Posts Tagged ‘František Vláčil’
František Vláčil: an introduction
The recent retrospectives and DVD boxes of films by the long-neglected Japanese master Mikio Naruse serve to emphasise the wealth of important cinema that still remains to be discovered outside the established canons. František Vláčil (1924-1999) may be Naruse's closest equivalent in Czech cinema, not because their aesthetic and thematic [...]
The Devil’s Trap
Ďáblova past. Czechoslovakia, 1961, black and white, 87 minsFrantišek Vláčil's second feature was the first of a loose trilogy set in the distant past. All three films (the others being Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees/Údolí včel, both 1967) take place at a time of fundamental ideological conflict and upheaval - in the case [...]
The Struggles of František Vláčil
Anyone who's planning to visit Prague between now and the end of May might well be interested in the exhibition František Vláčil: Zápasy (or The Struggles of of František Vláčil), a multimedia tribute to the great Czech director of Marketa Lazarová (1967).Those of us trapped elsewhere will have to make do with its bilingual (Czech-English) [...]
Adelheid
Czechoslovakia, 1969, colour, 99 minsAlthough František Vláčil's directing career continued to 1987, Adelheid (1969) was the last of his films to get much exposure outside his native country. It also marked the end of his most creatively fertile period: in the years following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Communist authorities [...]
The Valley of the Bees
Údolí včelCzechoslovakia, 1967, black and white, 97 mins. The year that Marketa Lazarová finally came to the end of its protracted five-year production schedule, František Vláčil wrote, shot and completed a second medieval film. This initially arose from an expedient plan to reuse the earlier film's sets, though in the event [...]
Marketa Lazarová
Czechoslovakia, 1967, black and white, 162 minsFirst, the superlatives. While I’m not competent to judge whether Marketa Lazarová really is the greatest Czech film ever made (as asserted by a poll of 100 Czech film critics in 1998), after three viewings I’m certainly confident enough to rank it alongside Bergman’s Virgin Spring [...]
The White Dove
Holubice Czechoslovakia, 1960, black and white, 76 minsFrantišek Vláčil's debut feature, after a decade spent making shorts and documentaries, is a self-consciously poetic portrait of children and their relationship to the world around them.It's based around two parallel situations: young Susanne, living on an unnamed Baltic island, awaits the [...]