Jancso, a Bolshevik film mentor and beneficiary of state interventionism in the arts in Hungary during the Iron Curtain period, literally followed the classic "September Protocol," i.e. The theoretical, Manichaeist dogma of the Stalinist Era laid out by Zhdanov and then adopted by the Communist Parties on a global scale. The first step in Leninism, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was to establish, through censorship and state sponsorship, the complete control of cultural production with the aim of destroying Western thought ("Bourgeois or burzhooi", they called it) based on Jewish- Christian prophecies as well as on Roman law and Greek philosophy. In fact, all red cultural policies were born out of such distortions, namely: totalitarian Zhdanovism, engaged art, demented Gramscism, tenets of the Frankfurt School, Mao's destructive Cultural Revolution and so forth, not forgetting the message that every dictator used to state in the congresses of the communist militancy about the promotion of cultural production: "Comrades, anything for the sake of the Revolution, nothing outside the revolution!" But ¨the Round-up¨ is much more and much less than this, it is an unbearable parade of long shots where each image seems to reflect the hatred that this mediocre director always nurtured against the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
Review of The Round-Up
