Film director who used powerful symbolism to depict the fight for Hungarian socialism and independence
At the 1966 Cannes film festival, a movie whose title sounded like a western – but was actually Hungarian – caused a sensation and launched its director into the international cinematic scene, where he was to remain for a decade. The film of hypnotic beauty and daring technique was The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, literally translated as The Outlaws) and the director was Miklós Jancsó, who has died aged 92.
Jancsó's highly personal style had blossomed in this, his fifth feature. The Round-Up is set on a bleak Hungarian plain in 1868, when Austro‑Hungarian troops tried to break the unity of the Hungarian partisans by torture, interrogations and killings. There is little dialogue as horsemen drive the people to and fro, with power continually changing hands. Jancsó's ritualistic style manages to make the particular Hungarian situation into a universal parable of evil, ending with a cry of hope.
There are few directors so akin to a choreographer. His cinema does not conform to narrative or psychological conventions, but opens other areas that are usually found in the screen musical. His films are elaborate ballets, emblematically tracing the movements in the fight for Hungarian independence and socialism. In these ritual dances of life and death the Whites defeat the Reds, the Reds defeat the Whites. Tyranny is everywhere, and men and women, stripped of their clothes, are vulnerable and humiliated – nudes in a landscape. People survive in groups, often singing and dancing.
Sometimes the groups split up and realign, moving in different directions. The camera weaves in and out like an invisible observer, sometimes dancing with the people, sometimes following them across the plains, tracking them down, shooting them. A tracking shot takes on new meaning in Jancsó's films.
Born in Vac, a small town north of Budapest, Jancsó was the son of refugees from Transylvania, which became part of Romania after the breakup of Austria-Hungary at the end of the first world war. He studied law, ethnography and art before entering the Film Academy in Budapest, graduating in 1950.
After four years of making newsreels he turned to documentaries, several concerned with art. In his debut feature, The Bells Have Gone to Rome (1958), he already showed his interest in war as a theatre for working out his ideas. The country scenes in Cantata (1963) appear to prefigure his later work.
In My Way Home (1965), a Hungarian youth, travelling across the Russian-occupied countryside near the end of the second world war, is arrested, interned, released, arrested again, and sent to tend a herd of cows together with a young Russian soldier – Jancsó served in the second world war and was briefly a prisoner of war. The two transcend barriers of language as well as nationality to become close friends. This stark and moving film, eloquently conveying the dislocation of an occupied country, treats the themes that would mark all his best work: man alienated from himself and others by the cruelty of war, the harshness of nature and the unreliability of allegiances.
After The Round-Up, Jancsó made The Red and the White (1967), the first Soviet-Hungarian co-production, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. It was set in central Russia in 1919, where Hungarian fighters in the Red Army are hunted by White Russian troops. Using the possibilities of the large screen, the director orchestrates an enthralling, sweeping, large-scale drama.
Silence and Cry (1968) told of a fugitive from the White terror (1919-20) of Admiral Miklós Horthy's regime, who is sheltered on a farm among peasants demoralised by the cruelty of the police. Photographed in a series of long sequences, with each cut representing a time lapse, the film depicts the cruelty, dehumanisation and claustrophobia that comes from oppression.
The Confrontation (1969), Jancsó's first film in colour, of which he makes dazzling symbolic use, is conceived in choreographic and folk-opera terms. In 1947, after the Communist party has come to power in Hungary (Jancsó himself had joined in 1946), a group of revolutionary students set out on a glorious summer's day to win over a nearby Catholic school to their cause, but they are manipulated by higher party officials. The film echoes the 1968 student movements in the west – the young women anachronistically wear miniskirts – with an understanding of the Hungarian context of which Jancsó was such a singular and invigorating observer.
Winter Sirocco (1969) is said to have only 13 shots, and no more than 30 shots are used in the entire Agnus Dei (1971) and Red Psalm (1972) to convey, almost exclusively in symbols, a pattern of tyranny and revolution. Jancsó won the best director award at Cannes for the latter.
The well-known Greek tragedy can just be discerned in Elektra (1974), one of Jancsó's most stylised narratives. There are comical scenes, such as Egisto perched on a gigantic ball, and the surprising and optimistic ending when a red helicopter called Revolution, flying from east to west, comes down from the sky to rescue the hero and heroine. At this time, some critics were beginning to complain that the style was becoming an affectation, the nudity arbitrary, and the subjects mere excuses for abstract patterns.
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Away from Hungary, and divorced from his second wife, the film director Márta Mészáros, Jancsó let his hair down, often obscuring his vision. Among the various films he made in Italy was the playful, often childishly shocking, Private Vices and Public Virtues (1976), where the nudity of most of the protagonists is essential in this representation of history in terms of an orgy. In fact, because of its soft-porn elements, this erotico-political version of the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary and his lover Baroness Mary Vetsera at Mayerling gained a wider audience than his previous revolutionary pictures.
Hungarian Rhapsody (1979) marked Jancsó's return to his native land, but not to his earlier form. But, in the same year, he won a lifetime achievement award at Cannes. At the end of The Tyrant's Heart (1981), the set of the castle in which strange cavortings take place is raised to reveal horsemen riding over the Hungarian plain, reminding us of Jancsó's better days. Nevertheless, his oeuvre continued to influence a new generation of directors, particularly Béla Tarr.
Although lacking real impact, his career during this period was diverse, covering historical feature films, a documentary of a Hungarian rock group, a Faustian television series and much work in the theatre. With the fall of communism in 1989, Jancsó, still retaining his socialist beliefs, became a sceptical observer of post-communist society with Blue Danube Waltz (1992), a characteristically bleak look at Hungary's emerging political scene.
The Lord's Lantern in Budapest (1999) is a blackly humorous look at the post-1989 culture of violence, which begins with the line "If I were an animal, I wouldn't keep a man as a pet." The cryptic film also continued on from his previous work by employing two significant and long-standing collaborators, the novelist Gyula Hernádi, who wrote most of his screenplays, and Ferenc Grunwalsky as director of photography. Jancsó, in a small role, is dismissed as being a "has-been" by a pair of Shakespearean gravediggers, Kapa and Pepe. Dressed in pure white throughout the film, in which his death is depicted twice, Jancsó was bidding a premature farewell to the cinema, but also to death. This led to a few more locally popular Kapa and Pepe low-budget black comedies such as Last Supper at the Arabian Grey Horse (2001) and Wake Up, Mate, Don't You Sleep (2002).
Jancsó is survived by his third wife, Zsuzsa Csákány, and four children.
• Miklós Jancsó, film director, born 27 September 1921; died 31 January 2014
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