The Lord's Lantern in Budapest

I was lucky enough to see this film due to the efforts of the folks at the Second Run DVD company who recently arranged a retrospective of Miklós Jancsó's films in London, at which the director was in attendance.What is critical about this movie (the first in a series of six following gravediggers Pepe and Kapo) is that it proves that Jancsó was not a one-note director as many have claimed. His famous internationally-renowned pictures of the sixties and seventies were predominantly shot in black and white, contained very long continuous takes and formalist camera-work. Thematically they were pretty much all about the absurdity of war, and specifically the aleatoric justice that war provides.It comes as a shock then to see an incredibly humorous Jancsó film, with lots of close-ups and editing, such as The Lord's Lantern in Budapest. One correspondent on this website once described Jancsó's cinema to me as a glorious cinematic dead-end, this film irrefutably proves the contrary position,