The Red and the White · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man walks away from the camera across open grass. He has been told he is free to go. Nothing in the frame stops him: no wall, no ditch, no treeline close enough to matter, just pale field running out to white sky in a rectangle stretched wide enough to prove there is nowhere in it to hide. He keeps walking. Behind him someone decides when the reprieve ends.

That shot is the film, and it is also Miklós Jancsó's invention. War pictures had always put the moral question in a face. Jancsó took it out of the face and moved it into the ground plan. There are essentially no close-ups in The Red and the White. A human being is legible here as posture, gait, and position relative to other bodies, and it is the geometry — lines, columns, circles, dispersals — that tells you who currently holds power. Not the dialogue, which characterizes nobody. Not the lighting: Tamás Somló shoots high-key and hard, white sky, pale grass, black uniforms, almost no chiaroscuro, which removes the tonal shading by which films ordinarily let you know whose side they are on.

Deleuze's name for the ordinary cinema contract is the movement-image. A character takes in a situation, acts on it, the act changes the situation, and the cutting exists to keep that chain running. War films are its purest case. Jancsó keeps every visible feature of the chain and voids the outcome. Men march, capture, strip, release, execute, withdraw. The monastery and the field hospital change hands. Nothing is transformed. Whoever holds the building performs the same liturgy inside it.

Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image, and he usually finds it in people who have gone slack, who can no longer respond to what they see. Jancsó's version is stranger and worth the distinction. His men respond constantly. They are efficient. The failure sits on the far side of the circuit: the situation has become one that no act can convert into a different situation. Position changes, the arrangement does not. Which is why the arbitrary reprieve keeps recurring. Run to the treeline, you have this long. Freedom is handed out as a move inside a game whose rules belong to whoever holds the rifle, and can be revised while you run.

So where does change go? Into the camera. Deleuze's technical term for a shot is the mobile section: a slice of duration that expresses a change in the whole by moving. Jancsó strips that capacity from his characters and hands all of it to the camera, which pans, tracks, cranes and circles for minutes at a time. Zoltán Farkas cuts a ninety-minute feature from an unusually small number of takes, so the cut becomes an event, and it lands where the occupying force changes. The edit itself performs the reversal.

He was making a jubilee picture. The Mafilm–Mosfilm co-production was tied to the fiftieth anniversary of October, and the tradition it nominally honored, Eisenstein's, made meaning by colliding shots. Jancsó makes it inside the shot and uses the cut as a hinge between regimes. In that year, on that commission, refusing montage is a position.

What he keeps from Battleship Potemkin is the collective protagonist, a mass with no individuated hero, faces used as types. Deleuze has a term for a crowd handled as one feeling-unit: the dividual. Jancsó keeps the dividual and discards the montage machinery that gave Eisenstein's crowd its charge, so the mass is observed rather than orchestrated. From Chapayev he takes the Civil War genre grammar, legible Red and White uniforms, the charismatic commander, victory-shaped accumulation, and negates it item by item: uniforms come off and go onto other men, command is anonymous. The camera comes from elsewhere. Ugetsu is the precedent for one scene, one shot, crane and track reframing figures in depth while the cut is withheld. Paths of Glory supplies the lateral track through military space used as a survey instead of an identification, keeping pace with men walking to their deaths rather than cutting into their faces. L'Avventura licenses holding a shot well past narrative need, letting emptied ground carry the relations between figures. I Am Cuba proves the moving camera can deliver the political argument by itself; Jancsó keeps the unbroken traversal and drops the handheld lyricism for something flat and impersonal.

Impersonal is precise. The camera declines to follow the man we expect it to follow, picks up someone else, and when it returns the first man is dead. Deleuze's most radical claim about film perception is that the camera can be cut loose from any human center, so what we get is nobody's view: vision belonging to the world rather than to a person in it. That is what makes the film's symmetry stick. The interchangeability of Reds and Whites is never asserted by anyone. It is a property of a camera that takes no side because it takes no person. And when the camera completes a full rotation, the space behind turns out to be as populated and as dangerous as the space in front. Off-screen space in most films is a promise that something is coming. Here it is a census.

The ground has stopped being a setting. Deleuze calls such a place an any-space-whatever, a space that no longer stages an action and becomes a field of bare possibility, which on this plain means bare exposure. Anamorphic scope for a film with no vistas and no spectacle is the thesis sitting in the equipment: the wide frame is for the horizontal, for showing that the man walking away has nowhere to go.

The long take had a theory attached to it by then. Bazin argued that refusing to cut preserves the ambiguity of the real and leaves the spectator free to look. Jancsó's uncut shot preserves something colder, the continuity of the drill. You are not free to look away while it runs, which puts you nearer the condition of the people inside the frame than to Bazin's browsing viewer.

Two sequences carry the argument in bodies. White officers take the nurses into a birch grove, put them into dresses, and make them waltz: violence conducted as etiquette, captivity given a form and a tempo. Elsewhere the naked and the half-clothed are driven across country, the uniform removed until political identity is a body in a field. Deleuze's word for a posture that makes a social relation visible is the gest. Not a symbol of the relation, the relation itself, held in an attitude the body has been put into. The waltz is one of cinema's clearest. Nobody explains the power arrangement; two people turning in three-four time under supervision is the explanation. There is no composed score, only wind, hooves, boots, the flat report of rifles in open air, and music that is always being played by someone present. So the waltz is not atmosphere. It is an order being obeyed.

The commission asked for a people. Fifty years of the Revolution, the Hungarian internationalists who fought for it; the Hungarian title, Csillagosok, katonák, comes from a soldiers' song. What arrived is a film in which no people can be assembled. The Hungarians are foreigners in someone else's civil war, two languages grind under one command structure, and both sides perform the same rituals with the same gestures. Deleuze says the condition of modern political cinema is that the people are missing: the collective a film would speak for does not yet exist, and the honest film says so. The much-repeated sequel is that Soviet authorities were unhappy and the film's circulation there was curtailed. The specifics are thinner than the story, and worth holding loosely. What is not in doubt is that Hungary and the West took it as a major work at once.

What it did to filmmaking is easy to state and hard to absorb. It proved a film can carry a complete moral argument with no protagonist, no psychology, no score, no close-up, and almost no cutting. Everything normally assigned to editing — emphasis, judgment, the direction of sympathy — is done by where people stand and how long we watch them stand there. Jancsó had found the method on The Round-Up a year before; here it arrives whole, and he kept working it with János Kende from Silence and Cry onward. What he left behind is a grammar rather than a genre: the unbroken choreographed take as an instrument for filming power, and the discovery that a camera refusing to take anyone's side can still take a position.

Watch it once for the camera. You will lose track of who is who, which is the point and also the experience. Then watch it again and try to say, with the uniforms out of the reckoning, who holds the field at any given minute. You can always tell. It is in the geometry. The open question is whether that perfect symmetry is the truth about civil wars or a form Jancsó found so beautiful that it swallowed its subject. He does not answer. Watching the last reversal, neither will you.