Jancsó's breakout film is set amid the summary detention of entire villages as Hapsburg forces try to root out any remnants of Hungary's defeated nationalist guerillas that may still roam the country's sprawling plains. Confined to a wooden fort, peasants and herdsmen are subjected to a complex array of interrogations, traps, and ruses set by their Austrian keepers.
"Jancsó exhibits portraits of an embryonic police state, set against a pitiless sky and a plain so vast that it seems to show the curvature of the earth. In his cold eye, war is an aleatory art in which values are as random as bullets... In his own deep-dimensioned, black and white montages, he seems a sculptor who scrapes his material from the soil of his native land and gives it a cast of permanence." (Time, 1969)
Film description from the LA Hungarian Film Festival.
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