This is my second Jancso, I'm still far from having a fair perspective on his work; but I can say one thing for sure: He loves large dynamic tableaux. The dynamism of his scenes is interesting, it's based mostly on numerous (up to hundreds) actors executing different asynchronous actions coming in and out of frame. He stages his actors often in groups at different distances from the camera, giving the shot depth (3-D perspective), adding the different actions in/out screen you'll have the feel of witnessing a giant complex machine in motion.
The first film I saw of his (Electra, my love) was a re-interpretation of the legend, in an neo-operatic theme. His control of the hundreds of actors during lengthy scenes is astonishing! I couldn't escape this thought: repeating a ten-minute shot of a hundred something actor if one mistake happens sounds really painful!Back to The Red and The White, plotwise though it's a film about the 1920's war b/w the communists (Red) and the Czarist (White), it is a plotless movie, no main actors, no heroes. Jancso would lead us to follow a main "commander" everynow and then only to arrive to his demise very soon after, and that's a smart mechanism to describe the war: no intervention, no involvement, passive observation of different war figures, and the futility of the war itself.
Like many, I knew about Jancso after reading about Tarr, and I can see where this association comes from, yet Tarr is different from Jancso despite his adaptation of this "dynamism".
Not only Tarr's image is unrealistic, contrastest shadowy grey, black, and white. But also Tarr's "dynamism" is different (and more sophisticated):
1. Tarr doesn't constantly rely on large number of actors in his scenes like Jancso, to produce an effect of motion.
2. Tarr's camera's movement is more complex, often traverses through windows into different territoires. Jancso's camera follows, tracks, observes, rarely zooms, but doesn't cross planes.
Tarr even surpasses Tarkovski in manipulation, while the latter uses a slow paced rythm and a slow flow of images to create an effect (something he called Sculpting in Time, i.e using time to enhance the memory of an image, thus sculpting). Tarr uses time and his complex camera movement to distort our perception of time AND space. At times I am "lost" in a shot, in the very opening of Man from London, the full information about the "place" is giving SLOWLY through the flow, the close follow up over stuctures, furniture... adding the "actual" action (not created by the camera movement) the camera captures. Anotonioni and Teshigahara did that at some elementary level, They would start a scene by a confusing close up, but nobody like Tarr pushed that effect to such level.
Jancso is different from Tarr and anybody else, and "The Red and The White" is worth watching for its splendid tableaux, including a hauting scene (at the end) of an army gathered on a triangular-shaped open land surrounded by water.
WASSIM
