In Wheeler Auditorium

Admission: $2.50

For Electra

This film by Hungary's leading director, Miklos Jancsó (Red Psalm, The Red and the White, The Round-Up) was premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, where Sight and Sound correspondent Penelope Houston noted:
“Jancsó's unchanging Hungarian plain is an open stage in which part of the object is to situate rituals in space. In his Elektra, the immutable elements are reassembled: horsemen, girls, jigging peasants, men cracking whips, men trailing smoking torches. Against their shifting patterns, now as familiar as a ballet, Jancsó makes the Greek tragedy both timeless and urgent. The film is swift, concise and dazzling; I didn't count the shots (though there seemed to be rather more than the eight that have been spoken of), but the remarkable thing about Jancsó's almost seamless cinema is both its dramatic concentration (Mari Torocsik is a splendidly brooding Elektra) and its buoyancy. The end of the film brings on a scarlet helicopter, a red bird of hope; and there is no sense of incongruity, merely a kind of willed rightness, about this blend of the timeless story, Jancsó country and toytown technology.”