ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

jgcorrea Jancso, a Bolshevik film mentor and beneficiary of state interventionism in the arts in Hungary during the Iron Curtain period, literally followed the classic "September Protocol," i.e. the theoretical, Manichaeist dogma of the Stalinist Era laid out by Zhdanov and then adopted by the Communist Parties on a global scale. The first step in Leninism, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was to establish, through censorship and state sponsorship, the complete control of cultural production with the aim of destroying Western thought ("Bourgeois or burzhooi", they called it) based on Jewish- Christian prophecies as well as on Roman law and Greek philosophy. In fact, all red cultural policies were born out of such distortions, namely: totalitarian Zhdanovism, engaged art, demented Gramscism, tenets of the Frankfurt School, Mao's destructive Cultural Revolution and so forth, not forgetting the message that every dictator used to state in the congresses of the communist militancy about the promotion of cultural production: "Comrades, anything for the sake of the Revolution, nothing outside the revolution!" But ¨the Round-up¨ is much more and much less than this, it is an unbearable parade of long shots where each image seems to reflect the hatred that this mediocre director always nurtured against the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx With these early films of Miklós Jancsó (people don't realise he's still making films, with one slated for 2009, and his technique is now totally different) where he shows dehumanised power systems, there's always a dual interest for me. You get the kind of political comment, but you also get the love of nature as a counterpoint, I think one observer noted of the Red and the White, that the main character was the river Volga. Perhaps he's proffering country walks as an alternative to power games, as wise a suggestion as any you'll see in a film.Anyway in the Round-up we have a whitewashed stockade out on the Hungarian plains. One Count Gedeon Radey has been given the task by the "Apostolic Emperor" of rounding up all the bad sorts, the outlaws. This is back in the late 1800s, we are led to believe that the monarchy has become ignorant and hard-hearted to the populace in the countryside, banditry and revolt foment. Radey interns all these "bad sorts" in the stockade. He wants to find out which of them are undesirables, which he does through a series of psychological games. It's reasonably clear that all the men rounded up aren't ignorant thieves, one for example has travelled extensively and speaks four languages.It's almost fetishistic the setting, you've got an achingly beautiful shimmering plain of grass that reminded me of when I was a child, strange sensations linked to nature and story-telling. Then you've got all these military men with their advanced piping, tabs, epaulets and sabres. The wild birds are trilling throughout the entire film, except at night when the cicadas chirp. The wind flutters the black feathered cockades on the hats of the officers. You can feel the flaming June heat radiate off the whitewash. Jancso appears to have fetishistically had the sets reconstructed from drawings in historical documents, along with a gibbet that Pasolini would have been proud to display in Salo.We see for example a man being lead out of solitary confinement, a soldier asks him his name, and the man replies "You already know, Varjù, Bèla" the soldier replies almost lovingly, "Ah yes, Bèla Varjù, you've had many a beating from me haven't you?". Horses ride in circles, men are marched in circles, insanity abounds. The film is basically an exercise in dehumanisation. For me it's not offering much in the way of commentary, unlike the Red and the White which is setting out the aleatory nature of war. The Round-up is perhaps a protest about what went on in the past, an ode to the dead who died for a free Hungary.The important person in the film is Lajos Kossuth, although you'll never see him. He is one of the famous personages in Hungarian History. He became famous via a series of letters he wrote that were very well received whilst he was a deputy to a Count at the National Diet. He was a liberal of note, he wanted an end to feudalism, and he wanted taxation of the aristocracy, and to remove their right to pass their lands and castles and such like on from one generation to the next without taxation. Anyway he had an interesting life which I'm sure you can read about elsewhere. And his was the spirit of the majority of the interned, although there were brigands too. I think it's key to understand history in the movies of Jancsó, otherwise, in this case you might be led to believe that all the prisoners are simply bad people.Radey, I believe is only seen once in the film, but he stands against the spirit of Kossuth and behind the "apostolic emperor".This is not a nasty film in the sense that it doesn't stand up much to the level of horror you would see in a modern exposition on the same subject, or anything like the torture porn of current sensation. That for me I think is a good thing. There is one scene though of terrible evil genius. Every day womenfolk are allowed to come to the stockade and deliver food for the prisoners. One man who is threatened with strangulation unless he turns informant peaches to the authorities that one of the women is in league with a rebel leaders (she is probably his sweetheart). It is arranged for many of the rebels to be sat high atop the stockade wall (perhaps 50ft high). They are then forced to watch this women whipped to death as she runs down a corridor of sadistic soldiers on the open plain. It is too much for three of the men who plunge head first down to their deaths. The techniques of the Radey and his soldiers are ingeniously cruel, they make you complicit in your own demise and the demise of comrades, they bewilder you. It may surprise you that throughout the entire film the soldiers appear almost gentle.Obviously, essential watching.

Balthazar-5 Life comes along at a variable pace, and we are constantly re-positioning our gaze to obtain the optimum information in order to understand the situation we are in. This is replicated in the cinema through the mise en scène and editing of the scenes. Since the 1930s there has been an either explicit or implicit debate as to whether editing within the scene is a good or bad thing, with Andre Bazin rooting for the unity of the image against montage (editing). Fifteen years before this film, Hitchcock set down a marker with 'Rope' (and to a lesser extent 'Under Capricorn') that scenes, indeed whole films can be made without much in the way of editing, by simply organising the action and camera movement to reveal the same information in a more continuous way. Enter Miklos Jancso. With this film he became something of a celebrity in intellectually active film circles by structuring it to be shot in the main, in long takes. Does it work? Well, it works in one way, and that is that it draws attention to the Hungarian plains in which it was shot and which, during the numerous long slow pans that we see, seem to stretch forever across the landscape. Looking at it again after almost forty years, I find it difficult to believe that it made such a big kerfuffle. Long held takes DO enhance suspense - hence Hitchcock's temporary enthusiasm for them - but they seem artificial as they do not mimic the action of the eye, which is always on the lookout for something more interesting elsewhere (hence Hitchcock's enthusiasm being only temporary!). The 'rounding-up' of prisoners that it portrays is an OK subject for a film, but I think we would have been much more emotionally involved with the characters if we had been treated to reaction shots and the like. Still, see it as a theoretical/historical curiosity.

vodkabird The setting was suitably stark; I loved the scenes around the old woman's house; so desolate and bleak. I enjoyed the Kafkaesque aspect of it and the bluff and double bluff between the protagonists. The main character could have been a real influence on Lynch's Henry in Eraserhead; a victim and a loser.Having said that, the film didn't grip me but it did what it set out to do, I suppose.