The Red and the White / Csillagosok, katonak - by Miklos Jancso (1967)

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The Red and the White / Csillagosok, katonak - by Miklos Jancso (1967)

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The Red and the White / Csillagosok, katonak - by Miklós Jancsó (1967)

In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks' defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side then the other. Captives are executed or sent running naked into the woods. Neither side has a plan, and characters the camera picks out soon die. A White Cossack officer kills a Hungarian and is executed by his own superiors when he tries to rape a milkmaid. At the hospital, White officers order nurses into the woods, dressed in finery, to waltz. A nurse aids the Reds, then they accuse her of treason for following White orders. Red soldiers walk willingly, singing, into an overwhelming force. War seems chaotic and arbitrary.

Miklós Jancsó is commonly perceived, particularly when considering his films made in the 1960s and 1970s, to be a director who is interested in the power dynamics of revolutions and popular uprisings. This may be so, but it is interesting to note that Jancsó has been conspicuous in avoiding the most obvious choices of subject matter for his films. Although he worked on a Soviet-Hungarian co-production that was supposed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917, the resulting feature, Csillagosok, katonák (The Red and the White, 1967), was set two years later in the Russian Civil War. He worked with French co-producers but has never made a film about the French Revolution or its aftermath (unlike that fellow central European portrayer of historical oppression, Andrzej Wajda). And despite having an intense interest in Hungarian history, he never shot a direct representation of the 1956 uprising, possibly the deepest scar in the Magyar historical psyche.

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The Red and the White / Csillagosok, katonak - by Miklos Jancso (1967)

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The Red and the White / Csillagosok, katonak - by Miklos Jancso (1967)

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The Red and the White / Csillagosok, katonak - by Miklos Jancso (1967)

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The Red and the White / Csillagosok, katonak - by Miklos Jancso (1967)

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The Red and the White / Csillagosok, katonak - by Miklos Jancso (1967)

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The Red and the White / Csillagosok, katonak - by Miklos Jancso (1967)

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