The three presences of Miklós Jancsó

A year or so ago, I mentioned buying a box set of films of a director I hadn't heard of before, Hungarian Miklós Jancsó. The set has six feature films and a handful of shorts, one of which I already mentioned. I put the set back in the Blu-ray player again recently to watch some more shorts, specifically Presence, which had two follow-ups called Second Presence and Third Presence.

The three short films really deserve a single blog post because they're thematically related and use the same filming location. The first, released in 1965, shows two men who one might guess survived the holocaust. They're walking through the small town of Olaszliska, which before the war had a synagogue and a Jewish cemetery. Twenty years on, the synagogue is decaying since there are no longer enough Jews to form a minyan and have services. But the men still feel the need to pray and be faithful Jews, hence their trek to this synagogue.

A dozen years later, the synagogue has decayed some more, and two younger men show up, similarly to pray. This time, the movie is in color and a wider format, although it's clearly the same synagogue and cemetery. Then, in 1986, a group of elementary school-aged children show up with a pair of rabbis, presumably to learn about the history of the synagogue and the Jewish community in the area as it was long before they were born. They also say prayers over the site as well as having a bite to eat in the form of bread ritually dipped in honey. Third Presence is also the only film to have any dialogue, although it's just the students talking about how they want their slice of bread and similar; there's no narrative dialogue in any of the three shorts.

It's a bit tough to do a traditional review on these since there's no dialogue or even narration, just the ambient sounds and the chanting of Jewish prayers. It's interesting to see the documentation of what's happnening to a house of worship that has nobody to worship in it or care for it any longer, which I suppose also says something about the human need for commemoration. One other thing that's worth mentioning is how Jancsó deliberately put a composed shot of a train in the background in each of the three shorts. I'm not certain what if any point Jancsó was trying to make by doing this, but it seems evident these shots are there for a purpose since they look like an obvious decision to have them in the films.

These aren't films I would have thought to seek out, although I'm glad they were included in the box set.