Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

This 1967 feature was one of the first by Hungarian filmmaker Miklos Jancso to have some impact in the U.S., and the stylistic virtuosity, ritualistic power, and sheer beauty of his work are already fully apparent. In this black-and-white pageant, set during the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the reds are the revolutionaries and the whites are the government forces ordered to crush them. Working in elaborately choreographed long takes with often spectacular vistas, Jancso invites us to study the mechanisms of power almost abstractly, with a cold eroticism that may suggest some of the subsequent work of Stanley Kubrick. If you've never encountered Jancso's work, you shouldn't miss this. He may well be the key Hungarian filmmaker of the sound era, and certain later figures such as Bela Tarr would be inconceivable without him.


KINOEYE by Andrew James Horton

Csillagosok, katonák is the most visually mathematical and perhaps the coldest of the three (Jancsó films set in 1919). It is also the most famous of them. The action takes place in Ukraine on the frontline of the Russian Civil War, where the Tsarist "Whites" and battling the Bolshevik "Reds," the latter assisted by international irregulars, including Hungarians. There is little for the casual viewer to distinguish the two sides (although the Whites generally have less shabby uniforms).

The first focus of attention is around an abandoned monastery which a Red insurgent (András Kozák) escapes to following a riverside skirmish. The Reds have just captured the building, and they strip White prisoners of their uniforms and then release them topless. The Whites then retake the building and the Tsarist officers play cruel games with the lives of the men they capture, but some are able to get away. Following these men, the focus then switches to a hospital by a river, which the Whites take over in their hunt for escapees. The Whites are again brutal to Reds they capture, but also amongst themselves (a White caught sexually assaulting a woman is shot on the spot) and to the nurses.

In fact, the nurses are subjected to one of the most bizarre forms of humiliation in any Jancsó film. They are rounded up from the hospital - presumably fearing, as the viewer does, that they will be shot or raped - and taken into a forest, where they are forced to put on elegant clothes and dance with each other to waltzes while the officers watch on. The nurses are then allowed to return to the hospital unharmed.

The hospital is then recaptured by Reds, who shoot Whites who will not switch side and a nurse who helped the Whites find enemies in the encampment. The Hungarian irregulars are rounded up into a platoon, which shortly after leaving is surrounded by Whites and marches to its death in one of the most visually striking sections of the film. The final image, equally memorable, is a (rare) close-up of András Kozák, who has arrived too late with his troops to save his comrades, holding a sword up in front of his face in memory of the dead.

Jancsó's approach in depicting war in Csillagosok, katonák can be outlined in the following scheme, which is a summary of one adopted by Matt Johnson:

• war as predetermined ritual in which characters accept their fate;
• a lack of "rules of the game";
• an inversion of war film conventions (important actions - particularly those leading to reversals of power - occurring off-screen, birdsong on the sound track);
• deliberate confusion as to who is on whose side to the extent that one wonders if sides even matter;
• characters have their own internal logic for their actions, but we are not privy to it (ie a lack of psychologising)
• denial of the individual in a mass process (as there are no recognisable characters);
• victory leading to senseless humiliation (due to an absence of larger military goals);
• denial of the meaningfulness of victory.

Johnson considers Csillagosok, katonák to be an absurdist comedy (although he admits it is "humourless") and concludes, drawing on observations by Graham Petrie, that the film is a more powerful anti-war statement than most films in the genre (which mimic the stylistic and narrative conventions of heroic war films) precisely because of the factors that lead some people to find the film difficult - its dehumanised feel and confusing nature.


Ozu's World by Dennis Schwartz

Set in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, in 1919, it tells of the brutal Civil War that went on from 1918 until 1922. The Hungarian Communists, among many foreign contingents, come to the aid of the Bolsheviks (the Reds) to defeat the Czarists (the Whites), the counter-revolutionists. The endless battles take place in the hills along the Volga in Central Russia and in a field where an abandoned monastery is converted into a garrison headquarters and a hospital.

It looks like Miklós Jancsó's other war story, The Round-Up, as it emphasizes the same theme of the futility of war, its impersonality and how both sides do the same kind of insane killing to the point you can't tell one side from the other. Prisoners are captured, stripped, and then shot as they are told they can escape. A buxom peasant girl is about to be raped by a Cossack officer when his superior swoops in and executes him for his misconduct. A nurse, serving both sides by following her medical oath, is accused by the Whites of abetting the Reds, but who is shot by the Reds when they take over the hospital. Jancsó makes his point: war is not the best solution in political matters.

The noted filmmaker is most interested in telling how the powers work in such hardened ways; the combatants' personal identities are left unclear on purpose, as they are shown to have worth only for political purposes. The black-and-white film is filled with much movement and sweeping tracking shots but little dialogue, as it keeps things moving along at a fast clip by showing the never ending cycle of violence. It icily captures the gloomy mood of battle, painting each side in the same dismal color.

Grade: A


Movie Martyr by Jeremy Heilman ****

Set during the Russian Civil War of 1918, Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó’s The Red and the White is a war film unlike any other. With graceful uninterrupted tracking shots that feel as if they’ve been lifted from a Tarkovsky film, the movie lulls its viewers into a dreamlike state, despite the carnal strife that they’re being made to watch. The vast expanses highlighted by Jancsó’s black and white ‘Scope compositions dwarf the film’s cast to the extent that they become mere dots in an empty landscape. Though the film’s title seems to suggest profound differences between the two sides, from this distant perspective they lose all personality and become totally interchangeable. As the film progresses and the tide of battle shifts the upper hand back and forth repeatedly, we find ourselves withdrawing from the notion that either side’s possession of the upper hand matters to us. Jancsó has created here a war movie that not only fails to turn us onto the violence presented (which is itself bloodlessly stylized), but one that fails to give us anyone or any cause to root for. As a result, the entire enterprise seems utterly futile, and the reasons behind success or failure feel utterly arbitrary and random. Both sides are presented as being equally damnable and pitiable for being there in the first place. It’s the cowards that seem to glean the most sympathy, if only because they want no part in the entire sick spectacle. Though this sort of ideology might be a bit suspect and demeaning toward the politics behind the actual Russian Civil War, the effect is potent.

Since the film seems to be so resolutely without a strong point of view other than “all war is bad,” (though what other perspective might a sane person take?) Jancsó’s formalist tendencies are practically The Red and the White’s entire reason for being. What becomes so surprising, then, is that they’re strong enough to make the film worthwhile. Complicated action scenes unfold without any editorial commentary, and mass armies march upon each other in real time without any change in the camera’s location. Several shots are an amazing technical and artistic accomplishment. Jancsó starts out by color coding the opposing armies via their uniforms (though since the film is black and white they all look relatively similar anyhow), but as the tolls of the war wears down on their physical appearance, they blend together into an indistinguishable mess, and any notion that they are markedly different evaporates. At the film’s end, the mass suffering and indignity has changed absolutely nothing. The blank countryside that the soldiers fight on continues to mock the vain efforts of the people that populate it, but they still continue to press onward as if it had a point.