Fog of War

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.

Socialism Superstar

Film: Meg Ker a Nep (Red Psalm)
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

Today started out plagued by technical difficulties. I wanted to watch this on the big flatscreen in my living room today. Oh, the file worked just fine, but for some reason, the subtitles didn’t transfer over. This meant that once again I was relegated to the laptop. It’s not a problem; I’m just easily frustrated when my technology works less well than I had hoped. Regardless, Meg Ker a Nep (Red Psalm) is an unusual film. It’s easy to be impressed by it (the whole run time consists of a mere 27 shots), but just as easy to be bored by it.

The biggest issue with a filme like Meg Ker a Nep is that there is no real plot to follow. Oh, there’s a story here—there’s narrative, but there isn’t really someone or something we can latch onto to follow from start to finish. Instead, this film is about a failed workers’ revolt in Hungary. It’s not really about a specific revolt, working more as a pastiche of ideas and concepts. Characters aren’t important here. What’s important is not the story of a specific person, but the story itself.