal, they choose unstinting sycophancy - possibly aware that when Mao tried a similar tactic in the late 1950s, his assurances proved worthless. Aegisthus relies both on terror (his people are constantly surrounded by horsemen and whip-wielding thugs) and his subjects’ reluctance to take decisive action. However, he in turn feels powerless to discipline Electra, unless given a good excuse. When he is provided with one, such as her murder of the messenger bearing news of Orestes’ death, he takes the politically canny step of proclaiming that everyone is equal under the law, thus neatly hoisting Electra (who opens the film with a lament that without consistently-applied law, civilisation is impossible) with her own petard.
As in Red Psalm, János Kende’s camera is constantly zooming from long shot to close-up, though the overall pace is statelier, the compositions more measured, the complex blocking more precise, the movements more intricately choreographed. Dance is even more central to the film’s mode of expression than was the case earlier, and is often the primary means through which Electra communicates with her followers: the dialogue is not so much spoken as declaimed in a manner not unlike authentic Greek theatre. When Aegisthus is finally killed by Orestes, Béla Bartók’s pounding piano piece Allegro barbaro (the title of which Jancsó would later adopt for a 1978 film) implicitly proclaims the triumph of the people over the oppressor via its folksong roots.
In Red Psalm, revolution is seen as a sadly necessary corrective to centuries of exploitation by the ruling classes, with any violence to be deeply regretted. By contrast, Electra herself ends up a militant revolutionary, advocating bloody revenge as a legitimate end in itself, the people justified in expressing their hatred as hatred, if their ultimate aims are the creation of a wholly equal society. It’s an uncompromisingly absolutist vision that was hard to sustain even in 1974, and subsequent events (the journey from idealism to terrorism taken by the Red Brigades in Jancsó’s adopted Italy, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Bosnia and Iraq) have shown that it’s almost invariably unsustainable when applied in practice. Which may well be why Jancsó resorted to increasingly stylised treatments in the first place: practice was already sharply deviating from theory.
DVD Distribution: Facets (US), NTSC, no region code
Picture: Sadly typical for this label, this transfer clearly came from an analogue tape source (there’s at least one tell-tale drop-out, and it hasn’t been especially well tracked either), presumably originally created for a VHS release. Marked texturing to the image creates pronounced moiré effects in an extreme close-up of a woman’s white veil, and the lighting has been flattened to the point where the whole thing looks as though it was shot indoors, which was categorically not the case. Jancsó’s frequent recourse to smoke and fog also plays havoc with the encoding. However, the 1.33:1 aspect ratio does appear to be correct.
Sound: By contrast, the sound is fine, and almost certainly reflects the original mono track.
Subtitles: To start on a positive note, they’re idiomatic, typo-free, properly synchronised (by no means a given with this label), white, and appear to offer a full translation. On the other hand, they’re also permanently burned into the image - and, worse, they’re set against a translucent black background, presumably to ensure that they were clearly readable even in the VHS version.
Extras: A small stills gallery.
Links
- Filmtörténet (in Hungarian, but with video clips)
- Internet Movie Database
- Electra My Love is one of three films analysed by Peter Hames in this Kinoeye piece
- Light Sleeper reproduces a 1974 on-set report by Gideon Bachmann, originally published in Sight & Sound
- Reviews: Cinepassion (Fernando F. Croce); New York Times (Richard Eder); Ozus’ World (Dennis Schwartz); PopMatters (Chris Elliot); Village Voice (Michael Atkinson)
- DVD available from: Amazon.com; DVD Empire
Posted on 20th March 2008
Under: Reviews, Hungary, Miklós Jancsó | No Comments »
Még kér a nép
Current DVD availability makes it easy to trace Miklós Jancsó’s career from his second feature 
Reducing Red Psalm to its basic narrative outline, as I’ve just done, makes it sound like a crude piece of socialist agitprop, and its considerable musical content (its messages are as likely to be sung as declaimed) suggests affinities with the Marxist musicals of Grigori Alexandrov (Circus/Цирк, 1936) or Ivan Pyriev (Tractor Drivers/Трактористы, 1939; Cossacks of the Kuban River/Кубанские казаки, 1949). But those are altogether jollier affairs than Jancsó’s stark political parable, and far more straightforward in their construction and mise-en-scène. Once again, Jancsó is clearly fascinated by the mechanisms of power and oppression, both in theory and practice, and even when his film appears to be at its most deceptively bucolic, one can usually see evidence of a military presence in the background, and often a large-scale one.
Although Jancsó’s signature is instantly recognisable (it’s hard to imagine anyone else even trying to make a film like this, much less succeeding), there are several marked changes between Red Psalm and his 1963-67 output. He has abandoned the wide screen for the squarish Academy frame of his first films, and is now shooting in colour. While individual shots are as lengthy as ever (just twenty-eight in total, most running several minutes), their staging is different - I don’t recall him ever using a zoom lens in his black and white films, but it’s constantly in evidence here. Previously, the deep-focus shots would ensure that the surrounding landscapes remained as sharp as the people in the foreground, but here the depth of field is constantly changing: whenever Jancsó fills the frame with just one or two individuals, the background becomes blurred and foreshortened. The effect is of cutting to a close-up, albeit here within the same shot.
There are impressive individual set-pieces throughout, but perhaps most spectacular is the large-scale massacre towards the end, shot from a single camera position in the far distance, with soldiers and peasants singing and dancing together in apparent unison before the soldiers regroup into a circle around the peasants, trapping them in a human stockade (encircled by a number of men on horseback) before bringing out the rifles. There were apparently 1,500 people appearing on camera, and the choreographic logistics alone take the breath away. The unexpected background appearance of a steam locomotive pulling a train laden with hundreds of soldiers is equally startling (as no tracks have been visible up to then), but so too is the way that Jancsó will often move from distant observation to extreme close-up in the same shot, picking out details in a constantly swirling human panorama. János Kende’s ceaselessly circling camerawork, reputedly requiring more assistance than usual just to keep things in focus, is beyond praise.
Red Psalm has inescapably dated: the early 1970s may have been the last time such overtly Marxist propaganda could be presented with a straight face outside east Asia, and it’s best viewed today as a historical parable on two levels, representing both the 1890s of its setting and the still flickering spirit of 1968 that clearly animated its creation. But, like Sergei Eisenstein’s not dissimilar Strike (Стачка, 1925) - Jancsó’s associative montages are no less intricate for being staged within the same shot - Red Psalm is such a formidable work of art on its own terms that it diffuses political criticism on those grounds alone. Even by Jancsó’s standards, it’s an extraordinary film, probably his most thoroughly thought-through achievement since 
Csend és kiáltás
Both made and set in the same year as 
The opening scene, set on a sand dune, shows Kémeri - played by Zoltán Latinovits, the lead in 
Most of the film takes place in Károly’s farm on the puszta - it’s not unlike the one in the final scenes of Cantata. Károly’s wife Teréz is played by Mari Törőcsik, the iconic lead in Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta, 1955) and, shortly after this film, Károly Makk’s Love (Szerelem, 1971). Her calm demeanour conceals a deadly secret: while openly sharing István’s favours between herself and her sister-in-law Anna (Andrea Drahota), she is slowly poisoning Károly and his mother. When István finds out, he is put in a moral quandary, since it would be impossible to report them to the police without revealing his identity and whereabouts.
On the soundtrack, Jancsó’s characteristic birdsong can still be heard, but it’s often usurped by the harsher sounds of crows and cockerels, and also by a near-ubiquitous wind, which serves to chill even occasional romantic encounters to the marrow - though the word ‘romantic’ seems singularly inappropriate when applied to the scene where István is passed from Teréz to Anna, and finally neglected as the two find greater intimacy with each other. The fact that it takes place in the open air shows their essential contempt for Károly’s opinion. 
Silence and Cry was the last of Jancsó’s black-and-white Scope films, marking the end of one of the most distinctive lines drawn by anyone in 1960s cinema. His next film, The Confrontation (Fényes szelek, 1968 - only available on an unsubtitled Hungarian DVD at the time of writing) would be his first in colour, and would mark the start of a new phase in his career.
Csillagosok, katonák
Superficially, it’s easy to see why the Soviet Union thought that Miklós Jancsó would be the man to direct a Hungarian-Soviet co-production commemorating the October Revolution’s 50th anniversary. With 
In fact, The Red and the White (whose Hungarian title translates literally as ‘Starry Soldiers’, or more colloquially as ‘Stars on their Caps’) is an entirely logical follow-up to The Round-Up in that it too offers a detached, clear-eyed presentation of the mechanics of oppressive power as applied in practice. The opening scenes echo those of both The Round-Up and My Way Home in that we see large numbers of people being repeatedly rounded up, stripped and summarily executed. The impression of anarchic chaos is established from the start by a map of eastern Europe with a bewildering profusion of arrows that presumably indicate troop movements. But with no context-setting or clarification other than the suggestion that Moscow is at the heart of events, it’s as mystifying as any of the film’s later battle scenes.
We eventually encounter another distinct group besides Red and White fighters when one of the Red escapees stumbles upon a field hospital and opportunistically lying on the ground amidst a group of bodies after having spotted that not all of them are dead. Shortly afterwards, the hospital’s nurses are rounded up by the Whites - but instead of the usual and expected humiliation and slaughter, they’re whisked off to a classically Russian silver-birch wood for an impromptu recreation of a ballroom dance, complete with live musicians playing a mournful waltz. This echoes the equally surprising appearance of the military band towards the end of The Round-Up, but the effect here is even more incongruously surreal: it’s as though the Whites (i.e. the more aristocratic side of the conflict) felt a deep-seated psychological need to try to recreate a more civilised (i.e. Tsarist) past with whatever paltry materials they had at their disposal. It also marks the point where Jancsó makes it clear that anyone in search of a conventional bit of revolutionary propaganda is wasting their time - was this the point where his Soviet backers shifted uneasily in their seats, or had they written the film off already?
And then it’s back to the war, with men and horses running for their lives as they’re buzzed by planes, though as soon as they leave, it’s business as usual: more rounding-up, singling-out and summary execution. Although people are frequently shot on camera at point-blank range, there is no blood: they merely fall down as though the rifles contained compressed air. This approach was near-universal in the days of the classic John Ford westerns that Jancsó acknowledges as one of his lifelong inspirations, but by 1967 it’s become stylised enough to be just as surreal as the “ballroom” scene. If I remember rightly, just one soldier seems to display any pain when he dies in close-up towards the end, though any emotional response is limited by the fact that we have little idea who he is - it seems purely coincidental that he happened to die right in front of the camera. 
Whereas The Round-Up threaded personal stories through the long-distance overview of intricate troop movements and military operations, this time round there’s very little to latch on to. Seasoned Jancsó viewers will doubtless recognise András Kozák (the Hungarian lead in My Way Home, a key supporting player in The Round-Up) as a Red who makes regular appearances throughout the film, including a final-shot close-up - but he’s just as archetypal as his anonymous colleagues. A romance between a soldier and a nurse is perfunctory enough to suggest that Jancsó is merely tossing his audience a generic bone, one of many pieces of evidence cited by Matt Johnson, in by far the most comprehensive analysis of the film that I’ve found online, in support of his thesis that The Red and the White can be read as a great anti-war satire that rivals Dr Strangelove in its skewed adoption and subversion of traditional war-movie clichés.
Szegénylegények
It’s appropriate that Miklós Jancsó took inspiration for more than one film (
The film’s original title Szegénylegények translates as ‘the hopeless ones’ (its French title is Les Sans-espoir), and if that doesn’t already set a suitably grim and despairing tone, this is reinforced by the opening montage. Using simple illustrations and a deceptively informative voiceover (the original UK release print replaced this with a rather more detailed text scroll), Jancsó sets the scene in the late 1860s, the round-up of the English title involving the last holdouts from the 1848 Kossuth rebellion whom, one assumes, have been eking out a basic existence on the puszta ever since. But even here, images of buildings and landscapes are rapidly usurped by mechanisms of torture and oppression, made all the more unsettling for being presented as though they were items in a hardware catalogue. By the time we’re told that Count Gedeon Raday, the commissar ultimately responsible for the operation, “wasn’t particular about his methods”, that has already become abundantly clear, and one braces oneself for the worst.
Groups of horsemen thunder past either side of the camera to join their companions on the horizon, creating a startling three-dimensional effect, and throughout the film Jancsó is careful to compose for every plane - the far distance is as likely to feature people and horses in intricate geometrical arrangements as the foreground. The film often has more in common with dance than cinema: a group of hooded prisoners shuffles around in a circle, soldiers form two parallel lines to repeatedly whip a naked girl, black-clad old women bring white bundles of provisions that are laid out in a perfectly straight line. Jancsó often shoots from a high vantage point, as if to emphasise the massive scale of his canvas, and in the many sequences featuring literally hundreds of people, one can only marvel at how long they must have taken to set up. The soundtrack is clearly post-dubbed, as Jancsó liked to give directions during his long takes, aping his silent-movie forebears of four or five decades earlier.
Five years earlier, Alfred Hitchcock had taken the then virtually unprecedented decision to kill off his female lead partway through Psycho (1960). In The Round-Up Jancsó does this with such regularity that it’s impossible to latch onto any single individual, despite the presence of recognisable actors such as Zoltán Latinovits and András Kozák, the leads in his two previous films. It rapidly becomes clear that every character, without exception, is a pawn in an exceptionally complex game of three-dimensional chess whose board lacks squares and whose rules change from minute to minute.
This atmosphere of uncertainty (the film’s timescale is impossible to establish: it could be hours, weeks, months or years) means that a singled-out prisoner never knows whether he’ll end up dead or given an unexpected military promotion - and, if the latter, whether this is all part of the same macabre game and shouldn’t be taken at face value. The appearance of a full-scale military band just as a triple execution seems about to take place is both incongruously amusing and a wry comment on the ritualised nature of power: the unseen authorities seem to view the entire round-up as least in part as a gigantic Gesamtkunstwerk, a piece of conceptual art whose aesthetic impact outweighs the fact that it involves real human sacrifices.
This certainly stands up to scrutiny, but so too does a reading of the film as a representation of Bosnia, Rwanda or Iraq, which Jancsó obviously couldn’t have intended - and he clearly didn’t have September 11 in mind when staging the extraordinary sequence in which desperate prisoners fling themselves off the stockade to their deaths, or Guantánamo Bay (and Abu Ghraib) in the rigidly-defined groups of hooded prisoners who have no idea of their fate. But that’s one of the defining characteristics of a truly great work of art: it constantly reinvents itself for a new generation, and despite being over forty years old at the time of writing, Jancsó’s masterpiece has dated hardly at all.
Így jöttem
Miklós Jancsó’s third feature My Way Home is a key transitional work in his career. Although still not quite past the embryonic stage, his mature style is now clearly visible, and he’s already managed to ditch the Antonioni influence that cast a long shadow over its predecessor 
Jóska is then incarcerated in a Russian-run labour camp, whose Hungarian inmates are systematically shaved, stripped and assessed for health problems. During a swimming session, a prisoner attempts to swim under a security fence while the others generate distracting splashes, but the barbed wire stretches all the way to the bottom. A motley troupe of musicians (mostly violinists) plays Russian folk standards, ostensibly to lighten the mood but actually a pervasive aural reminder of who’s boss. Jóska joins a water-fetching detail, one of whose members attempts to make a run for it, but he is swiftly recaptured. Jóska is then arbitrarily released - again - and ordered to return home, but becomes a prisoner once again when he runs into an almost equally young Russian soldier named Kolya.
Eventually, thanks to some spontaneous horseplay by a river (where Kolya shoots frogs for fun and tentatively lets Jóska join in) and a ruined building surrounded by crumbling statues, they discover that they have enough shared values at base to conquer the language barrier. They certainly show each other more human warmth than they get from an environment that’s otherwise full of sudden and unpredictable dangers - biplanes buzz them at random, they’re surrounded by groups of unidentifiable horsemen, passing military units force them to strip for compulsory disinfection of their clothing, and they’re attacked by Hungarian POWs. (A group of women bathing in a nearby reservoir is treated with equal lack of respect, though they do at least escape the proverbial fate worse than death, unlike their successors in The Round-Up).
This being a Jancsó film, the mutually supportive situation that Jóska and Kolya create for themselves against a backdrop of chaos and confusion doesn’t last. It’s clear from relatively early on that Kolya has something wrong with him, and he gradually reveals that his obsessively structured exercise routine has more to do with alleviating the symptoms of a bullet wound than a need to keep in shape. Once he’s gone, Jóska is once again on his own, stranded in a Hungary that he no longer recognises and which doesn’t seem to want him. It’s a powerfully bleak ending reminiscent of Imre Kertész’s (yet to be written) novel Fateless, filmed by Lajos Koltai in 2005.
Though both András Kozák and Sergei Nikonenko give appealing performances, we’re not given the same insight into their psyches that we were granted with Zoltán Latinovits’s troubled protagonist in Cantata - there are no self-diagnostic speeches or anguished bouts of introspection, nor even the most basic biographical or contextual information. Indeed, by the end of the film we know little more about Jóska than we did at the start, which makes him an effective surrogate for the viewer. We might as well enjoy this while it lasts, because no such identification is possible in Jancsó’s extraordinary The Round-Up, his next feature and the one that catapulted him to international fame.
Oldás és kötés
Miklós Jancsó’s second feature is, to all practical intents and purposes, his debut, since he has all but disowned his first decade’s output - a large number of documentaries plus a 1958 feature The Bells Have Gone To Rome (A harangok Rómában mentek). Although embryonic glimmerings of Jancsó’s mature style can be discerned towards the end, the dominant influence is clearly Michelangelo Antonioni. If one didn’t already know (since Jancsó has cheerfully admitted it) that La Notte (1961) was a key inspiration, one could easily guess from both the subject matter and treatment of this story of a disillusioned surgeon - the film’s Hungarian title translates as Solution and Bandage.
Beforehand, he expresses misgivings about the approach of the senior surgeon known as the Professor (Andor Ajtay). Ambrus takes a strictly Marxist line: surgery in the Professor’s heyday used to be a matter of individual craftsmanship, but it’s since become like a piece of chamber music with various specialists playing together in absolute harmony. Disconcertingly, the operation involves what appears to be genuine surgical footage, adding to the overall tension. There are some striking compositions in this sequence, such as an overhead shot of the white-clad patient being laid down on an equally pristine bed, creating an impression of sterility that’s at odds with the underlying conflict.
Up to this point the film has more or less aped Antonioni in its visual treatment and mise-en-scène, placing Ambrus in a variety of largely empty environments (glass, steel, bare white walls) that seem to express an ennui that he can’t quite articulate himself. This impression continues throughout the film’s mid-section, a lengthy party (modelled explicitly on the one in La Notte?) in which Ambrus tries and fails to integrate with his much more laid-back companions - he walks out of a pretentious avant-garde film about dead geese projected to a live jazz accompaniment, and stands aloof from the subsequent discussion, clearly bored and distracted.
Finally, Ambrus applies for two days’ leave and sets off for the countryside and the film’s final act. It’s here that we see the first stirrings of what would become Jancsó’s own highly individual style: vast, empty plains only occasionally studded with buildings, often shot from a high angle to emphasise the sense of isolation and distance. He encounters old friends from his past life, including a woman, Eta (Mária Medgyesi), who may be a former lover - but is as detached from them as he was from his colleagues and friends. All three conversations between Ambrus and Eta are shot as unbroken deep-focus takes, averaging nearly three minutes, the slow-moving camera constantly alive to the surrounding landscape - another sign of things to come.
As with Antonioni, there are no pat answers to a psychological crisis that Ambrus himself admits he can’t articulate. Two brief encounters on the way home, with a hitch-hiking soldier and a kindly station guard, ironically have more value than his other conversations, as they’re based on acts of uncomplicated kindness, with no worries about one’s status or past.