The Red and the White (film)

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The Red and the White is a 1967 film directed by Miklós Jancsó and dealing with the Russian Civil War. The original Hungarian title, Csillagosok, katonák, can be translated as "Stars on their Caps" (literally 'starry soldiers'), which, as with a number of Jancsó film titles, is a quote from a song.

The film, a Russian-Hungarian coproduction, was original commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia in which the Bolsheviks took power. However, Jancsó chose to set the action two years later in 1919 and showed Hungarian irregulars supporting the Communist "Reds" in fighting the Tsarist "Whites" as the two sides battled for control in the hills overlooking the Volga river. As well as deviating on the required setting, Jancsó also chose to use a radically different approach to the film than that expected.^{[citation needed]} Rather than shooting a hagiographic account of the birth of Communism, Jancsó produced a profoundly anti-heroic film that depicts the sensless brutality of of the Russian Civil War specifically and all armed combat in general.

As a result, the film was not well received in Russia, where it was first re-edited to put a more heroic spin on the war for its premiere and then banned. However, in Hungary and the West it was favourably received and it had a theatrical release in many countries (opening in the United States on 20 September 1968). It remains one of Jancsó's most widely seen and admired films, although audiences often find it exceedingly difficult to follow.

The film's difficulty stems from its lack of central characters and defiant rejection of war film conventions: for example, key moments of action, such as the deaths of certain characters are sometimes shot with a long lens from a distance rather than in close-up, making it unclear what has happened or who it has happened to. Supporters of the film point out that the hard-to-follow plot merely reflects the confused and meaningless nature of war itself and that Jancsó's aim is to prevent us from emotionally identifying from any one side in the battle of ideologies. For this reason, detractors (and even supporters) often find the film to be "cold" and "mechanical". However, the film's defenders contrast this approach with more conventional anti-war films, which often paradoxically adopt the same visual language and narrative conventions as heroic war films.^{[citation needed]}

More universally appreciated, however, is the film's dramatic use of black-and-white Cinemascope, with stylized compositions and elegant camera movements, shot by cinematographer Tamás Somló. In this The Red and the White looks forward to later Jancsó films such as Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1971) in which the visual language developed by dramatically increasing the shot length, using even more "balletic" camera movements and further stylizing the visual composition to the point of overt symbolism.