Miklos Jancso's "The Round-up" (1965): A manual for activists, prisoners, and police

Copyright (c) 2019, William Heidbreder

Hungarian director Miklos Jancso’s 1965 classic “The Round-up” is one of the most remarkable among the many dissident films made in Eastern Europe during this period.  It is remarkably partly for its abstraction.  It is a film about policing, and the ways modern police manipulate the people they suspect or want to control.  The police in the film manipulate the political prisoners.  I wonder why the Pentagon screened the film Battle of Algiers, whose traditional melodramatic plot with heroes whose acts are sometimes morally ambiguous, while the character of the villains is wholly such, and not this film, which is much more disturbing—but also certainly a manual of policing. 

The film’s historical referent is in one sense multiple (its explicit situation, announced in a text at the beginning, is the aftermath of the 1848 Hungarian revolt against imperial Austria, but of course it is also a thinly veiled reference to the aftermath of the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, and even the Holocaust—the German national anthem, unexplained (the film is set in a Hungarian province in 1860s Austria), frames the film on both ends).  The shadowy way (one thinks of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, which reduces radical left politics to an idea) in which in the film’s world of failed revolution and a policed group or society points to something both like and like the official Communist Parties at the time, which represented however cynically an idea of workers’ power and social revolution, but also identified this with the state that the Party controlled, is doubtless one of the more interesting evocations.  But in another sense the referent is to something like what Foucault, for whom prison architecture was one example, called an “apparatus” (dispositif in French).  This is a kind of mechanism, like a technology that consists of tools and techniques, that serves a governmental purpose “tactically.”  In Foucault’s thinking, the purposes for which something is done are less important than what is done and how.  The film presents “abstractly,” though architecture, uses of the geographical environment, the arrangements and movements of bodies, and the way that—as it is quite appropriate to say in the context of this film—individual persons are manipulated.  The film has a specific theme, in relationship to which the details of the specific historical moment are accidental. Perhaps the allegorizing abstraction of this is ideally suited to making pointed political observations (that are also) about the present and hoping to evade the censors—as the ex-revolutionaries who are prisoners in the film’s staging fail to do, in large part because their concerns are always defined by given opportunities and a limited horizons of vision, so that they only ever see or understand what they are literally faced or confronted with, however grand or petty.  The prisoners are grouped in spaces of confinement, individualized at moments at times of interrogation, and manipulated in various ways by the police, that fit their project of re-assembling by the film’s end a group of militants whose very enthusiasm and sense of hope will betray them as possessed of the very subjectivity that convicts them in the eyes of the state.  The process that leads from the one (prisoners assembled in a merely external or “serial,” as in Sartre’s Marxism, relationship to one another, to an autonomous grouping by an ex-leader enthused by the prospect of mastery enjoyed in exercising his craft as leader of a militant band) is almost identifiable with the process of the film itself, which like so many films at least since the early Italian neorealist classics and the early French New Wave films that followed them in this, is recognizable formally as a movement of bodies through spaces in the course of a time.       

The film’s theme is police and political prisoners.  Art does not represent, it thinks; this film’s purpose is not to represent a particular set of events, but to think about a paradigm.  Maybe film is like the orchestration of events that paranoiacs rightly or wrongly suspect (from their own limited standpoint as affected individuals who necessarily lack this synoptic perspective) of powerful state actors or conspirators, except that film can “think” about these things in ways that go beyond power games and their strategy and tactics to interpretation based on something like an idea of “meaning.”   This is a point of  view not of the figure of the master, but something else.  Though if this something else is a position that has to be constructed as something new, we should not forget its false simulation in the assembly of militants at the end, who are self-betrayed partly because like workers, they may value and enjoy what they do. 

The viewer should watch the film forgetting the supplementary informational text (which in a European art film can only be suspect, as a statement that calls itself into question by its, non-cinematic, form) at the beginning, informing us that these are Hungarian rebels in Austria.  Fortunately, we know that films that wish to dwell on historical specifics (The Battle of Algiers, for example—but contrast Godard’s Le Petit Soldat and especially Les Carabiniers, which is about a comic book war, just as Alphaville gives us a comic book dystopian futurism) will usually soak us in period detail, including costumes and settings.  These are identifications we are not supposed to question, as naive film art never does.

Look at how minimalist is the architecture in this film.  The prison yard is surrounded by a wall that almost frames many of the images of it and the people inside it.  There are few buildings, the site being somewhere in the vacant midst of the Hungarian steppe.  A group of women whom we presume are mothers, wives, or girlfriends seems to come out of nowhere and then form a line facing a line-up of the male prisoners.  The film’s settings resemble those of some modernist stage plays, where the elements of the spare set may rise to the level of an idea (so that, for example, a fence ‘means’ not this one but an idea of a fence).  Films of theorems need the visual and narrative abstraction that lend themselves to a thinking about such ideas and the situations in their allegorical generality.   

The film is about police manipulation through surveillance and harassment of political prisoners (who may be ex-revolutionaries) and the behaviors, reactions, and thinking of the latter.  It is as abstract as Pasolini’s “Teorema” (Theorem), like it a demonstration of an idea, which in this case is the ‘conceptual idea’ that grasps the meaning of the situation.   The viewer should recognize, in the police and prisoners, types, some of which are all too readily recognizable.  The modern police were established around the turn of the nineteenth century and used largely to control the new urban working class (and in America, the slaves).  Of course, they would harass, among others, not only ’proper’ criminals, the poor, the mad and otherwise deviant, and political dissidents, activists, and protesters.  The police as we know them today are not so different as here.   

This can mean the situation of paranoia.  Paranoia is always a political problem, which is both micro-political and macro-political.  It is also a problem of a theatrical subjectivity, when it wonders about the play itself that it is in, and not just the immediate situations and dialogues, or one’s own purposes and those of the others. The paranoid subject suspiciously wonders what is going on, may pose this question about everything he notices, and tends to a ‘theatrical’ understanding of the object of the paranoid desire that he fears, which is something like (as in Freud’s case of Schreber) ‘God’ as a master who knows and controls everything.  (This God was first dethroned in modern thought by Machiavelli, and the reason is the role of chance: If there is chance, than the success or failure of my actions cannot be attributed to a (hidden) God, who is deprived of his totalizing knowledge and power).  In situations where captive persons are essentially powerless vis-à-vis opposing actors who control the setting, paranoia can have a certain truth. Thus, Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust argues that the Jews and their leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe were placed in a situation where rational action undertaken with careful thought in the interest of surviving, took place within a situation that dictated that such efforts would only be used to tighten the trap they were in. People still think too much about political power as theatrical more than cinematic: as dramatic conflict between self and other, yet failing to think about how situations are structured.

There is a tradition of thinking about political paranoia in film as at a juncture between theater, or the theatrical, and cinema.  (One example, which Deleuze has written on, is Jacques Rivette’s 1957 Paris Nous Appartient.) Paranoia is a possibility of a mode or style of thinking that is political because it starts with the judgment that the present state of things in the instance is bad, it sucks, but it doesn’t have to be this way; it could be otherwise. 

Most people today know that anything you say to a police officer will be used against you if they can, and so when questioned or spoken to by one, you should want to say basically nothing.  (Thinking he can manage, in a situation that is arranged or mise-en-scène and controlled by “the Jew-hunter” cop Col. Landa, is the mistake the farmer makes at the beginning of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.) A society that is among other things a police state will be one in which naiveté tends to be heavily sanctioned.  It will be one in which desires, inclinations, spontaneous reactions, and strong (or dissident or even discordant) opinions are indulged in only by fools.  Leave your affects and dispositions at the factory gate, and “set aside your ego,” ye unfortunates who enter here (where “work makes free,” and all common-sensical notions of the good are easily obscenely parodied, as in Judge Schreber’s writings, where he is the object of some obscene intercourse with persons engaged in by ‘God’).  The triumph of impersonal “reason” in modern society will also mean that a sharp separation will tend to develop between the personal and the social, as traditionally marked in the familiar/polite address distinction in Spanish, French, and some of the other European languages, which Americans tend to ignore.  The Prussian Protestant coldness of Kantian reason and the sublime may be revolutionary, in at least some of its uses.  One thing that struck me on my most recent viewing of The Round-up is that the police (who are soldiers) actually seem less affectless than sternly angry; this is surely both a pose and an attitude.  The film’s characters include some effective actors (in both senses of the term), but no very good ones.  Soldiers and police are usually purposive and know that they cannot afford to be naive; they are thus like actors who know they are while the prisoners are like the many people who don’t.  

But now we must distinguish positions not only between the police and the prisoners, but also two absent presences, though both are invoked, particularly at the end: the state (mentioned as the Austrian monarchy) and the force of popular revolutionaries, which at the end is reassembled, along with a plurality of arrangements of troops of official army soldiers, on the empty stage of the Hungarian plain with its endless, empty horizons).  One problem that this points to is the politics of memory and repetition (or “fidelity” as Alain Badiou calls it) in the case of revolutionary movements that are apparently past their shelf life.  The film is relentlessly pessimistic.  But the state is an absent idea in at least one sense: it ‘almost’ seems invoked in identity with the perspective of the camera itself, with its complicated camera movements and the mise-en-scène.  At least this is a point of view of a totalizing vision of a kind (the camera movements may give a sense of motivation and so of totalization in progress rather than a totality that could represented as something existing somewhere in fact).  I think the camera and mise-en-scène are the perspective of “history,” and that is also elusive.  Indeed, the camera itself directly eludes the point of view of the characters, particularly the prisoners, in the construction of its perspective.  At the same time, the police seem to us the viewers to be carefully orchestrating the final scene through a series of steps.  The camera gives the movement of persons through a series of settings and positions.  I think the film identifies the camera with the perspective of ‘history,’ and it also ‘knows’ that that perspective is absent (it is, in Kantian terms, an idea of reason, not an existing fact) but also under construction.  And the film raises the troubling question of how history’s construction of itself by its subjects works, and to what end.  The prisoners can only reiterate their radicalism, whose signifiers and songs, sung in enthusiastic abandon, are in the current setting, 20 years later, mere impotent nostalgia.  The film is pessimistic because while we know who it sides with, and much more about who it is against, the question of what process or activity of ‘redemption’ might hopefully follow is entirely eclipsed; it is not possible in the world of this film.  On the other hand, as in The Red and The White, Jancso here declares his tentative faith in history and in cinema in being able through its gaze to give us some purchase on the history of which we may also be a part, though in a way that seems to concede nothing, or little, to the persons who as subjects of their own lived experience ‘in’ history as being able to grasp and reflect upon their situation and its meaning and possiblities.  Structuralist thought tends to remove consequentially meaningful recognition and agency from individual actors, only to restore it on the level of the whole that is given only to a viewer who can grasp history as having a meaning at the level of reflection on its broad processes, blind to engaged individuals in a situation, and forms of figuration. 

It certainly contributes to this way of thinking to ‘negate’ the theatrical in favor of the cinematic as I think Jancso does.  Why figures of theater and theatricality go in for this treatment from so many filmmakers is a question worth asking.  Cinema is essentially a visual and not a dramatic art, but the two modes are close enough that the distinction has seemed to many filmmakers worth remarking.  It is one way of asking the question “What is cinema?,” which is a form of the kind of self-interrogation that has been thought important in modern art. This problematic is also ‘Oedipal’ in the sense that it seeks differentiation from a 'paternal’ discourse or style of thinking, and must pose a question similar to the one Oedipus extracts from the riddle of the Sphinx: “What is ‘man’?” or what is the essence and meaning of what we are engaged in doing, as an art, or indeed a politics.  

As a visual art that depends on a variety of formal elements, film is less ‘humanist’ and also has more ‘formal’ or ‘structural’ possibilities than theater.  While Walter Benjamin identified this possibility with montage, it can be found equally in mise-en-scène.   Althusser’s declaration that “history is a process without a subject” was one of a family of similar notions at this time.  Perhaps their purpose was partly to enthrone the critical reflections of radical intellectuals at a time when Marx’s traditional subject of history, the proletariat, was beginning to lose ground, both as real historical force (in the West) and object of a supposedly ‘revolutionary’ ideology (in the East).  In the terms of “The Round-up,” one could probably announce such a divide only at the price of a pessimism that approaches cynicism.  What saves some of the ex-revolutionaries in the film is perhaps the sole virtue, more important even than courage, that remains to the perspective of “left melancholy” that reflects on all of the historical defeats of the left, and one that it can make sense to maintain in a police state: being not so naive.