I realised that it’s been a year since my last newsletter. Mostly, that’s because I’ve been focusing on Muub Tube. But what I’ve decided to do is reboot this project, albeit with a focus on film. Goodbye awful mass, hello awful screen. One essay per week; and each week, an essay on a specific film and filmmaker. You can subscribe below. Thanks for sticking with me.
— For the past several weeks, I’ve continued to encounter films that offer various confrontations with Grecian antiquity. Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Méditerranée (1963), Piavoli’s Nostos: The Return (1989). A mesmeric memento mori, an imagistic psycho-drama. And now this, Miklós Jancsó’s Electra, My Love (1974), a thing that—on the surface—looks like a relatively po-faced retelling of Sophocles’ Electra. Dingy Google search results (try to keep your eyes closed) will tell you that this—vibrant and a bit naked—is a work of inflammation, of political allegory. Nested, subversive. Such things sound sexy. They are not very helpful.
— You might know Miklós Jancsó from what critics call his ‘later’ period, excluding an elliptical digression in Italy that the list-makers tend to tug their beards about and ignore. You might also be more familiar with an early period, the ‘Hungarian’ period, which stretched from the 1950s to the 1970s; a deep grab-bag of works whose themes cohere around political repression, folk memory, cantering horses, military formations. They are interrogatory. Historicist. Electra, My Love fits that bill pretty cleanly. The year is 1974. Here’s colour, a bared breast, a lock of sun-caught hair.
— Typically, I might not be very kindly predisposed toward a work of undiluted allegory (and this is what various articles keep telling me it is); its characters stripped of their ambivalence, reduced to the role of an instrument. A film like this might slip—yolk from a fork—out of your hands, deflecting from your eyes. Either way: politics. Already, with Szegénylegények (The Round Up, 1966), he had banged his tuning fork against the drum of human cruelty, political repression, and the aftermath of a failed 1848 revolt against Hungary’s Habsburg rulers. It has been likened to Bresson. Its Venus fly of a narrative constitutes a ‘trap, closing shut’. Hooded, circling figures. Folkloric singers. Moments of studied intimacy. Ritual’s trance. The motifs of a later style (an obsession, in fact) were already clicking and clacking into place. N.b., a trap, tightening shut. The inevitability of historical forces. Later, he spoke of his early films as expressions of “defencelessness”.
— I have a feeling this might become a kind of ‘awful screen’ motif. The monotony of history’s obliterating return. What fun!
— Interviews. He speaks of the necessity of avoiding the censors. Like cat and mouse. Censors are bureaucratic, stupid. They are rarely incisive. They are also vain. By making a film about oppressors past, the censor sees only a doughty celebration of their own ascendance. Assumes they are the heroes, that it is their victory. This is how thorns get slipped in. How critique gets leavened. At least, in theory. A funny little memo (internal) shared around the Mosfilm offices. “Jancsó is a typical representative of auteur filmmaking. Any kind of screenplay we work out together, he will deviate from when it comes to shooting. Even at this point we regret to disappoint those comrades who expect a huge celebratory film for the anniversary. This will not happen.” This is very funny and I like it a lot.
— I had looked at many densely rich paintings earlier in the day. The day I saw this film. I was with my father (he went to bed before the film). We walked around the big, bustling halls of the National Gallery. He liked the Delaroche? I liked the puff-headed Dutch portraitists, Beuckelaer’s Four Elements (because of the fish, the fish-eye optics, the disorienting cabbages). Too much confectionary. History is something you look at and go ‘hm’ at. It is stuff you can arrange around a room, like furniture. The furniture can also roll over and crush you.
— 1974, and with it Miklós Jancsó—smilingly, confidently—slides another such package across the table. You can feel the finger wagging, already. Here’s a political film, a feuilleton of archly eyebrow-raising critique. I can only tl;dr the context, pass my hands around the outline. A period of liberalisation after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 allowed such “weird” and “strange” films, as he calls them, to (sort of) flourish. I found it charming, albeit analytical, a little cold to the touch. And by this point (1974), Jancsó’s commitment to the ‘bit’ of ritualised choreography had begun—for some critics—to wear a little thin. An affect. Lazy, almost. ‘Get new material!’ You wouldn’t necessarily know that when coming to the film as a hermetically sealed object, on your first exposure to Jancsó and the long tendrils of his aesthetic strategy. But some critics (as critics do) were harrumphing. This also warms me to him.
— Formally, Jancsó’s world—the world of his Electra—is collapsed; an implied stage, an abstraction. Nothing of Electra’s Mycenae exists—meaningfully, corporeally—beyond this singular summer’s field (everything takes place in a flat, pastoral abyss; lit by the smudged clementine of a summer sun, teetering toward the horizon). This is the Hungarian puszta, a ‘great featureless plain so characteristic of his country’s topography’. Within it, erectile things. Protrusions. Grey buildings (more Corbusier than 2,000 BC), plain white linen. Some doughty dramatization of Woodstock, perhaps. Inflected with intrusions of the modern (a 19th century sabre, a silver pistol, an honestly annoying pork pie hat, &Etc). Materially, time is pushed together. By the film’s end, the ‘chariot of the gods’ is substituted for a bright red helicopter that does some dangerous-looking manoeuvres above a field of circling horses. Jancsó taps the microphone: this isn’t really about ancient Greece, you know.
— In these roving, singular frames, there’s an anticipation of post-prison Parajanov, The Legend of Suram Fortress (198) and—perhaps more appropriately—Arabesques on a Pirosmani Theme (198). Here, however, the choreography is not a recursive loop, but a continually flowing flux. And the camera is granted more autonomy, an eye on a stalk. It roves close, leans in. Fraught debates between Aigisthos (newly minted, murdery king; Tyrant) and Electra happen within a tight, wound-in frame; the choreography of hooves and halberds softening, out of focus, glimpsed. Behind them. The camera hurtles forward into all of this writhing choreography, and this helps to wrest moments of compassion and ambivalence from the analytical fact of the wider promenade going on around it. Five hundred extras, for those keeping count. The collective is punctured, or punctuated, with moments of collapsed and fragile intimacy (the way that Electra touches A’s cheek, how he leans his head forward, tightens his brow, smiles). Really it’s at its best when the parades fall away; when these moments of sparse yet softly compassionate embodiment rise up. Put another way, it’s where the myth finds its footing in the real.
— Jancsó and cinematographer János Kende laid looping curls of track on which their bulky sound-capturing cameras could roll and writhe about. Like a horse.
— Different, though. Electra, My Love negates (or attempts to negate) Deleueze’s insistence on the formal properties of ‘film’ - with the beyond-the-frame (something he believes to be essential, even irrepressible) cordoned off with sealant and tape. There is an implied ‘beyond’, but it isn’t congruent or strictly contiguous with what’s happening on screen (or the context immediately beyond its edge). The single frame is privileged entirely, making it more like the paintings on the sides of a Grecian urn (albeit with a little wine and dirt on them). The context is kept at arms length. Really, this is a stage. A sequestered space, neatly arranged. No need for montage, no truck with it; because J isn’t trying to establish rhythms between discrete or even associated frames or filmic phrases. Its energy flows from the centre rather than from the anticipation of after and before. You might say that this isn’t really a film at all, but filmed theatre, and I think that this is mostly true; excepting these moments of compressed intimacy. Even with his very earliest works—The Round up, Silence and Cry, &Etc—these long, roving tracking shots and dynamically long takes are present. Letting the 35mm canisters roll through the entirety of their eleven or twelve minutes.
— Less cruel than his earlier films, perhaps. The Red and the White (1967) is barbarous, ungentle, in a more erratic way. The monotonous, terrifying tide of bloodshed. Silence and Cry experimented with something smaller, tighter. But the same motifs and phrases continue to pop up and assert themselves. A deep focus field in that 1967 film (Red and White, keep up), panning away, studies—with horrific, hurtling passivity—a melee of wild slaughter. But he could also bring his camera close, even then. Men shot on the ground by other men. The whiff of cordite. Brutally calculating. Electra’s violence is ritualised, suggestive. But no less cruel, perhaps. It just feels like the ideas are doing the stabbing. A is sort of executed with a gigantic bouncing boulder. It’s like a balloon. And he bounces on it.
— Elephant in the room. How your eye draws a probably too-simplistic comparison with the durational takes of fellow Hungarian Béla Tarr. But where Tarr places emphasis precisely on the moment’s elongated absence, the aporia and the un-uttered immanence that lays beyond it, Jancsó discovers sites of concertina-like significance that are coiled within. A distant conversation which slowly merges into presence, all of it weighted with considered meaning, without cut or enjambment. Tarr uses similar tools to different ends. You might compare Jancsó’s arrival of horsemen in the earliest movements of Electra, My Love - a ‘herd’ of lance-bearing riders who, through the smoke, assemble beside the buildings of the Forum. The arrival is prodigious, momentous. For Tarr, a similar pack of wild horses crashes through the ghostly town centre in Sátántangó, observed—once the camera pans down—by a trio of silent onlookers. Decontextualised, explosive. They dissolve into the absence from which they had come. Unheralded, indeterminate. This is the tide of history withdrawing into a cavernous and immutable absence. For Jancsó, these same riders couldn’t be more absolute; for they are history itself. They have weightiness, substance. It matters that they matter, that they are here. For Tarr, the riderless horses demark the space of a demolished continuity; a fragment from the beyond that soon will disappear back into the beyond. For Jancsó, history has just pulled up outside your house. And the radio is playing.
— Stuff, stuff, stuff. Happenings. A pool of pink liquid. Women (brushed with curls of paint) stand with their backs to us, naked. Somebody sinks a knife into somebody’s else’s back, but sideways, as if the death-blow isn’t exactly a moment of awful, explosive abjection so much as an inevitability, a name crossed out. The camera jolts back and forth, pans left and right. Blood is poster-painty and red. Bright. A woman, in a gauzy dress, is born aloft on the arms of a soldier. She flings her arms wide and sings about something. It’s lyrical. Who is singing? The chorus is babbling. Who is singing? The people! Whose people? I don’t know. Soldiers tie yellow ribbons to their swords and walk back and forth. No commands are given. None at all. History (like a monotonous diorama) just happens. Moments of intimacy pierce through. You welcome them. Everybody knows their lines. Doubt isn’t welcome. It doesn’t exist, actually.
— Thoughts on sex. Electra, My Love is erotic in the vein of a summer festival; its nude bodies and bared skin not feeling so much salacious as Bountiful, unconsummated. That is to say, it’s erotic in the way that a freshly picked apple is erotic. This makes it very ‘socialist realist’, and shares a similarly fulsome vein with a lot of other broadly ‘propagandistic’ film. See: when you bring lots of bodies together, it looks like collectivisation. Censors love that stuff! In later years and films, he’d lean more blatantly toward the transgressive eroticism of Borowczyk and Tinto Brass. The bodies would fuck and be fucked. But here its potential can be glimpsed. This is an orgy of the collective, untainted by something so obvious as a seedy shag. Eventually, the dress slips off the shoulder. But not yet.
— 1979, and Jancsó returns to Hungary (goodbye Italy, goodbye). Cavorting in a castle. That’s how it’s been described to me (I’ve not seen it yet). But a still from that film reveals horses charging across an abyssal plain of grass. History is a field that you can move things around in. Like furniture. And horses. Horse-furniture that can roll over and crush you. In a recent episode of Muub Tube, I called Tarr the greatest Hungarian filmmaker. I’m not sure if I believe that. I don’t know if Jancsó is, either. Tarr thinks he is.
— Are those hooves I hear? It can’t be, no. It can’t be.
An update. 10th November, 2021.
— Earlier, I mentioned that Jancso’s Electra, My Love (1974) is ‘orderless’. That is to say, its choreographed masses and cavorting extras don’t ever follow the commands or demands or implorations of Electra or Orestes, their returned rulers. But this isn’t typical of Jancso’s early cinema. In Silence and Cry (1968) and The Red and the White (1967), much of the dialogue—most of it—is made up of such orders. They are rarely shouted. People rarely refuse them. “Take off your shirt”. “Come this way”. “Stop”. “Get in this cart”. The tides of war flip this way and that. Now the Reds have the upper hand. Now the Whites. A Cossack officer captures a fleeing soldier. He commands him to strip. The man does. He commands his orderly to shoot the man. He does (off screen). He commands his troops to strip a woman. They do so. Now other (allied) White soldiers arrive, Tsarists. Dissatisfied, they command the Cossack to stop what he’s doing. He does. They command him to remove his weapons and his belt. He does so, unresisting. Now they shoot him, in turn. Next. Unlike Electra, these are films of order, though this order is entirely unmoored, unpredictable. What does it matter what side you’re really on? Yet again, the senseless structures and absurdities of conflict.
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