Jancsó's black-and-white film is a disquietingly beautiful ballet of war and death in which war is the enemy and individuals are but the nameless and helpless victims of its perpetual motion. The setting is Central Russia during the Civil War of 1918; at an abandoned monastery and later at a field hospital, power shifts continually between the Red (Hungarian-speaking) soldiers and their White (Russian-speaking) guards. Jancsó's style is epic in some very basic sense of the word: with a ceaselessly tracking camera he moves among figures whose positions change against a vast, unchanging landscape; he captures, as if from a great distance, the essence of history, with its criss-crossing vectors of transient loyalties. For Jancsó, the spaciousness of the 'scope screen--now horizontal, now incredibly deep--is a palette for an almost surreal flow of "colors" in which the only constant is the absolute corruptibility of power.