Frantisek Vlacil's Marketa Lazarova, from 1967, is an epic Czechoslovakian film set in the 13th century. As warring clans face off in an increasingly appalling conflict, Vlacil's camera focuses of the flora and fauna of the Bohemian countryside in winter. There is an almost pantheistic embrace of the natural world in the film, a not particularly faithful version of Vladislov Vancura's 1931 novel. The conflict between Paganism and Christianity is at the heart of both works. The fecundity of Paganism and the charity of Christianity are both given their due. The scions of the dueling factions are portrayed as stern patriarchs whose values are self serving and evil. The ultimate struggle in Marketa Lazarova is not between the two isms, but between Man's better or more bestial nature.
The film juggles a myriad of themes with a plethora of effects: pans, tracking shots, flashbacks, quick cuts, closeups of an impressive number of beasts, even human ones. The narrative seems jumbled, but the film races along with a hurtling momentum in which each character is enmeshed in a snare of their own natural design. Characters often hide from their nemeses in brambles or underbrush. The hero is ultimately trapped in the stone crevices of a crumbling castle. There is little solace except by meditating on loss and mortality.
Marketa Lazarova is not really an actor's movie because of its emphasis on nature. The acting is haphazard with the heroine a tabula rasa and the villainy sometimes overdrawn. Still, there are moments of greatness: tracking shots of wolves, a tableau of deer, an amputation. The greatness is not an Apollonian one, but a living, breathing Dionysian one. The film was selected by Czech and Slovak writers in 1998 as the greatest Czech film and I haven't seen a better one.
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