Despite being commonly read as allegorical works, Jancsó’s early films are noticeable for their extreme realism. Iván Forgács examines how these two sit side by side as the director uses physical space to define the spiritual.
Miklós Jancsó’s first film The Bells Have Gone to Rome (A harangok Rómába mentek, 1958) has remained almost unnoticed as a fluid piece of lyrical realism flourishing in contemporary Eastern Europe. This lack of interest in the film is itself relevant. The attribute “lyrical” helps us to perceive some of the basic structural peculiarities of this tendency on a practical level and makes more understandable the meaning of some former tendencies in film, such as neorealism.
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