The Red and the White
Cast
: András Kozák, Tibor Molnár, Krystyna Mikołajewska, József Madaras. (The characters don't have names, or at least not names the viewer remembers.)Jancsó, born in 1921 and still an active movie-maker in the 1990's, began his career in feature films in 1962. He established his style and made several of his most impressive films over the next six years, when artistic restrictions under the Hungarian Communist regime were relatively loose. Jancsó's political intentions never gave the regime cause for concern; this is the only Communist-era film we see in this course that is not in some measure distanced from or critical of the Communist system. However, though Jancsó's work is concerned with good socialist ideas like oppression and revolution, the director is aesthetically committed to a stylized, strange and often difficult expression of his themes, so that most of his films bear no resemblance to propaganda. At his best -- and many people find the films of the 1960s his best -- his films are provocative, irresistibly beautiful, and utterly distinctive. It's easy to recognize a Jancsó film.
The setting: During the years 1918-1921 much of the area of the dissolving Russian Empire was torn by civil war, which ended of course with the consolidation of the new Communist regime, soon to be known as the Soviet Union. The action of this film takes place in 1919, early in the Russian Civil War, in an unspecified backwater near the Volga River where there seems to be hardly any civilian population. On one side there are the Reds, or Communists, fighting for the victory of Lenin's new Soviet government; their local forces have been reinforced by volunteers from released prisoners of war committed to the cause -- Hungarians, in this movie. The other side are the anti-Communist Whites, largely commanded by officers of the former Imperial Russian Army, with an admixture of Cossacks. (The film's dialogue is partly in Russian, partly in Hungarian.) Little more can be said of the course of the war, as seen in this film, than that it seesaws back and forth.
To look for:
1. The movie definitely has an ending, but it doesn't exactly have a beginning: the viewer is dropped straight into the middle of things with hardly any explanation. Nor does the film have a story in the usual sense; even the ending, memorable as it is, doesn't serve to explain what has come before. What, then (if anything), gives the film form? Is there some story-telling principle at work?
2. There's no doubt that this is an "art film". Everything is stylized. You will notice the visual stylization at once: the emphasis on forms and shapes, the vivid use of black-and-white contrasts, the framing of views in gateways and such, the almost choreographed movements of groups, and not least the memorable use of the landscape. Notice, too, the role played by the camera, and how action often occurs just outside the frame, or comes from
behind the camera before we get a look at it. Listen to the soundtrack: the absence of "movie music", the long silences, the hints and premonitions that come from sound. And notice how stylized the acting is -- nearly expressionless, seemingly emotionless -- and how interchangeable and almost impersonal the actors are. Think about these aesthetic choices and how they may relate to the movie's themes (if at all!).3. Jancsó's admirers see his films as informed by a deep passion for justice and hatred of cruelty and violence, both of these expressed in a particularly challenging way. Others find his work, however beautiful, to be cold, alienating, and self-indulgently aesthetic. Any thoughts on this dispute?
4. What do you think this film is meant to convey to the viewer?