The Round-Up

Janos Gorbe, in black hat, and fellow detainees 

Miklós Jancsó's The Round-Up, from 1966, is a pitiless depiction of ethnic cleansing in the Austro-Hungarian empire circa 1870. Jancso's fourth film was the first to bring him widespread acclaim in the West. Magyar peasants undergo torture and humiliation under the knouts of the largely Austrian military. The army, reeling after their defeat by Prussia, are forcibly taking new recruits for their depleted regiments, but they have other motives. They use the detainment of the men to weed out and eliminate veterans of the 1848 Hungarian rebellion which was led by Lajos Kossuth. Some sources, including the Kanopy website where the film is streaming, have indicated that this film takes place in the immediate aftermath of the 1848-9 uprising, but this is not so. The veterans of the rebellion served as young men and are now in late middle age. However, the fact that they are still facing reprisals twenty years after the fact, bears witness to the depth and bitterness of the enmity that lingers. 

Janos Gorbe as Janos Gajdor, a wheedling and desperate informant, is the de facto protagonist of the first half of the film. His frantic and futile attempts to save his skin make up the majority of the drama and give the film a sense of the era's paranoia and cruelty. Despite positioning his film as a Marxist critique of Hungarian history in the prologue, Jancsó eventually admitted he wanted the film to reflect the fallout from the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956. After Gajdor meets his just desserts, the film eschews psychological characterizations for the Cinemascope pageantry and allegory that was to become Jancsó's distinctive style in the next decade. Multiple fields of movement, usually infantry and cavalry units drilling, fill the widescreen frame. I find The Round-Up to be a bit dour compared to what was to follow, but if you've never seen a Jancsó film, this is the place to start.