In 1962, Jancsó's Cantata was "an overture to the Hungarian film renaissance," Jancsó himself "the first director to try to systematically demystify the essence of the Hungarian character in the sixties" (Liehm and Liehm). Moreover Cantata was a prelude to the oeuvre of this austere stylist better known for later films including The Round-up, The Red and the White, and The Confrontation-epic "ballets" which abstracted the historical moment. Their stark passions are already embedded in Cantata's more straightforward narrative in which an ambitious young doctor (Zoltán Latinovits), confronted with mortality, faces himself for the first time. Jancsó's command of mise-en-scène is extraordinary in three distinct settings: In the first, a hospital where the drama of life and death turns not on the patients but on the doctors themselves, his high overhead shots pull us out of the Bergmanesque undertow into another realm of dramatic analysis altogether. The second is an artist's loft with its sculptures, cracked mirrors and infinite angels, where events comment, alternately with humor and sadness, on the vacuity of intellectual life. The third is a rural setting in which landscape and architecture become synonymous with the hero's struggle to recoup his own humanity (we can see Antonioni's influence on Jancsó). A marvelously inventive music track ranges from an original jazz score to Béla Bartók's "Cantata Profana" and even a snippet of "Run-Around Sue." This most accessible of Jancsó films is still enormously convoluted: while rejecting the inhumanity of socialism it also rejects its own existentialism ("the age of the lone wolf is over)"-and looks forward to the group portrait that would be Jancsó's pursuit thereafter.