The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, 1967) (Patreon)

Often, the great modernists were forced to devise a new formal approach to their art in order to fully accommodate the subject matter they wanted to explore. This isn't a new observation, of course, but I think it reminds us that radical styles can become routinized once they become detached from the historical circumstances that helped produce them in the first place. Which is really just my long-winded way of saying that The Red and the White is a film whose form and content support each other astonishingly well. Where I found the long takes and balletic camerawork of Agnus Dei and (to a much lesser extent) The Round-Up to be a bit forced, here it is absolutely essential.

Jancsó's film is about warfare, of course. But more than this, it's about military discipline as a template for controlling behavior, and the desire to scale that control up from the level of the individual or the platoon to the level of society in general. Going against the wishes of the Soviet producers who commissioned the film, Jancsó depicts the Hungarian communist fighters (reds) and the Tsarist officers (whites) as structurally interchangeable. The Red and the White provides very little on its face to communicate to us who the good guys are. Not only is this evaluation completely dependent on one's sympathies before watching the film. A lot of the time, it's almost impossible to tell them apart.

In other words, The Red and the White is about the fog of war, in particular the mania of constantly attempting, and failing, to establish a lasting order. Jancsó organizes the film a bit like a sonata. Whites are subjugating Reds; reinforcements for the Red ride up on horseback and rout the Whites; the Reds subjugate the Whites; and then the cycle repeats. All of this is staged as a series of troop maneuvers, or as the subjugated army being forced into meaningless actions: lining up, counting off, breaking into groups of four or five, taking off their clothes, putting their clothes back on, etc. 

In this regard The Red and the White demonstrates the disciplinary nature of power, a tendency that Foucault identified across various moments in history and within a multitude of social institutions. Forcing prisoners at gunpoint to assume useless positions, or to divide into vague groups of one sort or another, is the way that the dominating army makes its control visible, and is an attempt to break down and rebuild these enemies as "docile bodies." (Those deemed beyond repair are simply shot.) The presumptive cure for the unruly, unpredictable mob, then, is mass geometry.

Jancsó may have angered the Soviets with his seesawing depiction of power dynamics, and the film was indeed censored there. But more than this, The Red and the White refuses to valorize the mass -- the Marxist subject of history. Adopting a theoretical approach much more in keeping with the Western Marxism of Gramsci or the Frankfurt School, Jancsó's film engages in a dialectic between the individual and the group. Single soldiers are frequently pulled from the collective -- a mid-rank officer, or a fleeing prisoner -- and allowed to assume some kind of singular (if typical) identity. However, The Red and the White refuses to pander to the liberal sentiments of Hollywood war films. When a person is individualized, it's only for a moment, and in most cases just prior to his death. (This aspect of Jancsó's method seems to have influenced Terrence Malick, especially in The Thin Red Line.)

Béla Tarr has long been a champion of his countryman Jancsó, and although Tarr's use of long takes is very distinct from Jancsó's, one can readily see a relationship between The Red and the White and Werckmeister Harmonies. Both films are about the dissolution of social bonds, which in turn leads to an unleashing of violence that had previously been suppressed. Jancsó, of course, doesn't show us a "before;" we are already in a state of war. But in both cases, leaders and groups struggle to establish some new regime of meaning. Hyper-control is prescribed as the antidote for irrationality.

And this is why Jancsó's roving camera is so crucial here. It works both with and against the militarized choreography, sometimes helping to give it shape, and other times wafting past it, moving on to something else. Tarr's slow cinema is a bit more deterministic, working in tandem with the grim procession of events his films depict. But Jancsó is more optimistic, more of an anarchist. His camera provides a perspective separate from power, even if it isn't entirely outside of it. It suggests that certain elements, like the landscape, will never be subject to human control. But more than this, The Red and the White's cinematography materializes the struggle necessary to subjugate human beings, as it momentarily succeeds and as it continually fails. It depicts a stalled dialectic, one that can only be sublated by a vision of society beyond tribal violence.