The Round Up [1966] [DVD]

Along with 'The Red and the White' by the same director and also released by Second Run DVD, this film is a must-have for any serious collector of world cinema. Made in Communist Hungary in 1966, it is about Hungarian prisoners rounded up by the Austrians one hundred years earlier, and held in a stockade set within a barren landscape. The themes of unjust imprisonment, oppression by a foreign country, and the powerlessness of the individual are all present here and must have carried immense power at the time the film was made.

Many of the scenes in this strange film are in medium to long shots, across the flat landscape, and of groups of men inside the stockade. There are countless shots of great beauty and the pace is quite slow. As such the drama is almost abstract at times, and it's difficult to identify with many of the characters. The ending however, is very dramatic and deeply shocking.

The DVD includes a lengthy interview with Jancso and the print of the film is very sharp.

The other reviewers have given excellent accounts of these superb Miklos Jancso films so no need to add my modest thoughts. Having recently bought them perhaps it's worth mentioning the excellent Second Run releases in terms of quality and extras which the others have not covered in any detail, if at all.

Of the two - The Round-Up and The Red and the White, the Round-Up clearly comes from a superior print source. It is clean and sharp although not without occasional damage and speckling. The poorest section is the opening titles which has the most speckling but once into the main body of the film it is only sporadic.

The bold contrast looks very good - it seems comparable to the print I saw at the NFT some years ago - in the transfer the whites behave themselves and there's detail in the shadows. One major problem comes in the appalling scene where the poor naked girl is whipped as she runs between two lines of soldiers. The fast close-up panning produces in the telecine lots of very noticeable little black pixel blocks in the trail of the image. This also reoccurs in a shot later in the scene but I haven't spotted this technical problem elsewhere. Nevertheless it's a stunning film, which comes with a new [2008] 20 min interview with the director and as always with Second Run an excellent illustrated booklet.

The source print for The Red and the White seems to be a softer, slightly murky one, by comparison. It has a good measure of speckling at the head of the opening reel, as with The Round-Up. There's even a persistent scratch in the right-hand quarter of the frame that continues some way into the body of the film. The exteriors tend to be low in contrast and a little soft but the sharpness does improve later on in the film where the contrast is stronger in the hospital interior scenes.

The Red and the White DVD also comes with an episode from the directors documentary series, 'Message of Stones' shot on digital video in 4:3 aspect ratio. This is a wordless - in terms of commentary - visual 'meditation' on Jewish life in Budapest - or that's how it struck me on first viewing [I haven't had time to view it all yet]. Anyway, it's a substantial and valuable extra. The booklet contains the transcript of another interview with MJ.

Finally, the aspect ratio of both films is 2.35:1 so you should watch with bars at the top and bottom of the screen to view the whole frame. This has the advantage of placing half the sub-titles in the black band across the bottom and not over the picture. If my 16:9 TV is set to auto aspect ratio it fills most of the screen with an image cutting off the left and right sides of the frame. Is this what "enhanced for widescreen televisions" means?

The restored mono soundtracks are very acceptable and of course none of the modest defects can distract from the brilliance of these great films. They are not to be missed on these great value, excellent quality Second Run releases.

It's almost unfathomable that a filmmaker like Miklos Jancso is virtually unknown here. His films are incredible, painful, beautiful. Like an Eastern European Sergio Leone, his films are both epic and intimate.
THE ROUND-UP is (possibly) his finest film - set in a Hungarian detention camp in 1869, it unflinchingly demostrates the dehumanising effect of war and abuse of power.
Powerful, visually stunning and above all relevant - this is a film that should not be missed by lovers of cinema.