Rouges et blancs

This is a great, great film. It's very unusual and not geared to all tastes. It follows differing groups of soldiers as they fight each other and take prisoners, or evade capture, or hide in villages. There is no plot. You simply follow one group of soldiers until something happens and you follow another group. You feel sympathy for the soldiers; until they commit a heinous act, and you hate them. It's really about the arbitrarious of war and how it reduces men to animals. Not for the faint of heart, it is nonetheless the best antiwar movie I've seen.

"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.

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.

Sure it's boring! Sure it's confusing! Sure it's stupid! ...But that's what war is all about, isn't it? Well...boring, that is if you have the chance to live long enough...

This film is a piece of art. See how the camera moves, floats, count the shots (about 300, compared to a 600-800 norm), Admire the long takes, try to guess who's going to live through the nonsense of this war...

Who didn't understand that the only thing that this film is promoting is peace and not war nor communism? And, excuse me, but...where did you see the propaganda exactly?

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.