Taking as its subject an obscure Russian battle in 1919 for the land between an abandoned monastery and a river, this is a film of ceaseless ebb and flow.
It is famously difficult on first view to completely follow the action. The Reds of the title are the Bolsheviks, the Whites the Tsarists, yet aside from the Whites’ having better uniforms, there is little to tell between them, and though certain characters impress themselves on our minds, they are soon move on, or are shot. This deliberate confusion is part of the intent of course; though this may be a film set in war, it follows none of the conventions of such films. It is not really important that we know their characters or causes. Orders are unexplained, there are no larger goals to lend a sense of purpose to the actions taken, and few characters stay long enough for us to empathise with them. Command passes though a succession of people in the film as in a game of tag; soldiers impose order for a brief while on a situation before another relieves them of command, through capture, death or seizing a situation. Speech in the film occurs almost entirely in the form of commands, and here again we are in constant motion: ‘Go away!, Stay!, Go back! Come here!’. It is not a bloody film; death is a random, abrupt punctuation, nothing more. It is a film too of ritualisic nakedness; time and again characters are stripped before escape, ordeal or death.
There are moments also of surreal beauty (on one level, the elegant, luminous black and white photography stands in contrast to the subject throughout), no more so than when the nurses are rounded up and marched to the middle of a birch wood, there to waltz for the watching soldiers. There is relief too that they haven’t been abused as we half-expected they would.
Action in the film repeatedly returns to the river. A natural feature so important to the soldiers, it is entirely indifferent to them and their futile ebb and flow, knowing they will soon all be gone.
A powerful anti-war film filmed in widescreen black and white grandeur. Staged on a huge canvas, this dramatization of an obscure incident during the Russian Civil War leaves us with profound impression of war as both chaotic and arbitrary. Miklos Jancso is arguably the key Hungarian film maker of the last 50 years and yet also one of the most criminally neglected. The Red & The White is a masterpiece that through its stylistic virtuosity, ritualistic power and sheer beauty portrays the utter futility of war.
Set during the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Jansco’s remarkable film is both a classic of the cinema and one of the most powerful war films ever made. In the c... more >
Set during the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Jansco’s remarkable film is both a classic of the cinema and one of the most powerful war films ever made. In the crushing Civil War which happened after the revolution, Hungarian volunteers supported the Red revolution is, who were being hunted by the White government forces order to destroy them. The film has immense dramatic force, and it's hardly surprising that the Russian authorities banned it from being shown anywhere in the Soviet Union. < less
My Way Home (Jancso, 1965)
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The Red And The White
