His works are often allegorical commentaries on Hungary under Communism and the Soviet occupation, although some critics prefer to stress the universal dimensions of Jancsó's explorations.

Around this time Jancsó began working on newsreel footage and reported on such subjects as May Day celebrations, agricultural harvests and state visits from Soviet dignitaries.

Between 1954 and 1958 he made newsreel shorts whose subjects ranged from a portrait of Hungarian writer Zsigmond Móricz in 1955 to the official Chinese state visit in 1957.

[2] Although these films do not reflect Jancsó's aesthetic development, they gave the director the opportunity to master the technical side of film-making while also enabling him to travel around Hungary and see firsthand what was happening there.

In the film a group of Hungarian schoolboys are pressured to join the army by Nazi Germans and fight against the Russians on the eastern front.

The film starred Zoltán Latinovits and Andor Ajtay, and was written by Jancsó from a short story by József Lengyel.

In the film Latinovits plays a young doctor with humble roots who grows tired of his more intellectual life and career as a surgeon in Budapest.

He decides to revisit his place of birth: his father's farm in the Hungarian plains and is affected by the connection to nature that he had forgotten in the city.

In the film Kozák plays Jozak, a teenaged deserter of Hungary's Nazi-run army at the end of World War II.

The two friends, who cannot communicate through language, begin to act like young boys and innocently play games together, forgetting their roles of captor and prisoner.

The Russian soldier finally dies of his wound and Jozak again begins his journey home, wearing his dead friend's Soviet army uniform to stay warm.

The film was again written by Hernádi and starred János Görbe, Zoltán Latinovits, Tibor Molnár, Gábor Agárdy and András Kozák.

The Round-Up takes place shortly after a failed Hungarian uprising against Austrian rule in 1848 and the attempts by the authorities to weed out those who took part in the rebellion.

Jancsó set the action two years later during the Russian Civil War and, he made an anti-heroic film depicting the senselessness and brutality of armed combat.

The film starred Jacques Charrier, Marina Vlady, Ewa Swann, József Madaras, István Bujtor, György Bánffy and Philippe March.

In the latter part of the 1970s, Jancsó started work on the ambitious Vitam et sanguinem trilogy, but only the first two films, Hungarian Rhapsody (Magyar rapszódia, 1978) and Allegro Barbaro (1978) were made as critical reaction was muted.

Unlike Jancsó's 1980s films, there has been no general critical reassessment of his Italian works and they remain the most obscure part of his filmography.

The film deliberately undercuts the audience's ability to construct a notion of reality in the plot, which contradicts itself and includes many post-modern interventions to raise questions about its own manipulative nature.

[6] Later in the decade, Jancsó dispensed with the historical rural settings of the Hungarian puszta and shifted to contemporary urban Budapest.

While some new visual tropes were introduced (including a fascination with television screens that show clips of later or earlier action in the film), others, such as candles and naked women, were preserved.

[7] In the early 1990s, Jancsó made two films that thematically can be grouped with the works from the 1980s, God Walks Backwards (Isten hátrafelé megy, 1990) and Blue Danube Waltz (Kék Duna keringő, 1991).

After a long break from making full-length features, Jancsó returned with The Lord's Lantern in Budapest (Nekem lámpást adott kezembe az Úr Pesten, 1999), which proved to be a surprising come-back for the director.

The film largely (but not entirely) dispenses with long takes and choreographed camera movements, and for this Jancsó started working with a new director-of-photography Ferenc Grunwalsky (who is also a director in his own right).

Although all of these films are rooted in the present, recent ones have also seen Jancsó return to his earlier love of historical themes, including depictions of the Holocaust and Hungary's devastating defeat to the Ottomans in 1526, usually in the context of criticizing Hungarians for not understanding the meaning of their own history.

In addition to feature films, Jancsó made a number of shorts and documentaries throughout his career and from 1971 into the 1980s also directed work for the theater.