Red Psalm (Miklós Jancsó, 1972) (Patreon)

Happy May Day!

While Red Psalm is a far cry from the triumph of The Red and the White, is does depict Jancsó's art at a particular moment of mastery. Essentially an abstract cinematic pageant depicting a Socialist peasant uprising and its violent obliteration, the film reflects a protracted cycle of rebellion and counter-rebellion, punctuated with highly formalized intrusions of competing ideologies that threaten to weaken the Socialists' resolve. Instead of articulating a compressed version of "the long revolution," as The Red and the White did -- wins and losses in dizzying succession -- Red Psalm is protest and insurrection considered as an alternate form of Catholic mass.

That's to say, the title of Red Psalm is somewhat literal. Jancsó stages the peasants' political activities as a series of Hungarian folks dances, protest songs, and a strange regard for the female body that suggests that women are not so much comrades as emblems of the new order, repositories of traditional values that have mutated into radicalism almost naturally. They are the Virgin Mary figures, exalted through movement and ritual, frequently naked but never really eroticized.

Jancsó's long, winding takes take place once again in an open field. People are seldom individualized; they function as components within larger formations. Soldiers ride up on horseback, crisscrossing each other in military dressage. All the familiar Jancsó elements are in place. But Red Psalm presents moments or phases in revolutionary consciousness, forming and decaying like stanzas in an epic poem. First, we see the "bailiff," a petty functionary of the ruling class, tell the peasants to stand down, assuring them they will get a civic allotment is they cooperate: a parcel of land, two cows, two pigs, a ration of salt, etc. Before we know it, he is thrown in a burlap sack and dispatched.

Later, a moderate democrat arrives, arguing for gradual change through labor boards and agricultural co-ops. In the middle of his spiel, he drops dead. But the biggest ideological crisis for the revolutionaries relates to the church. One of the leaders argues on behalf of the Catholics, and he is spurned by his comrades. We hear priests demand that the peasants capitulate to the current social order. Soon, the head priest is locked in the church which is promptly set on fire. Meanwhile, one older priest sympathetic to the revolutionary cause joins with them, and soon lays down and dies of his own volition, as if clearing the way for a new reality.

So within an overall structure of peasant song and interlocked movements, the Socialists engage with counter-revolutionary ideas and then reject them. Jancsó has one of the men state that, as Socialists, they have a responsibility to debate with other ideas, but Red Psalm very systematically shows the peasants overcome every dialectical challenge. This pattern lasts until the end of the film, when their celebratory dance in the field is surrounded by the soldiers of the monarchy, who quickly gun them all down. 

What's notable here is that Jancsó's "troop movements," if you will, are never imposed from without. They are spontaneous gestures based in the peasants' centuries-long folk traditions. Red Psalm shows folk wisdom operating as an armature for peasants' coalescing class consciousness, not simply a set of superstitions to be rejected. Even as Christianity is purged in its official capacity, it remains in the minds of the revolutionaries as an ideal that could only be achieved through Socialism. (The rebel who argued on behalf of the church eventually delivers an amended version of the Lord's Prayer, with the working class taking the place of God.)

If I have any real reservations about Red Psalm, it has to do with Jancsó's attitude toward Hungarian folk culture. Where The Red and the White assumed two relatively stable positions that would weave in and out of one another, Red Psalm plays like a kind of Antonin Artaud / Julian Beck production, with sacred rituals fashioned into overt theater. This results in a tense combination of radicalism and conservatism, and comes dangerously close to the sort of idealization of the people that The Red and the White deftly avoided. To be fair, part of my resistance stems from my own aesthetic preferences. I am staunchly pro-modernity, and often I get frustrated with art that assumes cultural continuity as an unproblematic good. (See my similar agnosticism toward Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, even Glauber Rocha at times.)

But of course I realize that this "conservatism" is contextual. Given the Soviet bloc's relentless attempts to purge tradition in favor of industrial Communism, it is an act of resistance to hold fast to traditions and pre-Marxist social knowledges. Even after the authorities massacre the Socialists and re-impose the dominant order, Jancsó depicts them as having magically risen again. 

The message is clear: the specificity of the Hungarian experience is the resilient core that will allow the peasants to finally triumph. And I suppose it's unfair to fault Jancsó for his failure to recognize that the old ways can be just as easily mobilized for reactionary purposes. Still, Red Psalm is a potent document because, even through its undiluted radicalism, it tells us that we should have all seen Viktor Orbán coming a mile away.