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Red and the White
 
 
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Red and the White

József Madaras (Actor), Tibor Molnár (Actor), Miklós Jancsó (Director) | Format: VHS Tape
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Miklós Janscó takes the romance out of Russia's Revolutionary struggle in this simultaneously beautiful and brutal look at the civil war following the Bolshevik coup of 1918. Set in a remote region of Central Russia in 1919, The Red and the White follows the shifting balance of power around an abandoned monastery. The anti-Bolshevik White Army has embarked on a campaign to completely eradicate the area of Red Army soldiers, and scores of Hungarians, former Bolshevik prisoners thrust into battle, are caught in the middle. The graceful camerawork and lush, lovely landscape captured in stunning black-and-white widescreen stand in sharp contrast to the abrupt on-the-spot executions and sadistic cat-and-mouse games of the White Army, hiding behind a mask of politeness and civility as they line up their next row of victims. But Janscó's portrayal of the Bolsheviks, while decidedly more heroic, isn't much more sympathetic. The dreamlike poetry of Janscó's cinema and the surreal atmosphere of doom carries the film in place of a strong story or a central set of characters, but there is no mistaking his sympathies for the victims of the struggle--peasants and prisoners and civilians caught between collision of two armies, systematically stripped of their dignity and their lives as the battle rages around them like an evocation of hell on Earth. It's a brave stance for a Hungarian filmmaker working on Soviet soil in 1968 and it makes for a powerful film. --Sean Axmaker

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Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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1.0 out of 5 stars red and the white, Feb 15 2012
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This review is from: Red and the White (DVD)
What a garbage. The quality is under any decent level, and the story is very boring, and stupid. No wonder, that this movie in unknown to everybody..Waste of money. I put my copy into the garbage..
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Vast and breathtaking, Feb 5 2004
By 
Stephen Taylor (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Red and the White (DVD)
Like Ingmar Bergman's amazing film "Shame" (produced in the same year as "The Red and the White", 1968), Miklos Jancsó'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, 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 with the Whites along the river. From beginning to end, Jancsó 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. Jancsó'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, the spectacular and flowing symbol of Mother Russia, a snake more lasting than violence and one that will outlive every blood-letting combatant her banks.

This is a dreamy and labyrinthine masterpiece. Get it. Five stars.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent but you need to know the history to appreciate it!, Nov 17 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Red and the White (DVD)
This movie kept me at the edge of my seat the whole film! The reason being, prior to viewing the movie I had read quite a bit on the Russian Civil War and I knew more or less what to expect (mass executions, no mercy given to either side, etc.). On a whole the film appears historically accurate. However, I found some parts hard to believe. The "cat and mouse" scene strikes me as being highly unlikely because the White Army was advancing on Moscow - they had little time to chase prisoners (which they had just released!) all over the countryside. Not to mention it made no sense to waste ammunition (especially grenades) in that pursuit, because such supplies were very limited and needed to be conserved. Other than that, at an aesthetic level, it is a very beautiful film. The shots are crisp and the rolling countrysides are amazing to take in (even though the film is in black and white!). Also, they did a great job with the dress for both sides - the Whites with their clean officer uniforms and the Reds with their mismatched papakha outfits. Great for the military modeler or wargamer! The film ended somewhat abruptly, but if you think about it, you know how the rest of the story goes, so it ends up being anti-climactic in a way. It does however leave you longing for a Red and the White II, complete with large battle scenes and, of course, more action.
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