The setting is the aftermath of the Russian Revolution: the ‘Reds’ are the revolutionaries, the ‘Whites’ the government forces ordered to
suppress them. Director Miklos Jancso focuses on a young Hungarian fighting with the reds, and charts the arbitrary pattern of arrest, imprisonments and escapes that he goes through. As in The Round Up, Jancso is here primarily interested in the mechanisms of power, seen as virtual abstractions.