The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (210 page)

Jaglom’s most recent films have seemed increasingly forced:
Venice/Venice
, in which Jaglom is a movie director at the Venice Film Festival who meets a new lady…, is painfully et cetera—as well as a fatal reminder that Henry is not a good enough actor to play Henry Jaglom. That great role needs someone subtler. Jaglom also needs scripts, and a more structured way of shooting. Otherwise, his process might actually bring someone to lay hands on a weapon. He could be the first auteur to be silenced in the middle of one of his own films.

It has been said with wisdom that some great directors make the same film over and over again—Hawks, Ozu, Antonioni. But that great family-feeling sinks in slowly. Whereas, when the audience sees the ditto marks before they stick in the director’s eye—then something is wrong. And, truly, Henry Jaglom is far too smart, far too creative, and far too insecure to repeat himself so much.

Miklós Jancsó
, b. Vac, Hungary, 1921
1958:
A Herangok Rómabá Mentek/The Bells Have Gone to Rome
. 1960:
Három Csillag/Three Stars
(codirected with Karoly Wiedemann and Zoltan Varkonyi). 1963:
Oldás es Kötés/Cantata
. 1964:
Igy Jöttem/My Way Home
. 1965:
Szegénylegenyek/The Roundup
. 1967:
Csillagosok, Katonák/The Red and the White
. 1968:
Csend és Kiáltás/Silence and Cry
. 1969:
Fényes Szelek/The Confrontation; Sirrokó/ Winter Sirocco
. 1970:
Egi Bárány/Agnus Dei; La Pacifista/The Pacifist
. 1971:
La Tecnica e il Rito/Technique and Ritual; Meg Kér a Nép/Red Psalm
. 1973:
Roma Rivuole Cesare/Rome Wants Caesar Back
. 1975:
Szerelmem, Elektra/Elektreia
. 1976:
Vizi Privati, Pubbliche Virtu/Private Vices
. 1979:
Allegro Barbarao Magyar Rapszodia/Hungarian Rhapsody; Eletunket es Verunket
. 1981:
Zsarnok szive avagy Bocaccio Magyarorszagon
. 1982:
Omega, Omega
. 1984:
Faustus, Faustus, Faustus
(TV);
Budapest/Muzsika
(d). 1986:
L’Aube/Dawn
. 1987:
Szornyek Evadja
. 1988:
Jezus Krisztus Horoszopja
. 1992:
Kék Duna Keringö
.

It was in 1966 that Jancsó first made an impression outside Hungary with
The Roundup
. That much nearer the 1956 uprising, it was difficult not to see the film as growing out of specifically Hungarian circumstances and experiences. Writing in
Sight and Sound
, the Hungarian critic Robert Vas seemed to confirm this feeling: “With a burning intellectual charge, he invites his viewers to throw away the pleasant, comfortable dream of Hungary’s romantic-heroic history and face up to reality: black as much as white, oppressor as much as oppressed. A challenge to self-analysis of a small and tragic country surrounded by so many different tensions in the middle of Europe.”

It is significant that Jancsó was trained in law and ethnography—the two courses of study overlapping, just as dispassion and formalism mingle in his work. Indeed, he became a doctor of law before the end of the Second World War, but did ethnological research in Transylvania in the following years. It is unclear how he found his way into filmmaking, but in the early 1950s he made newsreels and over a dozen shorts on ethnological and artistic subjects.

Cantata
is judged by Jancsó as the first feature of his own. Like
My Way Home
, it is a work of conventional poetic realism, dealing with precise, unique characters. The first is about a young doctor’s spiritual crisis as he returns to his rural home. The second concerns a young Hungarian, taken prisoner by the Russians in 1945, and put to work with a Russian soldier tending cows. Observant, sensitive films, these two were compared with the work of Olmi, and taken as a sign of fresh authenticity and humane concern in the Hungarian cinema.

The Roundup
really revealed Jancsó. Ostensibly, its basis is historical: the period after 1848 when Austrian soldiers trap, round up, interrogate, torture, and kill a band of Hungarian partisans. But the way of showing these things was so much more impressive than the non-Hungarian’s sense of Hungarian history. First of all, Jancsó had defined the flat Hungarian
puzta
in the way that Ford mapped out Monument Valley for himself, or Antonioni the London park in
Blow-Up
. Robert Vas saw this as a “specifically
Hungarian
vision. The horizontal line was surely dictated by the landscape, the domineering plain that left so rich a mark on the national character and literature. Its hard blacks against white suggest the toughness, the contrasts of this character: the rich fertility of summer as much as the tragedy, secretly maturing under the blazing heat.”

But was the tragedy merely Hungarian, and was the roundup tragic or a ritualistic exercise, a dance variation of the inevitable power struggle?
The Roundup
paid much less attention to individuals than had
Cantata
or
My Way Home
. The camera style became increasingly decorative, abstract, and domineering. Thus, a sense of mysterious fatalism muffled the plight of the partisans and the unhindered cruelty of their captors. That meant that the viewer did not actually experience plight or cruelty so much as share in the ethnologist observer’s view of an unfamiliar culture. Visually,
The Roundup
is a matter of pattern and shape, like a visitor from Mars describing a firing squad. And when Richard Roud suggested that it was as if Bresson had filmed Kafka’s
In the Penal Colony
, that served to remind one of Jancsó’s origins.
The Roundup
did have something of Kafka’s worried but meek attitude to divine law, and it did study human groupings with a semiscientific remoteness.

This situation—of irrational authorities and hopeful revolutionists confronting one another in the open—has run through
The Red and the White, The Confrontation, Agnus Dei
, and
Red Psalm
. The historical bases of these films seem very tenuous, less important than the chance to persist with the same visual ingredients—solemn girls, ominous riders, the sun on the plain, and the extraordinary, balletic, mathematical behavior of the camera. These films have very little speech, no character, and very opaque sequences of events. They do have an overwhelming camera sequence built on some of the most elaborate traveling shots in cinema. The shots are as beautiful and as blank as the slim, dark, half-naked girls in
Red Psalm
. But that is to talk of beauty in a way that reveals the gulf between prettiness and character. And when some critics came away from
Winter Sirocco
with the report that it has only thirteen shots, and from
Red Psalm
that it has but twenty-six, then I wonder whether fluid cinema has not become oppressively academic and premeditated.

The mechanical movements are the more disturbing in that Jancsó does have an eye for sudden revelations. There is no doubt about the poetic generalizations he can achieve with horses, sunshine, the river, riders, grass, and his herded victims. What makes him seem cold-blooded and frivolous is the need to decorate this vision with senseless movement. When the camera does not move with a character, an emotion, or an idea then I fear it is impelled by the director’s vanity.

Emil Jannings
(Theodor Friedrich Emil Janenz) (1884–1950), b. Rorschach, Switzerland
In
Fun in a Chinese Laundry
, Josef von Sternberg gives an artfully bewildered, matter-of-fact account of how he handled Emil Jannings that is as wickedly comic as his description of Dietrich is balefully enchanted. The book omits, though demonstrates, the fact that Sternberg was himself one of the most laconic and rebarbative of men. But it makes clear how far Jannings’s screen persona—of swollen, emotional nobility that is humiliated by fate—was based in the way he behaved. Indeed, von Sternberg makes himself out as Hal to Jannings’s Falstaff, and it is the case that after
The Blue Angel
(30, von Sternberg) the actor never regained the eminence he had enjoyed in the silent era.

Supreme among German actors, he had gone to America and won a best actor Oscar in
The Last Command
(28, von Sternberg) before sound grated on his impossible accent. The story of
The Last Command
—of an exiled Tsarist general forced into working as a Hollywood extra—was typical of the way Jannings fed masochistically on pathos. (The attempts to relate Caligari to German national character might do better to examine the vast appeal of Jannings’s gloomy humiliation.) In
The Last Command
, William Powell plays a director who observes the posturing general; while in reality, only two years later, von Sternberg humbled Jannings by making Dietrich the center of power and attention in
The Blue Angel
. If only a fraction of Sternberg’s account is accurate, then Jannings was a gross, overwhelming sentimentalist, the exaggeration of a great actor that so many critics were ready to admire. Seen today, he is cloyingly unsympathetic. He has only to be compared with Michel Simon, a dignified creator of larger-than-life characters, for his obtuse self-love to be made clear. He was perfectly adjusted to the scale of stylized tyranny or slow-motion self-abasement that fitted German expressionism.

After stage training at Zurich, he traveled in repertory and joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin. He made his film debut in 1914 in
Arme Eva
(Robert Wiene) and
Im Banne der Leidenschaften
. He also appeared in
Passionels Tagebuch
(14, Luis Ralph);
Stein unter Steinem
(15, Felix Basch); and
Nacht des Grauens
(16, Richard Oswald). Thereafter, his career amounts to a catalogue of German cinema of the period, with Fritz Lang the only notable absentee:
Wenn Vier Dasselbe Tun
(17, Ernst Lubitsch);
Brüder Karamazoff
(18, Dmitri Buchowetzki);
Der Stier von Oliviera
(Buchowetzki); Louis XV in
Madame Dubarry
(19, Lubitsch);
Rosa Bernd
(19, Alfred Halm); Henry VIII in
Anna Boleyn
(20, Lubitsch);
Köhlhiesel’s Töchter
(20, Lubitsch);
Tragödie der Liebe
(21, Joe May);
Das Weib des Pharao
(21, Lubitsch);
Die Ratten
(21, Hans Kobe);
Die Grafin von Paris
(22, Buchowetzki);
Othello
(23, Buchowetzki);
Peter der Grosse
(23, Buchowetzki);
Alles für Geld
(23, Reinhold Schunzel); as Nero in
Quo Vadis?
(23, Georg Jacoby and Gabriellino d’Annunzio);
Nju
(24, Paul Czinner); the hotel doorman in
The Last Laugh
(24, F. W. Murnau); Haroun al Raschid in
Waxworks
(24, Paul Leni);
Tartuff
(25, Murnau);
Variété
(25, E. A. Dupont); Mephistopheles in
Faust
(26, Murnau).

He then signed with Paramount and went to America for
The Way of All Flesh
(27, Victor Fleming);
The Last Command
and
The Patriot
(28, Lubitsch);
Sins of the Fathers
(28, Ludwig Berger);
The Street of Sin
(28, Mauritz Stiller); and
Betrayal
(29, Lewis Milestone).

He returned to Germany and to the part of Professor Unrath, the sexual victim of Dietrich’s Lola, in
The Blue Angel
. Thereafter, he made fewer films, though remaining a German cultural figurehead:
Liebling der Götter
(30, Hanns Schwarz);
Stürme der Leidenschaft
(32, Robert Siodmak);
Der Schwarze Walfisch
(34, Fritz Wendhausen);
Der Alte und der Junge König
(35, Hans Steinhoff);
Traumulus
(35, Carl Froelich);
Der Herrscher
(37, Veit Harlan);
Der Zerbrochene Krug
(37, Gustav Ucicky); and
Robert Koch
(39, Steinhoff). In 1940, he was made a director of UFA, and the same year he played the Boer leader in the propagandist
Ohm Krüger
(40, Steinhoff). In 1942, he made
Die Entlassung
(Wolfgang Liebeneiner) and
Alters Herz Wird Wieder Jung
(Erich Engel). But after 1945, his enthusiastic role in the war effort excluded him from further work and he died in Austria in retirement.

Derek Jarman
(Michael Derek Jarman) (1942–94), b. Northwood, England
1976:
Sebastiane
. 1978:
Jubilee
. 1979:
The Tempest
. 1980:
In the Shadow of the Sun
(s). 1984:
Imagining October
(s). 1985:
The Angelic Conversation; The Dream Machine
(s). 1986:
Caravaggio;
“Louise,” an episode from
Aria
. 1987:
The Last of England
. 1988:
War Requiem
. 1990:
The Garden
. 1991:
Edward II
. 1993:
Wittgenstein; Blue
. 1994:
Glitterbug
.

Jarman is like a prisoner whose relentless eye turns his bars into vines, barber poles, and beribboned serpents. His prisons are, variously, very low budget, aestheticism, the beleaguered position of gays, and the peril of having AIDS. These prisons are not just inescapable, they are essential. For Jarman’s hysterical inventiveness, his camaraderie, his serene anger—all these things need the condition of confinement. The films may also need an audience of inmates. In other words, he has a habit of alienating and scorning those on the other side of the bars.

Nevertheless, he is a heroic figure whether he is battling commercial hostilities, the staid attitude of England (he is nearly unthinkable in another society), or his own illness. The filmography above is enlarged by a journal-like stream of home movies, by some music videos, and by three books
—Dancing Ledge
, an autobiography,
Modern Nature
, journals from the period 1989–90, and
At Your Own Risk
.