Stepping Back to Examine the "Game of War"

Miklos Jancso, The Red and the White (1968)

Jancso’s The Red and the White (1968) is a difficult film, particularly for audiences accustomed to traditional narrative form and film editing that focuses on the psychology of characters. I found myself doing exactly what Horton contends that Jancso wants his audiences to forget about – becoming perplexed by the realization that I did not grasp the historical period of the film in a way that made it easy for me to understand the nature behind the fighting/conflict; in essence, to understand the “why?” of the actions unfolding before me. Though for the most part I could accurately distinguish between the Whites and the Reds, armed with the knowledge that Hungarians were fighting with the Reds for communism against the Whites, the anti-revolutionary forces, making this distinction did not make much of a difference. This may have been because the film was not edited with the intention of establishing identification or bias for one side or the other.

The Red and the White focuses on both sides and does not condemn either side or the “rules” they arbitrarily employ. A better understanding of this can be gained by analyzing how each side deals with internal conflict. In one scene, which we have somewhat discussed in class, a White soldier forces a Hungarian civilian to undress. Presumably he is about to sexually abuse or rape her, when he is shot on the spot for abusing the civilian population. Clearly, this establishes that there are some rules in war and that abuse of the civilian population somehow breaks them, though in an earlier sequence and in sequences throughout the rest of the film, games are frequently played with men’s lives. Reds are forced to undress and to run away so that they may be hunted, as if for sport, by the Whites. Likewise, there is a sense of propriety governing the actions of the Reds. In one scene, a Red officer is about to shoot a group of his fellow comrades for running away from the Whites, when another from within states, “You have no right to shoot them. We all ran.” This statement suggests that a few cannot be blamed for the actions of the masses, and that the actions of a few reflect those of the whole Red army. This mode of thinking may be the same employed by the whites when they shoot the officer sexually assaulting the Red woman; if one soldier commits the crime, the ideology of the entire group is jeopardized. Even this attempt to make sense of specific killings, however, does not lead to an end of questioning. The motives for other actions seem to be totally absurd, or at best, unclear in their wider effect upon the playing out of the broader conflict between Red and White forces.

It is intriguing to continue to think about the film in terms of modernism and formalism. In terms of camera movement as well as the logic behind the fighting, there is a formalist aesthetic. The camera consistently focuses on the landscape, relying on it to comment on or accentuate the action of the troops. Our attention is directly drawn to the location. Long takes are used so that groups of soldiers rather than individuals are viewed throughout most of the film; we cannot become emotionally involved or begin to formulate plots and sub plots for ourselves during viewing. This seems to be very important to Jancso. It is also something that must be consciously done, since a natural instinct would be to focus on individual reactions and allow them to represent opinions and reactions of the masses. The actions characters employ also have specific formulas. To cite an example that seemed to baffle most of us, the scene where the nurses were taken into the woods, made to change into formal gowns and to waltz with one another, was clearly pre-planned. However, the motivation is unclear. Why is this scene in the film and why is it considered to be a form of bizarre humiliation as Horton suggests? I am still baffled by this scene but I will agree that it is quite haunting. Perhaps it has something to do with isolation and beauty in the midst of this war. The nurses do not take sides, at least not until threatened and forced by Whites to tell who the Red soldiers are. Considering this, perhaps they represent the calm of the end to conflict, yet they are cut off/ isolated from the politics of the nature of this conflict, representing something unattainable that we are given a glimpse of in the isolated space of the woods. Perhaps I am reading too far into the sequence, but perhaps that is also Jancso’s point, that attempting to establish any definitive understanding of either both or even those on neither side, is futile.

As far as being a modernist work, I certainly never forgot that what I was viewing was a film. I felt alienated from the action in my inability to draw more specifically from knowledge of Hungarian history. The final scenes framed the film as an epic about war in general and about class struggle and taking action to stand against oppression – about being revolutionary in general, though it was set in the specific year 1919. In its conclusion, the film seems to affirm that attempts to eradicate class and the struggles surrounding it are as futile as attempts to end war. War and killing become accepted and normalized as if they fit into a larger formula in ways that are necessary, but unable to be totally understood. Perhaps the same statement is being made about the class system when the Red soldiers march to their deaths singing the International. In the final scene, a (presumably Red and ultimately victorious?) soldier stands saluting with his weapon – the struggle continues; it is part of a much larger game. I cannot seem to come to terms with this final image; it is this image that will haunt me every time I think about this film.