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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
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Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (13) | Top Critics (4) | Fresh (12) | Rotten (1)
Jancsó organizes the swarming and scattered fighters with a stupendous, almost unnoticed virtuosity, delineating the chaotic action in precise, flowing long takes.
If you've never encountered Jancso's work, you shouldn't miss this.
Jancso concentrates his message on the philosophical problem of life and death. Unknown and nameless men enter history in a given moment and after some time they step out of the scene with their death.
The effect is a precise ambivalence: a celebration of revolutionary heroism, and an icily detached recognition that both sides in a war can be mirror images of each other.
This is ostensibly a tribute to the Hungarian volunteers who fought with the Red Army against the pro-Tsarist Whites. But, Miklos Jancso clearly has an ironic contemporary agenda.
The Red and the White is quintessential Jancso. Like most of his best known films, it is a study of war on its meanest and most squalid level.
One of the few truly anti-war pictures
It icily captures the gloomy mood of battle, painting each side in the same dismal color.
...frustratingly esoteric and inaccessible.
Bloody and uncompromising, but Janscó makes no value judgemanets and approtions no blame to either side.
Jancso's formal stunner, although concerned with a specific time in Hungarian history, is also a universal story about war, the human patterns of power and submission, and the arbitrary laws of the universe.
A war film unlike any other.
it's true the film has no real plot or central characters-- and that's exactly the point. it's a series of skirmishes between the red (soviet) and the white (tsarists), plus assorted hungarian volunteers, immediately following the russian revolution. the film makes no judgement between the two sides, leading it to be banned by the soviets, who had funded it. one great statement about the chaos and futility of war
Super Reviewer
While exquisitely filmed, "The Red and the White" lacks any kind of traditional story, much less a beginning and an end to its tale. In fact, the movie consists of a series of skirmishes between the well-outfitted and armed White armies and the remnants of the Red armies during the Russian Civil War in 1919. A good deal of this involves the hunting and executing of military prisoners, first sorting them into Russians and foreigners, before ordering them to take off their shirts which can either be considered a symbol of dehumanization or a sign that beneath a uniform, we are all the same. Like volunteers and insurgents in the Spanish Civil War and the current Gulf Wars, right or wrong, they see a struggle that transcends simple nationality. In this case, it is Hungarian soldiers who have traveled to Russia to aid the Red armies, hoping that their actions will help the revolution which in return will spur change in their own country. They might be glad to know their actions will indeed have an effect on the future of their country, if not exactly what they intended. Not only did Hungary not get the brand of socialism they wanted for it, but there were also the Soviet tanks of 1956.
The division bell is ringing too fast for the weak and meek.Reds,Whites,colors are futile.It's the physical and mental torture that fastens your seat.Whatever occurred in historical manners,this vice-versa irony is entrancing and utterly disturbing,since cruelty isn't measured in uniforms and consequences.
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