Elektreia (Hungary. 1975)

Director: Miklos Jansco

This recreation of the Electra legend from a play by co-screenwriter Laszlo Gymko is a superb combination of classical Greek tragedy and revolutionary propoganda. It is visually spellbinding, thematically overpowering, technically faultless, and just thirteen shots long.

On a barren plain with just one openaired building hundreds of people are dancing in sombre lines. Riders herd horses, galloping from place to place. A fire-eater belches fire, a man dances with a sword, dwarfs walk in a line banging cymbols and drums, peacocks strut, doves flutter, naked and semi-naked men and women with painted bodies adopt poses, men walk in single file cracking whips in unison, a woman in blue wanders.

It is the day of "The Feast of Justice" and the woman is Electra. Aegisthos, the ki kings, appears with shaven head and fear in his body and his eyes, He is accompanied by a tall handsome courtier, and together they tell Electra to forget. Her father Agamemnon was murdered for giving the people freedom, which they could not use. Aegisthos the murderer claims justice for his action in the name of wise government. But Electra awaits the return of her lost brother Orestes who will avenge the death of their father. While she remembers, noone can forget.

The celebration gathers momentum and a sacrifice is performed: the victim collapses in a pool stained with blood in which naked maidens stand, their backs painted with grey and white patterns. It is announced that on this day no-one may fear to tell the truth, and the people praise Aegisthos for successful crops and fruitful marriages. Electra is married to a dwarf. With a white veil floating over her she accepts all humiliation, she waits.

Suddenly a column of red smoke is seen billowing over the plain. Underneath it a small group are advancing. There is a man in a red cape, riders on horseback and a minstrel in a wide-brimmed black felt hat who sings songs of change. They bring news of Restes' death. Electra kills their leader, and for this is given the choice of submission to Aegisthos or death for herself. She remains defiant, and the messenger rises to reveal himself as Orestes, the unconquerable liberator. Aegisthos is rejected by his people and brought to judgement. His courtier performs naked with a woman the beautiful dance of death. Their bodies moving in perfect symmetry, they transform what was once an aesthetic celebration of regal splendour into a profound experience of death. Aegisthos and the courtier are then killed. Electr and Orestes have fulfilled their duty and shoot as each other, collapsing only to rise again and fly away in a red helicopter. They return and dance with the people.

Janos Kende's brilliantly handled camera is forever on the move, tracking in wide areas and panning as it goes, zooming in to examine and out to reveal, twisting and turning back on itself, seemingly never following a straight line, and always moving with a purpose. By the use of this technique instead of the usual cutting, we are completely entranced by the flow of the action, never knowing what new spectacle will be revealed and constantly aware that just as in Greek drama everything one sees has been pre-ordained.

Because the action and dialogue (mainly chants and interior monologues) elucidate the background as the story unfolds, and because Jansco assumes a prior knowledge of Euipides' play, we are able to follow the plot of the film and at the same time appreciate its relationship with the original tale. By eliminating Clytemnestra (who was originally responsible for Agamemnon's death) an overt political theme is established; and by marrying Electra to a dwarf instead of Euripides' good peasant, the deformed nature of man in bondage is exposed: the dwarf is both a symbol of Aegisthos' subjects and of the petty nature of Aegisthos' power.

The English title (meaning 'things revolving around Electra') provides a verbal link between the classic cyclical concerns of the legend and the contemporary revolutionary theme and the flowing action and camera movement reinforce this.

Although Elektreia works primarily on a visual level, the soundtrack has much to contribute. The sound of whips being cracked in unison, later repeated as the sound of gunfire, has a distrubing intensity. Similarly, the rumble of horses, established early in the film, achieves a horrifying significance as it becomes that of men and women running, driven on by the whips. This sound is further used for the helicopter, as a symbol of freedom.

The ending of the film, from when Electra and Orestes shoot each other onwards, initially appears to be disturbingly over indulgent. That it is not the people but their actions that matter we have already realised, and that permanent revolution is Jansco's predominant theme is now also clear. The revolutionary songs, the gaiety of the dances, the red helicopter, and the story of the fire-Bird which rises each morning bringing beauty and freedom and life to the people, and dies each nigh to be reborn in even more splendid form (told by Electra), all reinforce this theme. The justification for these sequences is that we are not to forget we are watching more than a contemporary version of a Greek legend, that this is more than an aesthetic masterpiece.

Of course, such justification may not ve valid: film art is very rarely a matter and aesthetics alone; and equally rare is the audience who will accept overt and simple dogma when the artist has established a more probing means of communication within the body of the work concerned. Certainly there is no rule, and if the same high artistic standard can be maintained throughout, blatant reiteration of the message is easily acceptable. Jansco failed in only two small ways. As a symbol of revolution the unassumingly handsome Orestes lacked the depth of the less 'beautiful but more fascinating Electra. And towards the end we are subjected to about ten seconds of happy, laughing, running, people. Taken on its own they might be expected to start singing 'It's the real thing at any moment. But these are minor faults.

Elektreia is an extraordinarily rivetting piece of cinema-drama, and in that the brilliant camera-work and direction were quite unlike anything else it remains the high light of the festival.