Kósa's 'Ítélet' Is a Bleak Scream, Not a Historical Epic

Ferenc Kósa's "Ítélet" (Judgement, 1970) does not offer redemption. It offers a naked scream. The film traces the doomed 1514 peasant uprising led by György Dózsa, a nobleman and soldier of fortune who turned a crusade against the Ottomans into a full-scale revolution against Hungary's landlords. Thousands of peasants, starving and without supplies, attacked manor houses and killed hundreds of nobles. The rebellion fell only after the government brought in feudal levies and foreign mercenaries. Dózsa was captured and slowly executed on a red-hot iron throne, a red-hot iron crown placed on his head, while his brother was beheaded and his followers flogged. No new dawn arrives.

Kósa structures the story as a series of tableaux, each closer to an oral legend than a filmic scene. Peasant soldiers with crosses daubed on their chests, chained loggers dragging themselves through the woods, naked women ploughing a furrow to ward off plague – the images are stark and symbolic. The camera work hints at Tarkovsky. The aesthetic sits between the gothic period epics of Europe and the Ukrainian folk tradition of poetic cinema. The film echoes Bresson's "Procès de Jeanne d'Arc," a director who heavily shaped Hungarian cinema and, through that, the work of Béla Tarr.