The Red and the White

1919, on the Volga. The civil war is going on. The Reds take a monastery, then the Whites come, then it changes hands again. The same thing happens every time: prisoners are lined up in a courtyard, made to strip, some released, some shot. The characters' names are barely spoken and most of them die a few minutes later. A group of nurses works in the forest and they are drawn into the same machinery. The camera watches from a distance and takes nobody's side. Miklos Jancso directs. Jozsef Madaras, Tibor Molnar, Andras Kozak and Krystyna Mikolajewska are in the cast. It is a Hungarian and Soviet co-production. The film was commissioned as a co-production for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Jancso showed both sides inside the same cruelty; for release in the Soviet Union the film was re-edited, and then banned. The narrative moves in long single takes; the camera is constantly travelling and there are very few cuts. The matter it treats is the impersonality of power; whoever is holding the gun is in the right, and the roles keep changing. The film creates no hero and gives the viewer nobody to hold on to. The scenes happen on a wide plain and the people stand small inside the landscape. The violence is bare and unadorned; the deaths are sudden and unexplained. The ending closes on a company marching. Its limit is access; the narrative is cold, there is almost no character, and the plot is hard to follow. Who it is for: viewers who like formal cinema and anti war narratives. Who it is not for: it is cold, impersonal, and the ending bitter.