The Hungarian puszta, under the milky and indifferent sky of Miklós Jancsó, is not a landscape. It is an existential condition, a vast, blank slate upon which power inscribes its merciless geometries. In "The Round-Up" (original title, infinitely more evocative, Szegénylegények, "The Hopeless Ones"), every tracking shot, every camera movement, every choreographic arrangement of bodies serves not to tell a story, but to prove a theorem. A theorem on the nature of submission, whose formal elegance is directly proportional to its moral cruelty.

The year is 1869, two decades after the failure of Kossuth's revolution against the Hapsburg Empire. Imperial authorities are rounding up gangs of suspected rebels and outlaws, the betyárok, once followers of the national hero Sándor Rózsa. Herded into a makeshift fort, a non-place of a few white huts dotting the horizon like sun-bleached bones, these men are subjected to a process of psychological annihilation. It is not so much physical violence that dominates, but rather its methodical, almost bureaucratic application as an instrument of persuasion. Jancsó's film, shot in 1966, uses this historical framework as a transparent veil, an almost academic pretext for speaking about its own present: post-1956 Hungary, crushed under the Soviet heel after the Budapest uprising. But it would be a mistake to limit the work to a mere contingent political allegory. "The Round-Up" transcends its time to become a universal essay on the mechanics of totalitarian power, an abstract and terribly concrete model of how human will can be broken.

The instrument of this demonstration is Jancsó’s unmistakable style, here brought to a level of almost dogmatic purity. The film is composed of a handful of masterful long takes, in which the camera floats with an omniscient and glacial calm. There is no empathetic point of view, no character with whom to identify. The camera is the eye of a cruel god or, worse, of an entomologist observing his specimens. It moves in circles, in spirals, follows a prisoner forced to run naked to the point of exhaustion, lingers on an interrogation where the threat is more potent than the act, and pulls back to reveal formations of men reminiscent of military parades or, conversely, a flock awaiting slaughter. This choreography of despair transforms the puszta into a panoptic stage, an arena with no escape, either physical or psychological. The horizontal landscape, devoid of any handhold, becomes the perfect accomplice to surveillance.

In this open-air prison, the system of control is not based on walls, but on information and denunciation. Authority, embodied by anonymous officials in impeccable uniforms, does not need to know the truth; it needs to create a system where truth is irrelevant and individual survival depends on lying and betraying one's comrade. It is a giant prisoner's dilemma extended to an entire community, where the rebels' initial solidarity is eroded, molecule by molecule, through a calculated dosage of false promises, minimal privileges, and psychological torture. One prisoner can get a better jacket by denouncing another; another can save his life by identifying a killer, whether real or alleged. The logic is that of a laboratory experiment, an almost scientific observation of the disintegration of human bonds under pressure.

The most immediate, almost obligatory, parallel is with the universe of Kafka. As in The Trial or In the Penal Colony, authority is impersonal, its rules are arcane, and guilt is a pre-existing state merely waiting to be formalized. But while in Kafka the horror is born of the bureaucratic labyrinth and the absurd, in Jancsó, it is born of the most absolute transparency. Everything happens in the light of day, in this open and blinding space. The torture machine is not some infernal device hidden in a dungeon, but the system itself, visible to all. It is a logic that anticipates by a decade Michel Foucault's analysis in Discipline and Punish: power is no longer exercised through the spectacle of exemplary punishment, but through a pervasive discipline, a continuous surveillance that internalizes obedience.

Tamás Somló's black-and-white cinematography is not an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one. It subtracts all warmth, all chromatic distraction, reducing reality to a diagram of forces, a stark contrast between the dark uniforms of the tormentors and the white of the prisoners' shirts and huts. A white that evokes innocence but also surrender, the blank page on which power can write whatever it wishes. Even the use of folk songs, which should represent the indomitable soul of the people, is perverted: prisoners are forced to sing and dance for their jailers, transforming an act of cultural identity into a humiliating performance, a ritual of submission.

Perhaps the boldest analogy is not with cinema, but with Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Jancsó abolishes the traditional psychology of his characters. We know almost nothing of their pasts, their motivations. They are bodies, stage presences moved by external forces, living hieroglyphs in a ritual that is at once sacred and profane. The viewer is not invited to "feel" for them, but to "understand" the mechanism that crushes them. It is an intellectual experience before it is an emotional one, a demand for lucidity in the face of horror. In this, Jancsó radically departs from neorealism or more traditional protest cinema to arrive at a rigorous and uncompromising modernism, closer to Bresson or the early Pasolini of Accattone in its hieratic quality, but with a purpose that is exquisitely political and sociological.

The ending, one of cosmic desolation, seals the theorem. The prisoners who collaborated, deluded by a promise of pardon and enlistment in the army, are led into an open field and surrounded. The camera rises slowly, revealing the trap in all its geometric perfection. There is no catharsis, no hope, not even the dignity of a final rebellion. There is only the silent acknowledgment that the system has worked perfectly. The individual, the community, loyalty: all have been pulverized.

To see "The Round-Up" today is a dumbfounding experience. It is a film that demands total concentration, that refuses any easy narrative consolation. Its coldness can be repellent, its abstraction can seem difficult. But it is precisely in this distance, in this lucid and merciless formal analysis, that its devastating power resides. Jancsó does not show us suffering to make us cry; he shows us the logic of suffering to make us think. And he leaves us with a terrible question, which echoes in the silence of the puszta long after the credits roll: in the face of such methodical and all-pervasive power, what remains of human will? Perhaps only the capacity to be a pawn in a funereal ballet where the only possible choreography is that of submission. A glacial, necessary, and eternal masterpiece.