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Miklos Jancso
Life Time
29 September 1921 - 31 January 2014
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Hungarian film director. In the 1960s and 1970s, Jancho was synonymous with Hungarian cinema for international filmgoers. He studied law ethnography and anthropology and graduated from the Department of Directing at the Hungarian Film Academy in 1951. In the 1950s he shot news about Stalin chronicles and popular science films mainly related to art and ethnography: On the outskirts of the city (1957) and others. His first feature film, A harangok Romaba mentek/The Bells Have Gone to Rome (1958),
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Hungarian film director. In the 1960s and 1970s, Jancho was synonymous with Hungarian cinema for international filmgoers. He studied law ethnography and anthropology and graduated from the Department of Directing at the Hungarian Film Academy in 1951. In the 1950s he shot news about Stalin chronicles and popular science films mainly related to art and ethnography: On the outskirts of the city (1957) and others. His first feature film, A harangok Romaba mentek/The Bells Have Gone to Rome (1958), contained no features that would later become integral to the famous Jancho style. He addressed the anti-fascist theme from a moral perspective. The earliest film in which features of this style appeared was Oldass ess Kotes/Cantata (1963), mainly due to the very long shots. It was also Jancho's first film with screenwriter Gul Hernadi, with whom he is still working. Jancio claimed that he and Hernadi had seen Michelangelo Antonioni's "Night" ten times before making this film and, technically speaking, Antonioni had a huge impact. Jancho, however, had to develop his own style whose main features were extremely long shots (up to ten minutes), minimal dialogue, a constantly moving camera with choreography of actors moving inside the stage and repetitive motives and gestures. These first films had a very lyrical beginning. Some of Jancho’s works contain generalized episodes of the past, as it were, recreating a model of the historical situation: Stars and Soldiers (1967), filmed jointly with the USSR, Silence and Scream (1968).