Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy it now, February 22, 2002
Great films like "The Red and the White" stun and overpower us into forgetting every other movie we have seen. They don't cater to our prejudices, they don't flatter us into feeling good about ourselves. They refresh the art's potential and risk losing their audiences through their radical singleness of purpose. They transform experience, in short they make a *difference.*Such works result from one person, usually a director, pursuing an idea with a fascistic insistence that nothing matters more than the film. This is one reason Hollywood so rarely creates great works. Studios with a vested interest in keeping audiences infantile force even the best directors to trim their visions. Hollywood's contempt for the audience makes it impossible for a Miklos Janscó, with his disregard for the rules of smooth construction, indifference to sympathetic characterization, hypnotically absorbing camerawork and pessimism about humanity, to work on the scale his epic conception requires. Staged on a huge canvas, this dramatization of an obscure incident during the Russian Civil War may take place in the Soviet Union, but at one level exists only in the world created by the film itself. Questions of historical or geographic veracity are moot. What matters is the inexorable unwinding of a logic that reveals the casual brutality of human behavior. Yet while the action is grim, what makes the film so powerful is how *beautiful* it is. "The Red and the White" is full of haunting, unforgettable moments, such as a dance in the forest by nurses commandeered to perform for a White Russian officer, or the shots of mounted Red cavalry fleeing a White bi-plane, or the bitter irony of witnessing the execution of a Cossack for an offense far less serious than those we have seen him commit. All of these moments are exquisitely, but quickly staged, the camera gliding by almost indifferently, as if barely interested in them. It is tempting to suggest that the DVD's producers are barely interested in them either, since the transfer is at best acceptable. Nonetheless, I strongly recommend that if you are even remotely interested in the film that you buy the DVD without hesitation. Quite apart from the likelihood that it will quickly go out of print, it is rare indeed to be able to support such singularly epic visions, to prove to anyone interested in listening that audiences can, in fact, respond positively when treated as adults.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, Unconventional, and a Must See, October 4, 2001
The first time I saw "The Red And The White" I lost track of the story. The "problem" with this film is that it is not a drama with a focus on character, simply a collection of sequences in a day of fighting. It was disorienting and I wasn't prepared for it. But I was intrigued by the idea, so a year later later I watched it again.And I'm glad I did. The second viewing is a real eye-opener. This film is simply extrodinary. Everything that disoriented me the first time, became a feature the second time. "The Red And The White" is one of the most fascinating and unconventional films I have ever seen. The story involves the attempts by both Red and White Russian armies to hold a monastery during the Russian Civil war. It is told through a series of seemingly simple tracking shots, long takes that pass gently and slowly over the endless Russian landscape. People pass through these frames, on horseback, running, walking, marching, some floating to their destiny -- some we recognize from previous shots but most we will never see again. Most conventional narrative begins with a point-of-view -- a decription of an event, made relevant by the personal drama of one of the participants. Jansco avoids this almost entirely by using his long takes and graceful tracking shots to capture a geography within which these events occur. How we interpret the actions of those we see is up to us. We aren't participating, simply observing. There is drama, but not in the conventional sense. Instead of the standard scripted conversations, we hear snippets of arguments: nurses who refuse to seperate their patients by army; a Hungarian who refuses to shoot prisoners; a General organising a massacre. If it wasn't for the flawless tracking shots and perfectly timed framing, I would think it was a documentary. In this world the camera seems indifferent to it's subjects, as if simply recording a series of events. The deaths of hundreds don't appear to be any more significant in the frame than the landscape itself; they are just faces who pass us by. Some of them (the soldier who captures the horse; the nurse who is trapped into cooperating, the soldier who leaps to his death in a masterful -- and rare -- moment of editing), we recognise. But we don't know them. None of them have names. While people in the foreground stand waiting for their fate to be decided, a hundred soldiers march across a distant hill, the cavalry charges, gunfire is heard; our attention is distracted by the actions of distant figures. When we look back to the forground the people are gone. We don't know them, we will never see them again. But now Jansco's cold hearted camera has made us a witness. It didn't occur to me until days later, but this is probably what a UN Observer feels like.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vast and breathtaking, February 5, 2004
Like Ingmar Bergman's amazing film "Shame" (produced in the same year as "The Red and the White", 1968), Miklos Jancso's masterpiece evokes the vast and breathtaking panaroma of civil war on a small scale. No crashing, thundering armies here, and no heroes -- just murder on both sides. No plot really, no easy resolution, no ideology -- just the tension and menace of a venomous snake uncoiling in the sun.
At the center of the movie is a group of Hungarian volunteers who have come to Russia to fight for the Bolsheviks, either in 1919 or 1920. Caught in an abandoned monastery by a battalion of the counter-revolutionary, pro-Tsarist White Army, the Hungarians are let loose, in an apparent gesture of mercy, then hunted down while they scramble along the banks of the Volga futilely trying to escape. No mercy is shown to anyone on either side. Some of the Hungarians eventually meet up with a Red Army battalion, which is wiped out in a quixotic, unforgettable mini-battle against the Whites along the river. From beginning to end, Jancso squeezes every last drop of "beauty" out of war. Moreover, his refusal to romanticize the Bolshevik struggle in the Russian Revolution led to this film being banned by the Soviets for years.
Visually, "The Red and the White" is absolute eye candy. Jancso's genius, like Bergman's, is that he recognized the value of silence. As E.E. Cummings put it, "Nothing can surpass the mystery of stillness." There are whole scenes of this movie where the crickets and the grass say more than the people involved. And arguably, the Volga is a major figure in the film, too, the spectacular and flowing symbol of Mother Russia, a snake more lasting than violence and one that will outlive every blood-letting combatant fighting along her banks.
A dreamy and labyrinthine masterpiece. Get it. Five stars.
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