Hungary, 1919. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Hungarian volunteers supported the “Reds” against the “Whites”, counter-revolutionaries intent on restoring the Czars to power. The conflict is bloody and violent.

Prior to home video and DVD, it took dedication to follow world cinema. If you lived in a major city with access to an arthouse or repertory cinema – or at the very least a 16mm film society – you were in luck. Otherwise, after a foreign-language film had had its initial release, you could rely on a single showing, or maybe even two, on BBC2. Channel 4, which arrived in 1982, increased the showing of foreign films considerably. Yet, what of word cinema’s back catalogue – the distinguished films of the past? You could read about them in any decent history of world cinema, but chances to actually see the films were very rare. Add to this the fact that some filmmakers simply go out of fashion. Miklós Jáncsó (born 1921) is one such. For about ten years after The Round-Up (1965) made his reputation, he was a major name in British arthouses. But as far as I can tell – with the aid of a filmography and the BBFC website – this DVD of The Red and the White is the first time a Jáncsó film has been commercially distributed in the UK since Private Vices and Public Virtues in 1976. I’m not old enough to have seen any of Jáncsó’s films in the cinema (almost all of them bearing adults-only X certificates) and I have no memory of any TV showings, so The Red and the White is the first of Jáncsó’s films I have seen. In the 1980s, he was overshadowed by the works of his former wife Marta Mészáros (whose films are very different, more personal and with a feminist viewpoint, for example Nine Months and the autobiographical Diary trilogy) and other Hungarian directors such as Istvan Szabo. Second Run are intending The Red and the White to be the first of a series of Jáncsó DVD releases, and for this they should be commended.

Although The Red and the White is based on historical events, ones which would have been within living memory of many people when the film was first shown, somehow the film feels a little distanced. There are no “characters”, more presences in the film. The opening paragraph of this review – which is derived from an on-screen caption at the beginning of the film – gives you the historical background but isn’t much of a synopsis. You can be forgiven for not knowing who is who – and I’ll freely admit defeat here, as I’m sure my Central European history is inadequate. Yet somehow this doesn’t really matter. You’re watching an almost abstract display of the power of oppressors over the oppressed. (The Soviet Union, despite co-funding this film certainly got this message, and banned the film.) You’re also watching a virtuoso display of filmmaking.

The major element of Jáncsó’s style is his command of the sequence shot, an unbroken take lasting several minutes, often highly choreographed across the Scope frame and involving large numbers of people. Jáncsó will frequently move from a long shot to a close-up without cutting. And he did this ten years or more before the Steadicam was invented: I didn’t see the jitter of a handheld camera, or any dolly tracks on the ground. In his use of such extended shots, Jáncsó prefigures such later directors as his compatriot Bela Tarr and the Greek Theo Angelopoulos. The Red and the White is not as extreme in its use of this technique as other films – Jáncsó’s 1969 film Winter Sirocco apparently sustains an 80-minute running time in just thirteen shots. In this approach, there is a tendency towards aestheticism for its own sake – something that Jáncsó doesn’t always avoid – as if to show what intricate patterns he can make out of men, women, soldiers and horses and a couple of peasant women forcibly stripped naked. There’s something overwhelming, if maybe a little suspect, of such shots as the opening one, of soldiers on horseback charging at the camera in slow motion. But most of the time the power of his work is undeniable.



The DVD
Second Run’s DVD of The Red and the White is encoded for all regions. It’s transferred to DVD in its original ratio of 2.35:1 and is anamorphically enhanced. The black and white photography is intentionally more contrasty than “classical” monochrome usually is, but the image is generally sharp. Some softness in longer shots is no doubt down to the original materials, and probably unavoidable considering the use of anamorphic lenses in what looks like natural light. There is some print damage in the form of speckles and scratches, particularly near the beginning. However, I suspect this is as good as you are likely to get with a film of this age.

The soundtrack is mono – again somewhat lacking in dynamic range compared to a modern track, but this is how the film has no doubt always sounded, and it’s entirely adequate for the task. There are twelve chapter stops.

The main extra is a 1994 documentary made by Jáncsó, Message of Stones: Budapest (53:37). Shot on video in colour, this film has no voiceover or captions and very little dialogue, this is an impressionistic film with a specific emphasis on the Jewish themes which have preoccupied Jáncsó throughout his career. Second Run DVD’s website has a link to an article about this series, which can be read here.

Packaged with the DVD is a booklet which contains – as well as credits – a lengthy and informative interview with the lively and irreverent Jáncsó by Andrew James Horton.

Jáncsó was an important director of the late Sixties and Seventies who had slipped into obscurity since then. By making his work available on DVD again, Second Run are to be commended – and the disc is as well-produced and reasonably priced as always.

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