Miklos Jansco's Silence and Cry

Join us Friday, December 18 when we see famed Hungarian director Miklos Jansco's existential meditation on political repression and the struggle for freedom, Silence and Cry. In Jansco's powerful, elliptical 1967 film, "a commander tells a young soldier to climb a snowy hill, then orders another soldier to shoot him in the back; a military man demands that an elderly civilian slap a woman in the face, then does it himself. Barking dogs, figures hidden in darkened rooms, innocents entrapped while soldiers circle and maneuver: such is Jancso's portrait of life under a police state, ostensibly set in 1919 after the defeat of a doomed communist republic, but suggestive of many other places and times. On the desolate Hungarian plains, a hunted survivor hides in a colleague's village; his restlessness extends not only to the desire for freedom, but to the love of another man's wife. Here the outdoors becomes a stage, and every human, whether hero or villain, doomed; a final gunshot proves, however, that rebellion is still possible. British critic John Russell Taylor called Silence and Cry 'one of Jancso?s masterpieces--perhaps even his best film of all--and totally unlike anything else in the cinema'"

Silence and Cry is presented as part four of the Pacific Film Archive's Miklos Jansco retrospective (December 5-18): www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/miklos_jancso

Pacific Film Archive Information and Directions: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/visit/directions

Tickets are $9.50 adults, $6.50 students and seniors.

7:45 Purchase tickets at PFA's Box Office (2575 Bancroft) then meet across the street at Cafe Milano (2522 Bancroft) for salads/sandwiches/coffee.

8:20 Head to PFA's theater (2575 Bancroft) to take our seats. The film starts at 8:40.

10:15 We will meet afterwards at Caffe Strada (two blocks up Bancroft, at 2300 College) for conversation.