Film:
Csillagosok, Katonak (
The Red and the White)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.
It’s immediately understandable why a film like Miklos Jancso’s
Csillagosok, Katonak (
The Red and the White) is important in film history. It’s also soon apparent that this is a film that will be infuriating to try to describe. Hell, it’s infuriating and frustrating to watch. It’s a bloody, painful version of
Slackers, even if it’s more apt to suggest that
Slackers borrowed from this. There’s not so much a cast of characters here or a plot, but a series of events that occur in the same general area. We get very little time with any specific people, and that time that we do get is generally ended by death.
The film is essentially the short, pointed history of a particular spot overlooking the Volga River during the Russian Revolution. Local Hungarians fight for the communist (Red) side, battling the Tsarist (White) soldiers. Originally intended to be a film about the birth of the Bolshevik state, this is instead an anti-war film that depicts no winners or losers and no heroes in the conflict that erupted. Everyone here is a victim in some sense, even those who are clearly aggressors and morally repellent.
