Sterne an der Mütze

Some opinions reproaching this film with 'communist propaganda' strike me as creepily hilarious. Talk about blind determination and immutability in perception - ironically, the very thing that the movie is about after all. I would easily call 'propaganda' every other soviet or east-European war movie from the 1945-1985 period, if you like. Also, every other Hollywood movie that involves a battle scene and The Flag. But surely not this one. How many films show antagonistic parts performing the same tortuous movements of cruelty and murder, in what seems to be a state of mass hypnosis long beyond reason and ethical justification? This film must be one of the most unformulaic and most effective anti-war (i.e. anti-ideological) films ever, along with Elem Klimov's Come and See. The fact that both could be made in the Soviet Union is nothing short of transcendental.

This is the greatest war movie I've ever seen. The two sides are nearly indistinguishable. The tide of advantage goes back and forth, back and forth throughout the movie. Fortunes changes without notice. And at the end, the only thing left to do is raise the sword, salute the cause, and charge straight into death. War is pointless and savage, from first to last. Beautiful filmmaking.

War--chaotic, insane, inhumane, useless, and... calmly graceful? We of the Hollywood diet like our plates full with spastic editing, grippingly colorful images, and fast approach, but none moreso than with war movies, with Tom Hanks surrounded with shrapnel suddenly going surreal on us, or Martin Sheen slowly falling into mental chaos whether in the midst of battle or trapped in a room away from it. What we are not used to are long, slowly moving traffic shots as pretty much faceless groups of soldiers alternatively gain and lose ground, each performing their own atrocities and each making themselves no better than the others, but each the subject of a listless and uncaring camera that seems just as ready to focus on a blade of grass calmly waving in the wind as a troupe of men about to be slaughtered.

To add to this effect is the fact that half the time, the viewer hardly begins to establish his or herself with a character before the character is removed from the story. It definitely works to show the arbitrariness of war... it might not work so well with ingratiating the audience with the movie. With no characters to care for, well... sometimes it's hard to care so much.

But otherwise it's brilliant, magnificent, and... sort of epic, in a contained and concise way. What I want to know is how they pulled off the sound. The sound is always very spot on to the activities going on, but are so perfect, even in long shots, that it makes a complete mystery of where they possibly could have put the mic. Fascinating, in case the rest of the movie isn't.

--PolarisDiB

In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks' defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side then the other.

Rather than shooting a hagiographic account of the birth of Soviet Communism, Jancsó produced a profoundly anti-heroic film that depicts the senseless brutality of the Russian Civil War specifically and all armed combat in general. There are no heroes here, just death after death for seemingly no reason.

To no one's surprise, the film was not well received in the Soviet Union, 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 favorably received and had a theatrical release in many countries. It remains one of Jancsó's most widely seen and admired films, although audiences often find it exceedingly difficult to follow because there really is no plot or protagonist.

Besides the clear anti-war message, the film also has some incredible cinematography, with Tamás Somló's camera moving in and out of the action in very fluid motions. It seems very much ahead of its time and calls to mind the much later work of Seamus McGarvey in "Atonement" (2007).

As a muted treatment of the ephemeral moral horrors of war, this is good and will appeal to an audience tired of Spielberg - or the equally histrionic depictions of carnage of Russian war films.

Something else appears to me greatly, something of specific nature here about visual (cinematic) presentation of a story. And that is because it seems like a smart , elegant solution to the problem of portraying what I call disembodied consciousness; keeping the viewer consistently tethered to the point-of-view of a character is hard enough for most filmmakers, but to break free of that and send us scudding through the air of the story? While keeping us engaged in story? Few manage, very few.

It is this, I believe, that viewers appreciate when they praise the 'hypnotic' qualities of someone like Tarkovsky, this ability to start 'in character' and slowly expand ourselves to hover out of self to where multiple visions are possible - usually the world of story and sense, plus the mechanisms transmuting the world into a story. If you are positioned the right way as a viewer, this can achieve a feeling of ecstacy.

And this guy is using Tarkovsky's camera to excellent effect, and knows just how to position the viewer. What does this mean?

His first job is to remove hard storytelling limits. Which war this is. Who is killing who. Who to be rooting for. What is the cause that justifies all this, if any. We can surmise, but staying within clean boundaries is not the focus. In place of that, he supplies a more fluid notion of hyperreality - things happen presumably as they would if you were there, explanations are absent, but the consequences seem real. You may not know just who is out to kill you, but you know someone is. This is a world with angry blood coursing through its veins.

Now for the actual, ecstatic expansion of narrative limits. It is simply superb the way he does it, and still seems novel and powerful to me.

The normal viewing mode is that already within the first couple of minutes of a film, we scan the frame for a protagonist to latch onto, trusting he will be our assigned avatar in the world of the film. The filmmaker provides expressive enough faces that we implicitly recognize as such, that we follow for just the right amount of 'real' time to invest into, then suddenly they are removed from the world, maybe to resurface later. Characters are flippantly ordered shot, make narrow escapes, are summarily discovered again, and so on.

And a third expansion is of the way we see and navigate this world, by having the camera trace circles around the story and float in and out of corridors in the air, disembodied from any character.

Though still in the experimental stage, this is great work.

You have bloodshed as your base layer, what every other war film works from.

You have this force in man, in the gears of the universe, that moves him to kill which there is no rhyme to, beyond the perpetuating of motion.

And you have that motion so powerful, we see that in the frantic running of prisoners to escape the firing squad, it enters the human world and mindlessly tears anchors from the ground, and sends our eye skidding to the next turn of the world having stable form again and tears at it, and with each groundless , spinning turn of this ballet, we float farther and farther away to where it is all an abstract blueprint.

Fluid hyperreality, narrative, and eye - each one placing you a step further from reasoning with this, but deeper in the abstract experience of not just life, of cosmic dimensions in the transitory dance of everything coming into being and going again.

Humans are vanished and reinstated and vanish again, with death as flippantly decided as someone dismounting a horse, as though it's all a part of some inscrutable game to the amusement of capricious gods.

Better yet, this is samsara; the cycle of suffering and defilements, causing eternal transmigration to no purpose.