Csillagosok, katonák

Miklós Jancsó reduces war to its ignoble essence. Combatants swagger then cower. There are long periods when nothing very much happens, then a life is lost on a whim. Pettiness and officiousness abound. No transcendent causes, no rousing speeches, just ebb and tide, advantage then defeat. There are two sides, they fight. What more do you need to know?

The sweep of the camera is majestic, taking in panoramic vistas filled with struggle and slaughter. Thematically, this is the cinematic embodiment of the final lines from Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach:

And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night

Breathtaking in its conception and philosophical premise, this is an anti-war film that appeals directly to our current war-torn times. A masterpiece.

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.

I was surprised to read that some people feel this film is communist propaganda. It is a very sparse, minimalist evocation of the senselessness of war. The characters treat one another not as humans but as machines. "Stand here." "Go there." I found it compelling and 10 years after seeing this film, I have not forgotten it. This is not soviet realism. This is a stylized account of the dehumanization of war. You cannot indulge in sentimental tears after seeing this. You can only shake your head at man's stupidity and inhumanity.

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.

"The Red and the White" is not a conventional war movie; it moves at a continuous ceremonious pace, like the melody of a slow march. It creates an atmosphere where time seems suspended, and the situation, for all its violence, changeless; one side gains a victory and captures the other's position, then they in turn are captured, and then the balance shifts back again... There is continual motion, also, as the fighters move to and fro through great spacious natural landscapes, shot in sweeping black-and-white Cinemascope; the feeling for space is the most impressive feature of the movie (I'm sorry to say that this effect only comes through well on the large screen). The abstraction is enhanced by a total lack of "ordinary" conversation, which is usually intended to give the audience a sense of knowing the characters better, even if those characters are totally stereotyped. Here, however, there must be only half-a-dozen lines spoken which are not orders. It's hard to explain why all this should not be highly boring; I guess either you are fascinated by it, or you aren't.

As to the charge of being nothing but propaganda: certainly the Whites are presented in a much more unfavorable light than the Reds; but I don't think we Americans can plead innocent to the charge of demonizing the enemy in war movies. The scenes of atrocities committed by the Whites don't break the tone of the movie, since they are shot in the same calm manner as the rest, and there is no overacting. Most of all, there are no explicit lessons stated, a sure sign of propaganda. If you think this movie is propaganda, you've seen nothing yet; try one of the many Communist-backed films that really are heavy-handed and preachy, like, for example, the East German "Fünf Patronenhülsen", set during the Spanish Civil War.