Kósa's landmark first feature is a stunningly visual chronicle of recent history in the fortunes of a peasant, István, over three decades, from 1935 to 1965. Born into near-slave conditions, by the war's end István has managed to amass a bit of land to which he attempts to cling like a dog to a bone, neighbors and progress be damned, through the postwar collectivization, Stalin-era prison camps, and the crushed 1956 revolution. Kósa's approach is both engaging and analytical, distanced and measured, and full of surprises in its telling detail. The CinemaScope photography by Sándor Sára, himself a major director, has been compared inevitably to Janscó, but perhaps more appropriately to the great Soviets, its luminous, mobile geometry "tracking objects and characters horizontally across the frame, as if in symbolic recognition of the unstoppable onward rush of history which has everything and everyone in its power." (Bryan Burns, World Cinema: Hungary)