Heroes and Villains

"In the final analysis," says Hungarian Film Maker Miklos Jancso, "I find no solution to the problem of reconciling man's power with his freedom." Even so, Jancso has made a singular struggle to come to grips with the problem in such epical films as The Roundup and The Red and the White. Using historical narrative and an elliptical style, he has developed a highly personal cinema for the avowed purpose of "killing all sentimental romanticism." In its place he has substituted a gray bleakness as background for his fables of political manipulation and moral subversion.

As he has dug more deeply into the problem, Jancso's films have become progressively more stylized--more concerned with issues and symbols than with people. The director seems to believe that characterization stands in the way of analysis. In Winter Wind Jancso has made his most oblique statement yet. Individual identities are always interchangeable. Cowards in one scene can be heroes in another; heroes are villains; martyrs are assassins. Motivations are questioned, contradicted, eliminated. Reality becomes little more than a masquerade. And yet the resulting tale of brutality and betrayal is a harrowing experience for the audience.

Brush Strokes. The film's story is simple, at least in synopsis. Marko (Jacques Charrier) is the leader of the Ustachi, a group of Croatian anarchists who made forays from Hungary into Yugoslavia before World War I. Winter Wind deals with the particular events leading up to the group's assassination of Alexander I and the French foreign minister in Marseille in 1934. But Jancso has relatively little interest in the incident itself or in the characters of the people who instigated it. He is, instead, obsessed with illustrating the forces that drove the individuals involved. His camera sweeps about his actors in broad brush strokes, imprisoning them in an enormous, existential fresco.

Unfortunately, this kind of intellectual film making tends to become a technical exercise. Jancso keeps his camera aimed at a single scene for ten minutes at a time. The results are often stunning, but frequently they tend to be ostentatious, sacrificing humanity for setting. His characters ultimately become cold symbols, seen from a distance. But this, after all, is his intention. Their coldness is the cutting edge of his rage.

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