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| Home > Contents > Article: |
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Form and Motion in Jancsó's The Red and the White
Hans V Mathews
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Complete Story: Form and Motion in Jancsó's The Red and the White:  |
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Miklos Jancso
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The Red and the White
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The Red and the White
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This essay tries to describe the surface of a Hungarian film classic. Miklós Jancsó is a Hungarian filmmaker who rose to prominence during the Communist era and perhaps represents - at least in his earlier films - the apogee of realist cinema both from the Marxist perspective and the Bazininan one. The earliest and most successful examples of 'realist' cinema came from Soviet directors like Eisenstein and Pudovkin who used 'montage' as a guiding principle to explore the 'real'.
The French theorist André Bazin drew a distinction between what he regarded as the two sides of cinema. The first, ('montage') which he associated with editing, is primarily connected to the spectator filling in the unseen details as well as inferring the various relations in the narrative. The second ('mise-en-scčne') which Bazin associated with the single shot - incorporating tracking and/ or panning - is more a matter of observation. Where relations are only implied in montage, mise-en-scčne enables the spectator to actually see the relevant relations. Bazin argued that montage - because it forces emotional responses through associations instead of allowing the spectator to merely observe - was manipulative. Where 'realism' was - to Eisenstein - not only the world as it was, but also as it should be made, Bazin regarded Eisenstein's films as 'Expressionist' because they did not respect 'reality' as it was, but endeavored to refashion it through 'montage'. Bazin believed that 'realism' should respect reality instead of recomposing it according to the dictates of a political belief, which is what Eisenstein had essentially done.
Jancsó's best films perhaps share all Eisenstein's political beliefs without the Soviet filmmaker's faith in montage. André Bazin did not live long enough to see it but it is Marxist cinema with mise-en-scčne rather than montage as the guiding principle. The Red and the White (1967) is one of his greatest films and is concerned with some events in the Russian Civil War, with the Communists on one side fighting White Russian troops around an old monastery. Describing a film's surface is not a task that critics usually take up - perhaps because of the literary skills required to describe a complex work of art that experiments with film form, and does not merely tell a story.
Editor
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Hans V Mathews is an editor of Phalanx.
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Courtesy: magyarhirlap.files.wordpress.com
Courtesy: seemagazine.com
Courtesy: brightlightsfilm.com
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