The Red and the White

The setting is the aftermath of the Russian Revolution: the 'reds' are the revolutionaries, the 'whites' the government forces ordered to suppress them. Jancsó focuses on a young Hungarian fighting with the reds, and charts the arbitrary pattern of arrests, imprisonments and escapes that he goes through. As in The Round-Up, Jancsó is here primarily interested in the mechanisms of power, seen as virtual abstractions: the characters have political status, not personal identity, and the lengthy arabesques described by the camera classify their struggles for supremacy as an endless cycle of gain and loss. The effect is a precise ambivalence: a celebration of revolutionary heroism, and an icily detached recognition that both sides in a war can be mirror images of each other.