This has to be on the short list of great war movies. It is set during the Russian civil war, 1919 - it follows, somewhat, a group of Hungarians who are fighting for the Bolsheviks. It is set in and around a monastery and a hospital, and in the woods and fields and rivers around them. It operates by stripping the fighting of all sense: it is all middle. It starts in the middle of something - two men running alongside a river, shooting back at something. One of them crosses the river and then a group of horsemen appear and chase him back to the river, where they murder him in cold blood. The riders ride off. The other man escapes. He turns up at the monastery where his comrades - Hungarians, POWs who have stayed to fight for the Reds - are humiliating prisoners. But they are captured in turn and humiliated and murdered and chased half naked through the countryside. They hide for a while in the hospital, but the whites turn up and start humiliating and killing people, until the Reds turn up and humiliate and kill the whites. Then there is a battle of sorts....
This is all very beautiful - stark, lush black and white photography, long, fluid takes, the camera prowling through the world around the men abusing one another, everything arranged, shot and staged in deep, complex spaces - every shot suitable for framing, as Michael Atkinson said of Jansco's countryman Bela Tarr. But what we see is as brutal and absurd as anything in Tarr's work - a seamless thread of cruelty and death, all of it stripped of all context. It starts in the middle of a scene, and everything afterwards remains in the middle - we never really learn who people are, where, why - even when fortunes of war change, all we see are the results - most of the actual fighting takes place off screen.
Instead we see a cycle of absurdities, repeated over and over: we see men running, stripping, forming up in lines, marching this way and that, shooting and getting shot, jumping into rivers, being separated into groups. Russians split from Hungarians, reds from whites, those who ran from those who didn't - or if all else fails, men are picked out of the group randomly. And on and on it goes, the same things repeated: strip, run, split, fall into line, march, shoot, run, strip, split, combine... murders, rapes or threats of rape, hiding, being found... There is no real pattern to any of this - it is a long, absurd skein, both what happens and how we see it, with those long, relentless tracks watching all this pointless brutality. It's as chaotic and insane a vision of war as you could ask - completely meaningless and unheroic.
The film maintains that relentless pointless logic, though there are a few moments that sharpen the point somewhat. One scene at the hospital - one of the Hungarians has been seducing a nurse, maybe to get her to help him send another man for help.... the Whites turn up and catch the man and force the woman to swim, naked, then come out of the water and stand on a jetty while they deal with the man. This starts in long shot - the man, woman, Whites on the jetty - the man is brought forward though, into a medium shot, sometimes even closer, while the Whites harass him. They mock him - they tell him to sing. He does - an insulting song in Hungarian. The woman, all this time, stands in the background, naked, watched by the guards. He finishes singing, he is marched back out onto the jetty and forced into the river where he is summarily bayonetted. The woman crouches down, still naked, on the jetty...
Or the ending, when we finally see an actual, coherent battle. A group of Hungarians run into a group of Cossacks - they exchange shots and see a whole army of Whites come out of the woods. They try to leave, but the cavalry charges - they are surrounded. For a few minutes the battle looks like the rest of the film - men walk back and forth, shooting in all directions - a couple of them fall... then - though we still don't see all the enemies, they form up into a line and march off singing, and the camera rises and shows a vast army of whites spread out to meet them.....
And the closeup that ends it.... A truly great film.
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