György Vidovszky

The video image in the films of Miklós Jancsó

In the 80s and 90s films of Jancsó the video image is a remarkable novelty. Vidovszky's study examines what formal, dramatic and technical changes the appearance of the new feature brought with it in his films made between 1982 and 1996.

In Jancsó's films of the 60s and 70s there were two main, defining stylistic elements: the long take and camera movements. Jancsó's long takes organised many different scenes, often played out in different spaces and times, into one intellectual unity. So time and space is extended, while the meantime this technique stops the director from being able to freely manipulate reality, and uninhibitedly steer the attention of the viewer. The use of video broadened this dramatic approach with new possibilities.

The video image appears first in the film Omega, Omega, Omega Here the monitors placed behind the haracters show them in another location, during other events, duplicated in time and space. The Season of Monsters is a film where the video frame becomes part of the narration, radiating constant observation, objectivity, and constant presence. Events happening in different times and places are scrambled together, with place and time changes mixed together like the real and surreal elements of the story. In Jesus Christ's Horoscope the monitor screen appears in almost every shot. We see most events, and this is deliberate, on both the film screen and on the monitor screen (often events take place first on the monitor), and characters react to things they see on the video screen. In this film the monitor has a life of its own, and it supplants reality. Chaos and apocalyptic uncertainty manifest visually with the help of a sense of time and space cascading that the video picture introduces.

In God Walks Backwards, the director shows the film several times as part of itself. We see the present, but then this same present repeated on the monitor, but recorded from the viewer's perspective - with this the film steps out of its own space, and it is placed into the video image seen by the viewer and the characters. In Blue Danube Waltz video gets an even more concrete role: an instrument of the observing, supervising, intimidating practised by authority. The Great Hungarian Brain Death is an artistic sketch of chaos and loss, where hopelessness, disorientation and intellectual debauchery are at once prey and predator. By this point the masterly use of video image just pops up occasionally in the film.