Overview

Kadár began his directing career in Bratislava, Slovakia after World War II with the documentary Life Is Rising from the Ruins (Na troskách vyrastá život, 1945). After several documentaries expressing the views of the Communist Party, which he joined, Kadár moved to Prague in 1947 and returned to Bratislava temporarily in order to make Kathy (Katka, 1950), his first feature film.

Beginning in 1952, he co-directed all his Czechoslovak films with Elmar Klos solely in Prague except their Czech−Slovak projects Death Is Called Engelchen (Slovak: Smrť sa volá Engelchen, Czech: Smrt si říká Engelchen, 1963), The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965), and Adrift (Czech: Touha zvaná Anada, Slovak: Túžba zvaná Anada, Hungarian: Valamit visz a víz, 1969) shot with Slovak, Hungarian, and Czech actors on location at Rusovce, Slovakia. Kadár returned to finish the latter one from the United States, where he immigrated in November 1968.^[6]

It was his last work with Klos. He then resumed his career in the U.S. and Canada working in both films and television. He was also a popular professor of film directing at the American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Film Studies.^{[citation needed]}

1950s

While touting the obligatory Marxist-Leninist doctrine and adhering to Socialist-Realist filmmaking, Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos first bounced between comedy and hard-core propaganda. Kadár's first feature film Kathy (Katka, 1950)^[7] made before he teamed up with Klos was little different in this respect from their subsequent joint work.^{[citation needed]}

Their choice of themes began to change with the first, mild relaxation of communism in Czechoslovakia after Soviet leader Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956. Kadár and Klos's first film during this minor thaw, Three Wishes (Tři přání, 1958), a cagey satire on aspects of everyday life, outraged the authorities and was shelved until the more relaxed conditions in 1963.^[8]

The studios suspended both directors for two years.^[9]

Their Communist Party membership protected them from a worse fate, however, and Kadár was able to find a refuge in semi-propagandist, technically avant-garde work for the early Czechoslovak multi-screen shows at the Laterna magika (Magic Lantern) project.^[10]

1960s

The first feature film Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos were able to make in five years showed a decided return to classical black-and-white film-making with barely a trace of Kadár's more experimental work at the Laterna magika.

A gradual relaxation of communist control in Czechoslovakia, whose first signs came from Slovakia, enabled the Bratislava journalist and writer Ladislav Mňačko to publish his novel Death Is Called Engelchen (Smrť sa volá Engelchen, 1959)^[11] and Kadár and Klos to reach for it from Prague after their suspension was over. The novel and their film Death is Called Engelchen (Slovak: Smrť sa volá Engelchen, Czech: Smrt si říká Engelchen, 1963) spotlighted a new take on the massive pro-democratic Slovak revolt of 1944 that previously had been portrayed only as invariably glorious. It showed some of its aspects that brought about human tragedy.^[4]

The film was entered into the 3rd Moscow International Film Festival where it won a Golden Prize.^[12]

The directors' next film, Accused aka Defendant (Obžalovaný, 1964), rehashed the propagandist structures of the earlier Socialist-Realist filmmaking, but turned them around by replacing the content mandated in the 1950s with committed social criticism that was quickly becoming one of the hallmarks of Slovak cinema and Czech cinema of the 1960s.^{[citation needed]}

All of these experiences and influences intersected to bring Kadár and Klos their enduring success with The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965),^[13] a compassionate and tormenting depiction of the dead-end street faced by many in Central Europe during the deportations of the Jews to German concentration camps during World War II.^[14] The film received several awards, including a foreign-language Oscar. Slovak and Czech film academics and critics still consider it the best film in the history of Slovak cinema.^[15]

Kadár and Klos's work on their next project based on the Hungarian novel Something Is Drifting on the Water (Valamit visz a víz, 1928) by Lajos Zilahy, and, effectively, a remake of the Hungarian film with the English international title Something Is in the Water (Valamit visz a víz, dir. Gusztáv Oláh and Lajos Zilahy, 1943) was interrupted by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.^{[citation needed]}

Kadár and his family quickly resettled in the United States, and although he returned briefly to help finish the film released as Adrift (Czech: Touha zvaná Anada, Slovak: Túžba zvaná Anada, 1969), his involvement was limited by comparison to his previous work with Klos. That was also the last time that the two directors met.^{[citation needed]}

1970s

Ján Kadár's first film after immigration to the United States and his first solo feature film since 1950 was The Angel Levine (1970), a substantially modified version of Bernard Malamud's short story Angel Levine (1958).^[16]

He later directed Lies My Father Told Me in Canada.