Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Red and the White
1967 · Miklós Jancsó · The Red and the White on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch a man walk away with nowhere to hide. (camera)
The widescreen frame holds pale field running out to open sky, proving there is no wall, ditch, or treeline close enough to matter.
Payoff: The emptiness of the ground is doing the same work fear usually does in a war film. In the reading: espace quelconque. The reading calls this an any-space-whatever: a field emptied of shelter, a space of bare exposure.
Watch officers make prisoners dance in a birch grove. (staging)
Nurses are put into dresses and made to waltz under armed supervision, violence conducted as etiquette rather than as an obvious act of force.
Payoff: Two people turning in three-four time under a rifle is the whole power arrangement, with nobody explaining it. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that is the relation itself, not a symbol standing for it.
Watch for the rare cut land exactly when power changes. (cutting)
Farkas builds the film from an unusually small number of long takes, so the cut becomes a major event placed right at a change of occupying force.
Payoff: The edit itself performs the reversal instead of just marking it.
Watch how quickly a man obeys when disarmed. (performance)
Actors are given no names and no backstory, only bearing to perform, how a body stands, moves, and complies under command.
Payoff: Watching how a body obeys turns out to tell you more than any line of dialogue could.
Listen for the complete absence of any music score. (sound)
Jancso works only with wind, hooves, boots, and shouted commands, so nothing musical ever prepares you for a death or comments on one.
Payoff: Without a score to guide your feelings, you're left responsible for deciding how to feel about each death.
Once you have seen it
Watch a whole company move like one single body. (staging)
Jancso choreographs groups in lines, columns, and circles rather than as separable individuals, so the mass acts as a single unit of feeling.
Payoff: A crowd handled this way stops being a collection of people and becomes one machine of obedience. In the reading: the dividual. The reading calls this a dividual: a crowd rendered as one affective unit rather than as many people.
Watch a prisoner told he's free, then watch what follows. (structure)
A recurring figure is the false reprieve, men released into the field or told to run to a treeline within a stated time, only for the rules to change.
Payoff: Freedom here is only ever a move inside a game whoever holds the rifle gets to revise.
Listen for the anthem playing over the final march. (sound)
The surviving Hungarians march toward a vastly superior force with sabers raised, and the film lets the anthem's irony go completely undirected.
Payoff: You can't tell if the music means tribute or epitaph, and the film refuses to decide for you.
Carry this in: Watch the geometry, not the uniforms. Whoever holds the field at any moment is always visible in how the bodies are arranged.