RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

ironhorse_iv Characterized by visual stylization, elegantly choreographed shots, long takes, historical rural settings, and a lack of psychoanalyzing. The Red and the White is a very interesting well-made movie from director Miklós Jancsó. Set during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922), the Russian-Hungarian film, was originally commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia in which the Bolsheviks aggressively seized authority. However, the director chose to set the action two years later in 1919 to show the Communist "Reds" Army in a firefight with the Tsarist "Whites" Army over the control of some hills near the Volga River. While, the movie remains one of the director's most widely seen and admired films; this movie is very hard to follow. The reasons for this, is because the film lacks a central character. Instead, we follow, a number of nameless characters from both sides on their quest to survive the battle. There is one character played by Andra Kovak who kinda ties the whole film together, appearing in the first scene and the last, however, he was never really assuming a central role. Supporters of the film point out that the director aim was to prevent the audience from feeling emotionally identify with any one side. He didn't want anybody to seem like they were winning in the battle of ideologies. Like a chaotic stalemate game of chess. Both sides are just killing each other without any strong offensive. We see, both forces try to take control of an area, only to find himself or herself, having temporary peace, before being execution, a minute later, by the next invading force. While, the movie doesn't show blood. The film hardly has any scenes, where somebody wasn't shooting at somebody. Indeed, the movie had no rest point, from the violence. I guess, it's supposed to tell, the audience. That no matter, how much control, you think you have, there is always, somebody gearing up to take your place. While, the repetitive action makes it a hard sit. It was done on purpose, to show the meaningless nature of war. It's one of the most violent movies, I have ever saw, pre-1970s. The movie also really surprised me on how much nudity, it had for a pre-1970s film. None of it was portray to be sexy. Those sexual abuse scenes were made to be disturbing and degrading. It really haunting imagery on the horrors of war. What I like about the film is while, the list of characters is ever, so changing, the landscape barely moves. It's always set around the beautiful surroundings of the Volga River. You really get to see the large scale of the battle. I also like how the film rejects, the war film convention and clichés. For example, key moments of action, such as the deaths of certain characters are sometimes shot with a long lens from a distance rather than in close-up, making it unclear what has happened or who it has happened to. It's give the movie a feel of mystery. Not everything needed to be explain. The only problem with it, is that it's hard to tell the different between the 'white' army compare to the 'red' army. There were times, where I was often confused, on what army, I was, now watching. It didn't help that the director's choice to use black and white, made everybody look the same. I guess, the choice was made to turn it b/w to serve a deeper viewer's immersion in the historical settling, or to show, that despite your political colors, everybody in war is a shade of grey. The artistic advantage of black and white did help heightens the impact of the film's violence. I love the fact, that the film used a lot of long take unedited movie footage. Since the film has barely any cuts, it transcribes the screen time as if it's real time. While, this movie might seem lawlessness, it does have one strong message show by the actions of a few characters, throughout the piece, such as the one refuses to aim properly during an execution, the one who stops the rape of a peasant woman and one stops the execution of their own soldiers for "cowardice". The message: "a man can fight and still be human." A very strong message, indeed. While, the film might look upon as communist propaganda to the untrained eye. It's barely was. While, yes, Whites are presented in a much more unfavorable light than the Reds. The movie hardly felt heavy-handed political preachy. During the Cold War, Jancsó was often criticized for being formalist, nationalist and generally against the Socialist ideology. A frequent theme of his films is the abuse of power. His works are often allegorical commentaries on Hungary under Communism and the Soviet occupation. It was no surprise, that the film was not well received in the Soviet Union. It was first re-edited to put a more heroic spin on the war for its premiere and then banned, afterwards. However, in Hungary and the Western world, it was more favorably received. The film was even listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but sadly, the festival was canceled due to the events of May 1968 in France. Overall: This is an Astounding piece, might be a bit hard to watch to some viewers, but if you get the chance to. Try watching it. It might change, your opinion on war.

chaos-rampant 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.

Polaris_DiB 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

sylvian 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.