I just got home from the Pacific Film Archive, where I caught a screening of Miklós Jancsó’s decidedly strange war film,The Red and the White. This was part of the PFA’s current series, The Long View: A Celebration of Widescreen.
I’m not sure what to make of this Hungarian Russian Civil War drama–if drama is the correct word. Jancsó never gives you the chance to really get to know any of the characters (none of which have names). He occasionally lets you develop a slight attachment to one or the other, but never for long.
The picture doesn’t concern itself much with battles–the few it has are few and small (possibly for budgetary reasons). It’s mostly about soldiers mopping up enemy survivors, taking them prisoner, then killing them, often by making them run and shooting them in the back. Although Jancsó shows White Russians (Czarist counter-revolutionaries) reluctant to commit atrocities, and Reds with no such qualms, the general tone of the film is decidedly Red. That was probably unavoidable for a film made in Hungary in 1967; most of the people probably hated Russian Communists, but they couldn’t openly put that sentiment into a movie.
Yet nationalism raises its head in an interesting way. Most of the Red soldiers are Hungarian volunteers, while the Whites are all Russians. I’m no expert on the Russian Civil War, but I don’t believe that’s any more realistic than Hollywood war films like Mission to Burma, Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Great Escape, that place American soldiers in parts of World War II where we didn’t have a presence.
The Red and the White contains many startling and effective scenes: Whites giving their prisoners a 15-minute head-start, without telling them there’s a dead-end ahead. Soldiers looking up from playing dead behind a hospital. A small Red regiment singing The Internationale before marching into certain death. But the scenes never quite come together as a whole.
Cinematographer Tamás Somló shot The Red and the White in black and white, which tends to make violence less visually gruesome but more emotionally horrifying. It was the right choice.
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