Marketa Lazarová

In a poll of Czech film critics and journalists in 1998 director František Vláčil’s masterpiece Marketa Lazarová was judged the most important title in the country’s century-old cinema history. The 1967 historical drama has also repeatedly placed very highly in other surveys. Thanks to its complexly loose, artistic treatment and original conception of individual elements (acting, camera, score, design) it represents a unique work in Czech historical cinema, though it is by no means a model example of literary adaptation. While the ballad-like prose of Vladislav Vančura’s Markéta Lazarová (1931) is not a traditional historical novel either, Vláčil and screenwriter František Pavlíček veer away from the whimsical, humanely benevolent original towards a harshly lyrical vision. The love story of an innocent yeoman’s daughter (the young Magda Vášáryová) who finds herself in neighbour Kozlík’s (Josef Kemr) band of bandits instead of at a convent is just the base for a polymorphous historical mosaic bringing together a wide variety of characters, motifs and themes. The deepening relationship between Marketa and the bandit Mikoláš (František Velecký) is impacted not only by disputes between their families but the kidnapping of the young Saxon nobleman Kristián (Vlastimil Harapes), who has become enchanted with Kozlík’s wild daughter Alexandra, the tragic fate of the wandering monk Bernard (Vladimír Menšík) and the efforts of the king’s captain Pivo (Zdeněk Kryzánek) to destroy the gang of highwaymen. Research into the period, one element of years of preparation for the project, became the basis for a distinctive, bleak vision of the early Middle Ages in which paganism and religion, the male and female principles and love and hate compete for dominance. Efforts to feature two valuable paintings from the royal court attest to the makers’ efforts to create an exhaustive picture. Even without them Marketa Lazarová was the most expensive Czech picture of the 1960s. Its artistic value is enduring.