In the clip above, I discuss “Electra, My Love,” by the Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, from 1974. In August, 2003—seven years ago this week—I was in Montreal, where I had the privilege of serving on one of the juries at that city’s World Film Festival. As if the thirty-eight or so films I had to watch in ten days weren’t enough, I betook myself to one of the festival’s theatres for a special screening of a new film by Jancsó, the mere fact of which came as a big surprise: no film of his, as far as I knew, had been released in New York for several decades, and so, I confess, I didn’t know that the director—who had been making films since the fifties—was still alive, let alone still working. The film, “Wake Up, Mate, Don’t You Sleep,” is a historical fantasy, a masque of Hungary’s grim modern history, in which the eighty-one-year-old director himself and his longtime screenwriter, Gyula Hernádi, wander through a landscape inhabited by the country’s political ghosts, including impersonators of Hitler and Stalin, along with well-groomed and white-shirted nationalist rappers and—in one of the most subtly, poignantly philosophical scenes in the recent cinema—a trip in a cable car overlooking Budapest, in which a young girl whistles Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” I emerged from the screening in a state of multiple ecstasies—for the film and for Jancsó’s very being—and told a fellow juror, Tom McSorley of the Toronto Cinematheque, about it. He was pleased: he loved the film too, and, in fact, had programmed it for the festival sidebar.
A long way of saying that “Electra, My Love” is—as this clip shows—a very different kind of film, though it shares a few crucial elements, notably, the sinuous long takes (which in the later film are, by and large, less elaborate) and the ubiquity of history in the present tense. But in 1974, when Hungary was still under Soviet dominion, Jancsó had an altogether more allusive way of dealing with that history and its ongoing effects. In earlier films (such as “Silence and Cry” and “The Red and the White,” both from 1967), he depicted historical incidents in the form of molecular docudramas, in which ambiguous scenes from obscure chronicles accrete to yield up—in plain sight but beyond the ken of the authorities—fierce or rueful charges regarding abuses of power or delusional plans. In “Electra, My Love,” Jancsó made use of a modern play set in ancient Greece to make his charges against unjust authority—and, in particular, against the casual murder of citizens high and low by rulers he considered usurpers. In an extraordinary central scene, King Aegisthus invites his subjects to criticize his rule freely; the fulsome and hyperbolic flattery that results is a grimly comical depiction of the abuse of the concept of freedom in a place where it didn’t exist. By 2003, when Jancsó made “Wake Up, Mate, Don’t You Sleep,” the abuse of freedom where it did exist had become one of his major themes.
P.S. I’ll be on the road the next few days and blogging a little more sparsely than usual.
P.P.S. Speaking of which, the Brazilian director Walter Salles is currently shooting an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road,” starring Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund, and Sam Riley, and also featuring Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, and Steve Buscemi. The project has been kicking around since the early eighties, when Francis Coppola was scheduled to produce and Jean-Luc Godard to direct.
