Red Psalm

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Red Psalm

(Még kér a nép)

Hungary 1972. Director: Miklós Jancsó
Cast: Lajos Balázsovits, András Bálint, Andrea Drahota, Gyöngyi Bürös, István Bujtor

 

Jancsó won Best Director honours at Cannes for the dizzying, dazzling Red Psalm, one of his pinnacle achievements. The film recounts, in fervid, balletic, bloody fashion, and with much pageantry (and nudity), a farm workers’ rebellion on a large Hungarian estate in the late 19th century. Jancsó’s circling, swirling, incessantly moving camera captures the drama with breathtaking kinetic and metaphoric force; this 88-minute film is composed of a mere 28 shots, each demonstrating the director’s bold, rhythmic command of the expressive extended take. Red Psalm is one of two Jancsó films — The Red and the White, also screening in this series, is the other — featured in 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die. "Jancsó’s awesome fusion of form with content and politics with poetry equals the exciting innovations of the French New Wave...It may well be the greatest Hungarian film of the sixties and seventies" (Jonathan Rosenbaum).  "A stunning symbolic analysis of the revolutionary process...a film of nearly perfect formal beauty, great humanity, and awesome cinematic power" (David Cook). "Jancsó’s cinema does not conform to narrative or psychological conventions, but opens up other areas which are usually only found in the screen musical" (Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide). Colour, 35mm, in Hungarian with English subtitles. 88 mins.