Some points...
1. Though Miklos Jancso's "The Red And The White" takes place in 1919, when Hungarian irregulars supported the Communist "Reds" in fighting the Tsarist "Whites" along the Volga River, the film deliberately ignores any political or historical context and instead goes to great lengths to blur the identities, objectives and motivations of its various characters.
2. The film lacks characters and plot. Instead, Jancso gives us war as cosmic ballet, the audience witnessing the ever-shifting balance of power between sides, a constant and repeated cycle whereby the defeated become victors and victors the defeated. Jancso emphasises this process by highlighting the various parallels between the two sides; the way they both perform the same rituals of humiliation, vengeance and forgiveness throughout the film.
3. The film is positively radical in the way it unfolds. Imagine an expansive landscape adorned with forts, forests, farms and villages. Now place clusters of troops, prisoners and civilians on this landscape and set them in motion. Finally, imagine a constantly moving "God's Eye" camera that floats above this landscape, gliding from one location or group of people to the next. There is no "story" here, only a constant state of flux, Jancso inviting us to become disembodied God's who study the rhythms of combat and the rhymes of war.
4. Characters enter the story as quickly as they leave it, their deaths occurring off-screen or at a cold distance. There is one character who ties the whole film together, however, appearing in the first scene and the last, but never really assuming a central role. He is a Hungarian played by András Kovák, a familiar figure in Jancso's filmography. Significantly, he's given a key statement in the film: "A man can fight and still be human."
5. Whenever a group of soldiers is conquered, the victors force them to strip and run away semi-naked, often sniped as they do so. Throughout the film, these acts of ritualised degradation are protested by ancillary characters. One symbolically hands back his rifle, one refuses to aim properly during an execution, one stops the rape of a peasant woman and one stops the execution of their own soldiers for "cowardice". The message: "a man can fight and still be human."
6. The theme that Jancso stresses throughout the film is the cyclical and futile nature of war. In the opening scene a Red soldier is shot by a White Cossack while his comrade makes an escape back to base, where it is a Bolshevik commander who is now holding captured White troops at his mercy, whom he releases at gunpoint, but not before relieving them of their uniforms. Yet within minutes, White troops have stormed the Red base and the communists are being forced to undergo the same humiliation of fleeing for their lives naked. This continuing shift of power and authority in the blink of an eye continues throughout the course of the film, on an increasingly larger scale; eventually captains are shooting captains and companies killing companies. This dynamic equilibrium and the waste of life becomes maddening to the point of exasperation, yet effectively depicts the pointless carnage and cost of civil war.
7. Jancos is constantly highlighting the randomness of combat. For example, one officer is picked up for execution but is randomly saved when another officer arbitrarily sends him away. Time and time again, little "flukes" occur which either spare lives or result in deaths.
8. Janco's later films became very rigid and almost motionless. But here, like most of his films throughout the 60s and 70s, his camera is always in motion. The film is comprised of huge long takes, his moving camera chartering massive chunks of land. Of all the masters of this style - Ophuls, Tarr, Mizoguchi, and Angelopoulos - no one has ever taken it to the level Jancsó achieved, perhaps because he is determined not to explore the inner motivations of his characters. He is more interested in external motion as meaning.
9. The choreography here is exquisite.
10. The film stresses how victory leads to senseless humiliation, both for the winners (due to an absence of larger military goals) and the losers.
11. In one scene, a brigade removes their jackets and runs hopelessly downhill toward a group of similarly white shirted soldiers. It's a point made by many war films - everyone wears the same uniform, there are no sides – but effective all the same.
12. The film ends with a close up shot of a soldier's face, the audience asked to recognise the sorrow in his eyes. This "final war movie shot" has become a cliché and I don't think it works here. Why not end the film one scene prior when the army charged headlong – with futility – down a hill? Why abandon the detached aesthetic of the rest of the film?
9/10 – New DVD releases of this film add an explanatory title card along with a silly scene in which horses charge toward a camera, before the beginning of the film. Ignore these additions completely.
Worth two viewings.
1. Though Miklos Jancso's "The Red And The White" takes place in 1919, when Hungarian irregulars supported the Communist "Reds" in fighting the Tsarist "Whites" along the Volga River, the film deliberately ignores any political or historical context and instead goes to great lengths to blur the identities, objectives and motivations of its various characters.
2. The film lacks characters and plot. Instead, Jancso gives us war as cosmic ballet, the audience witnessing the ever-shifting balance of power between sides, a constant and repeated cycle whereby the defeated become victors and victors the defeated. Jancso emphasises this process by highlighting the various parallels between the two sides; the way they both perform the same rituals of humiliation, vengeance and forgiveness throughout the film.
3. The film is positively radical in the way it unfolds. Imagine an expansive landscape adorned with forts, forests, farms and villages. Now place clusters of troops, prisoners and civilians on this landscape and set them in motion. Finally, imagine a constantly moving "God's Eye" camera that floats above this landscape, gliding from one location or group of people to the next. There is no "story" here, only a constant state of flux, Jancso inviting us to become disembodied God's who study the rhythms of combat and the rhymes of war.
4. Characters enter the story as quickly as they leave it, their deaths occurring off-screen or at a cold distance. There is one character who ties the whole film together, however, appearing in the first scene and the last, but never really assuming a central role. He is a Hungarian played by András Kovák, a familiar figure in Jancso's filmography. Significantly, he's given a key statement in the film: "A man can fight and still be human."
5. Whenever a group of soldiers is conquered, the victors force them to strip and run away semi-naked, often sniped as they do so. Throughout the film, these acts of ritualised degradation are protested by ancillary characters. One symbolically hands back his rifle, one refuses to aim properly during an execution, one stops the rape of a peasant woman and one stops the execution of their own soldiers for "cowardice". The message: "a man can fight and still be human."
6. The theme that Jancso stresses throughout the film is the cyclical and futile nature of war. In the opening scene a Red soldier is shot by a White Cossack while his comrade makes an escape back to base, where it is a Bolshevik commander who is now holding captured White troops at his mercy, whom he releases at gunpoint, but not before relieving them of their uniforms. Yet within minutes, White troops have stormed the Red base and the communists are being forced to undergo the same humiliation of fleeing for their lives naked. This continuing shift of power and authority in the blink of an eye continues throughout the course of the film, on an increasingly larger scale; eventually captains are shooting captains and companies killing companies. This dynamic equilibrium and the waste of life becomes maddening to the point of exasperation, yet effectively depicts the pointless carnage and cost of civil war.
7. Jancos is constantly highlighting the randomness of combat. For example, one officer is picked up for execution but is randomly saved when another officer arbitrarily sends him away. Time and time again, little "flukes" occur which either spare lives or result in deaths.
8. Janco's later films became very rigid and almost motionless. But here, like most of his films throughout the 60s and 70s, his camera is always in motion. The film is comprised of huge long takes, his moving camera chartering massive chunks of land. Of all the masters of this style - Ophuls, Tarr, Mizoguchi, and Angelopoulos - no one has ever taken it to the level Jancsó achieved, perhaps because he is determined not to explore the inner motivations of his characters. He is more interested in external motion as meaning.
9. The choreography here is exquisite.
10. The film stresses how victory leads to senseless humiliation, both for the winners (due to an absence of larger military goals) and the losers.
11. In one scene, a brigade removes their jackets and runs hopelessly downhill toward a group of similarly white shirted soldiers. It's a point made by many war films - everyone wears the same uniform, there are no sides – but effective all the same.
12. The film ends with a close up shot of a soldier's face, the audience asked to recognise the sorrow in his eyes. This "final war movie shot" has become a cliché and I don't think it works here. Why not end the film one scene prior when the army charged headlong – with futility – down a hill? Why abandon the detached aesthetic of the rest of the film?
9/10 – New DVD releases of this film add an explanatory title card along with a silly scene in which horses charge toward a camera, before the beginning of the film. Ignore these additions completely.
Worth two viewings.