Abstract

Miklós Jancsó is one of the most important European auteurs. His committment to social and political issues within historical themes has been a constant concern of his artistic output. Jancsó's overall cinematic oeuvre has been influenced and shaped to a great extent by the volatile position that Hungary has had throughout the twentieth century as well as by the dynamics and fluctuations experienced by the whole region. This sense of forced embedding in an extremely difficult context has been shared by other East European artists, a Polish filmmaker, Andrzej Wajda, among them. This thesis demonstrates that both directors have expressed similar fascination with the history of their respective countries but within increasingly different stylistic and narrative frameworks. At the age of eighty-two, Miklós Jancsó is still an active and successful filmmaker, while the films he has made over the last two decades are injustly understudied and marginalized. A thorough analysis of the artist's sophisticated camera movement and a unique approach to narrative structure and character formation in Jancsó's selected films seeks to enhance our knowledge of the director who--for fifty years--has been incessantly experimenting and reinvigorating his style while strictly adhering to his ethical, social and political convictions.