Terrence Malick's 1998 The Thin Red Line and Miklos Jancsó's 1968 The Red and the White offer images of war which defy the standard generic tropes of the combat film. Despite the fact that they cover different wars, World War Two and the Russian Civil War, and were made thirty years apart, these films have significant formal properties in common which shape the way in which they remember war and address the process of that remembering. These films fall under rubric of art cinema as described by David Bordwell in his seminal 1979 article "Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice" and further elaborated in his book, Narration in the Fiction Film. Bordwell specifies that the art cinema can be seen on a sliding scale of cinematic modes. The relevant part of the scale can be imagined with the art
cinema at the centre sandwiched between modernist cinema to the left and Classical Hollywood Cinema to the right. The Thin Red Line relies on certain icons and conventions of genre cinema and can, therefore, be placed on the right hand side of the art cinema category, while The Red and the White, eschews in depth character psychology and relies on extreme narrative ambiguity, and falls somewhere on the left hand side of the art cinema. Orienting these films with respect to one another and Bordwell's art cinema allows for analysis at the sites where their formal structures overlap, intersect and diverge. A few examples of this matrix of influence is the use of deep focus, deep space, the moving camera, long shots in each films. André Bazin privileges these stylistic techniques as "representing a realistic continuum of time and space" and Bordwell further categorizes these as part of the aesthetic foundation of the art cinema. In representing war with the structuring principles of the art cinema, The Red and the White and The Thin Red Line disrupt previously unified narratives of good wars, just causes and noble sacrifices. Through the ambiguity and causal gaps of art cinema form, both of these films force the cinematic spectator and diegetic soldier alike to step back and consider, in long shot, how they remember war.