5


FRANTIŠEK VLÁČIL

Peter Hames


     Of the new directors to make their mark in the late fifties and sixties, František Vláčil has
appeared as a figure set apart, owing little to the example of his contemporaries. His preference
for historical subject matter and his visual style – a concern for composition within the frame
reminiscent of the later Eisenstein – separate him from both the “poetic humanism” of Jasný and
Uher and the social critics. Yet his assertion of the values of form is itself in the nature of a
manifesto, and many of his historical films are concerned primarily with an attack on dogmatism,
the contemporary significance of which would not be lost on his audiences.

After two films made for the Czechoslovak army, the short Glass Skies (Skleněná oblaka, 1959) and
the medium length Purscrit (Pronásledováni, 1959), both revealing his formal preoccupations, Vláčil
made The White Dove ( 1960). His first feature film found itself under attack both at home and
abroad. When the director of the Venice Film Festival selected it for competition in preference to
Krejčík’s A Higher Principle ( Vyšší princip, 1960) and Weiss’s Romeo, Juliet, and Darkness, the
Italian left wing linked this selection of a “nonpolitical fantasy” to a general attack on the
management of the festival. Vláčil himself feels that his film had an influence on New Wave
directors, who, at that time, had scarcely started to study. “Not that they started to imitate what
we did; they simply began to work freely, to create outside the given rules. Personally, I never
submitted to any rules. It turned out that it is always possible to find a way.”[1] For The White
Dove, Vláčil had Jan Curik as director of photography, Miroslav Ondříček as his assistant, and as
editor Mila Hájek – three names that were to be associated with many of the best of the New Wave
films.

The film begins strangely as a lorry, twin headlamps lit, approaches across a moonlit landscape. It
turns in by a huge sign filling the left-hand side of the screen, Charleroi-Liěge. A man sits on
top of the sign and, as the sun rises, gives the signal for the release of hundreds of pigeons.
However, one of the birds is missing and released after the others. The film then develops as a
moral story in which the pigeon or dove, recognized universally as a symbol of peace, serves as a
link between a girl, Suzanne, who waits forlornly for its arrival on an island in the Baltic, and a
boy, Míša, who discovers the bird in Prague after it has lost its way in a storm.

When we first learn that Suzanne’s bird is lost, there are shots of morning mist among strange
exotic towers. It is not an Eastern city from a fairy tale but Prague, the city of a hundred
spires. An artist and a cat look through a window at the dove as it perches on a sculpture outside
a top-story apartment. When it flies to a new spot, its shadow is cast on the wall, and the artist
begins to trace its shape. Then, in a montage of confusing, half-understood images, we see a long
streak of blood on the window, a hand grasping at a floating feather in a lift shaft, and the cat
watching with predatory interest. Finally, the artist stands at the bottom of the shaft and picks
up the “dead” bird.

Míša has shot the bird with his air gun, but the fact that he is crippled and confined to a
wheelchair is initially hidden. The artist is determined to bring home to him the enormity of his
action, and, together, they virtually wish the bird back to life and prepare it for freedom. This
goes beyond the obvious symbolic links between East and West, between children on opposite sides of
the Cold War. Míša compensates for his physical condition through pointless destruction. The
artist, on the other hand, through his sensitivity, can act as a mediator, encouraging the growth
of a sympathy and understanding linked to the boy’s recovery of his ability to walk.

Following Karol Bacílek’s example with Sunshine in a Net, this schematic structure could be decoded
to reveal a Czechoslovakia crippled by ideological dogmatism. Through the vision of the artist and
a reassertion of humanist values, a rebirth of purpose and conviction may be achieved. While the
film’s use of symbolism invites this kind of response, nonetheless, it would be wrong to reduce it
to the one-to-one equation of political allegory.

The film’s importance, as with Desire and Sunshine in a Net, lies primarily in the strength of its
aesthetic charge. Formally, it follows an alternating structural pattern similar to the second half
of Sunshine in a Net. A strong polarity is also created between the black and white of the Baltic
seashore and the drabness of the highrise apartments in Prague (despite the exotic spires).

The Baltic scenes provide an opportunity for some lyrical photography characteristic of Curik and
the traditions of Czech cinematography. After the bird has failed to arrive, Suzanne is shown
sitting alone at the end of the jetty in her black headscarf, the surf breaking round her deserted
figure as night approaches. There is a beautiful sequence that begins with a shot of an empty cage
hanging outside her window at sunrise, followed by an upside down shot of her lying in bed. As the
camera rights itself, an imaginary voice hypnotically whispers her name. When she hears that a bird
has been sighted, she leaves her hut and appears to be walking on water. There are delicate shots
of her searching on the beach, dressed only in a negligee. Later, when the artist’s drawing of the
bird arrives from Czechoslovakia, it is delivered to her as she sits among the shallows sheltered
by a black umbrella. This rather whimsical style can be traced not only in the later work of Cuřík
(e.g., Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, 1969) but also in the work of Ondriček in apparently
dissimilar films such as Passer’s lntimate Lighting (Intimní osvětlení, 1965) and Němec’s Martyrs
of Love (Mučedníci lásky, 1966).

The Prague scenes are more directly related to the film’s narrative content, but even here there is
opportunity for some beautifully visualized sequences. The first is that in which the artist draws
the bird, to the accompaniment of fluttering wings and the ringing of bells. In following the long
process that leads to the final print, the film provides an early version of scenes more
elaborately developed by Marco Ferreri (Michel Piccoli’s culinary preparations in Dillinger Is Dead
[Dillinger é morto, 1969] and, more especially, Antonioni (the photographic “blowup” in the film of
that title, 1966). The function of the sequence, apart from its analysis of artistic process, is to
stress the elusive search for a poetic equivalent to the living bird with its human associations of
grace, beauty, life, and peace.

The height of the building is also exploited to great effect. When the bird is shot, it falls into
a tall elevator shaft, which Vláčil uses as a central motif. Míša’s friends later call up the shaft
to him, directly leading to a dream in which he finds himself stranded halfway up a sheet of wire
netting. He tries to reach a parachute lodged just above him, but it falls to the ground, recalling
the floating feather of the original shooting. It is fair to assume that the wire netting
represents his physical and psychological confinement and the parachute his failure to find a means
of escape.

When the dove has begun to recover, it tries to escape through the shaft, which is both a possible
pathway to freedom and a smooth-sided prison. As the bird is caught between the tall sides of the
shaft, the cat backs down the netting toward it. It leaps – a beautiful and frightening shot of its
black shape falling, legs outspread – but just fails in its attempt. The netting explicitly links
the elevator shaft to Míša’s dream. At the end of the film, when the reluctant Míša releases the
bird, he runs to the front of the building and out in time to catch a floating feather. The story
has moved full circle.

The film’s theme, that understanding and respect for both human and animal life are necessary in
any attempt to gain true freedom, may seem naive when reduced to paper. Likewise, the film’s
tendency toward schematic poetics is often unconvincing. When Míša refuses to release the bird,
there are shots below of men trying to catch a runaway horse (i.e., restrict freedom). A huge
airline advertisement the size of a house is made much too dominant (both a linking device between
East and West and another connotation of freedom). Finally, the artist, disillusioned by Míša’s
failure to release the bird, cuts the face from a sculpture of him on which he had been working. At
the end of the film, when all is well, it has been miraculously restored. However, the final shots
of television aerials in Prague, with the sound of waves beating on the beach, provide an effective
and essential unifying device.

The White Dove was made halfway between Jasný’s Desire and Uher’s Sunshine in a Net and, like them,
asserts simple humanist ideas within elaborate aesthetic structures, striving for poetic
association rather than narrative content. It was a formula characteristic of the times and can
similarly be traced in the early work of Kachyňa and Procházka. However, while clearly confined
within the letter of what was considered permissible, the significance of their dissent from the
status quo should not be underestimated. They assert values that relate both to the traditions of
pre-war lyricism and lie outside of restrictive definitions of committed cinema. They have an
importance related to their historical and social context but are also works that exist in their
own right and should not be reduced to a mere footnote in the prehistory of the New Wave.

It has not been possible to see Vláčil’s next film, The Devil’s Trap (Ďáblova past, 1961).
According to Škvorecký, it was a film that gained official support precisely because it was
misunderstood. “A simple miller from the `time of darkness’, i.e., counterreformation, uses his own
findings gained by the study of nature to fight against clerical dogmatism as it was proclaimed by
the disciplined and well-organised Jesuits. Formally, it was a very sombre film, and the parallel
to the other, more contemporary dogmatism, was still somewhat timid.”[2]

Following The Devil’s Trap, Vláčil turned his attention to what was to become his major work,
Marketa Lazarová, finally completed in 1966. In adapting Vančura’s novel, he was working on safe
ground. A committed Communist, Vančura had died a martyr’s death at the hands of the Nazis as part
of their retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. This, together with his reputation
as a major novelist, one of the founders of the art of Czech cinema, and prime mover in the
nationalization of the film industry, ensured him a place within the Communist pantheon. The
resources lavished on the production have been equaled only by those devoted to Vávra’s Hussite
trilogy (1954-57) and the same director’s wartime trilogy: Days of Betrayal (Dny zrady, 1972),
Sokolovo (1975), and The Liberation of Prague (Osvobozeni Prahy, 1977).

René Wellek has written that the dominant theme of Vančura’s work was one of hatred for war and
social oppression. Marketa Lazarová (1931) marked a complete change of style and subject matter.
“The social pathos and the glorification of the ‘idiot’ have disappeared. Vančura now tells a good
yarn about robbers and knights, rapes and elopements. Only the display of language and of metaphor
suggests that the author has ambitions beyond those of an adventure writer. In addition, the
celebration of brute force and lust seems to represent a definite break with the past.”[3]

An article in Czechoslovak Film describes Vančura’s objectives as follows:


The story is of secondary importance to Vančura. If he does relate a story it is only in order to
introduce some new elements of narration. He intentionally omits specifying the place and time of
the action and does not even characterise the protagonists by a particular manner of speaking. He
makes ample use of proverbs and sayings. In this way he attempts to reveal the very essence of
human nature. In the psychological portrayal of the characters he gives material form to
subconscious states. The material of his descriptions is realistic, but his highly figurative mode
of expression may be likened to that of poetry. Vančura coins new words and refreshes his idiom
with obsolete expressions from old chronicles and popular sayings. He imparts a subjective
character to the epic by interlarding the story with personal observations and comments, and points
out important passages to the readers.[4]


The experimental form of the original is clear, and Wellek’s somewhat puritanical response can also
be detected in his reactions to the work of Vítězslav Nezval. Jaroslav Boček notes some significant
differences between the film and the original. In using a structure based on set tableaus, he sees
Vláčil coming under the influence of Vančura’s novel Three Rivers (Tři řeky, 1936). In contrast to
what he regards as Vančura’s sober and gothic style, he describes Vláčil’s work as baroque,
barbaric, and antique. He sees the film’s intentional paganism and revolt against God and world
order as Vláčil’s personal contribution.[5]  On the other hand, as František Pavlíček, who adapted
the script with him, has testified, the filming of Marketa Lazarová was one of Vláčil’s life
ambitions.[6] There is little doubt that it is intended as a homage to Vančura, whatever the
personal additions.

Vláčil’s stated objective was to provide a “testimony about people six, seven hundred years ago, as
if they were our contemporaries. Whenever I watched a historical film, I always felt as if I were
seeing contemporary people all dressed up in historical costumes. I wanted to understand them, see
through the eyes of their lives, their failings, their desires – in short, I wanted to drop back
seven centuries.”[7] In order to achieve this, he studied groups of people still living at the
level of the Middle Ages and extended his researches further afield to include the lives of
Australian aborigines and Brazilian Indians. He insisted on as much authenticity as possible and
ensured that implements and weapons were made from the correct materials and by the original
methods. His actors even had to endure physical pain.[8] Vláčil’s attempt to complete the film
reduced him to a near breakdown as he deliberately tried to force himself into identification with
the thought processes and psychology of the time:

People then were much more instinctive in their actions, and hence much more consistent. If a
person made up his mind he was going to do something, he went through with it. The only controlling
emotion was fear, and that brought its pressure to bear mainly at night. That is why some pagan
customs stayed with man for such a long time. Pagan myths were much better for explaining things
that man can’t explain rationally.[9]

The film has been admired for its poetic vision and criticized for its lack of control, the
sprawling set pieces often holding up its necessary return to narrative. This is not surprising
given Vláčil’s devotion to individual images and sequences in The White Dove and the complexity of
his task in the case of Marketa Lazarová. The film is divided into three sections: “Straba the
Werewolf,” “The Holy Lamb,” and “On the Way to Summer.” While the fierce and primitive nature of
the first section dominates throughout, the second and third sections raise the possibility of
alternative models for human relations.

In a striking precredit sequence, we see a black and white snowscape, the effect of which is
enhanced by the film’s cinemascope format. As dawn breaks, a small party of wolves makes its way
through the snow toward the camera in an oblique movement. A hawk hovers above the reeds, and we
note that it is linked to the hand of its master. This is followed by a close-up of the film’s
hero, Mikuláš Kozlík (František Velecký). The sombre photography and the images of hunters both
animal and human establish the context of a harsh and predatory world.

The impact of the film’s opening scenes draws heavily on conscious polarities: violence/beauty,
male/female, pagan/Christian, young/old. The visual association with hunting wolves is immediately
reinforced by the opening scenes of “Straba the Werewolf.” The two adult Kozlík brothers, Mikuláš
and Adam the one-armed, launch an attack on a Saxon count and his retinue as they proceed through
the wintry landscape. The onslaught is merciless, violent, and exciting. A merchant is stabbed,
writhing in agony, and horsemen hunt a running figure. There are impressive shots of a horse
running through reeds and images of the pursued seen over the head of a following horse. This is
the violent world of Mikuláš Kozlík, photographed in appropriately dark tones.

In contrast, we are introduced to Marketa (Magda Vašáryová), daughter of the rival clan of the
Lazars. The screen is suddenly transformed to blinding white light. Nuns are seen spread out in
angular patterns on a hillside before a convent. A girl runs forward from the sunlit skyline,
plucking a soft bird from between her exposed breasts. A nun takes the bird into the convent. In
extreme close-up, the girl looks up into the camera and then at birds flying overhead. It is
Marketa.

These two scenes introduce us to the hero and heroine of the saga, the clans of Kozlík and Lazar.
The contrast between dark and light also serves to juxtapose a violent male world with the gentle
feminine world of the young girl linked to the positive forces of nature and freedom (the flight of
the birds). On the other hand, the scene contains a contradiction in the angular face of organized
religion, to which Marketa may soon be forced to submit.

The narrative resumes when the Kozlíks bring young Kristián (Vlastimil Harapes) to their stronghold
after they have killed his father. When they dismount, a raven lands on one of the horse’s saddles
and begins to peck at it. The men pass a voluptuous black-haired girl, their sister Alexandra
(Pavla Polášková), who is seen hacking erotically at an animal carcass stretched between two poles.
The sequence leads to a major confrontation between Mikuláš and his father, Old Kozlík, ostensibly
concerned with the number of men that Mikuláš has spared in the attack. It is also, of course, a
conflict between the old and the young, between the present and future leaders of the clan. The
scene is filmed with a Wellesian epic grandeur, the two men framed against the long, heavy rafters
of the ceiling as they recede within a murky interior.

There is a sudden shock similar in effect to the blinding light of the scene introducing Marketa as
the camera moves rapidly forward through grass to a naked girl seen as she hangs charms on a tree.
She walks forward with a dove and cuts its throat, the blood dripping into a bowl. A raven and a
snake are in the tree, but a man kills the snake. The woman is then seen stretched against the tree
in various close-ups of sexual intercourse, her hands clutching at the man’s back. It is only
revealed at the end that the woman is Alexandra and the man Kristián. In the final shot, linking
the sequence to present “reality,” she runs away across snow.

Besides the unexpected nature of the sequence, there are many other parallels with the introduction
of Marketa. Just as the relationship between Mikuláš and Marketa will cut across clan rivalries
and, to a lesser extent, pagan/Christian oppositions, so will that of Kristián and Alexandra. Here,
however, the opposition is explicitly cultural, between a man of another race who is fully
committed to Christianity and a woman who is actively pagan. Both sequences are similar in that
they employ poetic/figurative effects to introduce the leading female characters outside of the
narrative framework. Marketa is blonde and Alexandra is brunette. Marketa gives up her bird to the
church, Alexandra sacrifices hers in a pagan ceremony. The complex series of interrelated
oppositions set up in these opening scenes provides the basis for the film’s development of sexual,
political, religious, and generational themes.

The film progresses from here through a continued succession of tableau-like sequences in which
elements of narrative serve to forward the movement. While Vláčil, like Vančura, uses his narrative
as a basis for formal interests, it is necessary to provide a brief resume of the story both
because of its complexity and to make sense of the issues raised by the film.

Continuing in this section, “Straba the Werewolf,” the Hetman (military commander) attempts to
bring Old Kozlík to account for his crimes. Kozlík, however, escapes after knifing the Hetman, and
a proclamation is issued calling for the pursuit of his clan. Since the Lazars had shared in the
proceeds from the attack on Kristián, Mikuláš seeks an alliance with Marketa’s father but is
savagely beaten and thrown out of the fortress.

In retaliation, the Kozlíks lay waste to the Lazar stronghold. Mikuláš drags off Marketa by force,
preventing her entry to the convent, and leaves her father nailed to the gates of his burning
castle. The Kozlíks now move to a secret hideout in the forests. “Straba the Werewolf” ends with
the rape of Marketa by Mikuláš and the love-making of Alexandra and Kristián.

The second part of the film, “The Holy Lamb,” introduces the character of Bernard (Vladimír
Menšík), a wandering monk who is accompanied everywhere by a pet lamb. The lamb is caught and
devoured by the Kozlíks who leave Bernard with only its head. He serves as a narrative link between
the film’s diverse plot elements, which here include the death of Adam the one-armed at the hands
of the Hetman’s forces and a horrific battle between the Hetman and the Kozlíks, which ends in the
insanity of Kristián.

The final section, “On the Way to Summer,” opens in a quiet, idyllic fashion with the survivors of
the Kozlík clan peacefully fishing. The relationship between Mikuláš and Marketa has now developed
into one of love. Kristián is killed by Alexandra. Marketa returns to her father in the ruins of
his camp but is rejected. She is again about to enter the convent when she hears that Mikuláš has
attacked the Hetman’s castle at Boleslav where her father is being held prisoner. Marketa joins
him, and they are married immediately before he dies from his wounds. The Hetman and Old Kozlík,
whose dispute has been at the heart of the suffering, are reconciled. It has been unnecessary, but
the landscape is strewn with the bones of their conflict.

The theme of sexuality is developed through the relations between Marketa/ Mikuláš and
Alexandra/Kristián. The bold portrayal of sexual instinct is fully in line with Vláčil’s own view
of the directness and consistency of his characters’ actions. The love between Marketa and Mikuláš
is a matter of straightforward passion that develops into gentleness and understanding. Marketa’s
love for Mikuláš is first indicated when her open lips pass down bare stone walls as his blackcaped
figure gallops across the snow to her father’s fortress. When Mikuláš carries her off, the rape
scene occurs with an inevitability seemingly independent of conscious choice.

At the Kozlíks’ stronghold in the woods, an atmosphere of sexual tension is generated. Kristián is
tied with his arms above his head and released periodically to satisfy Alexandra’s desires. Mikuláš
is unable to sleep. The camera moves forward to Marketa via a group of hawks symbolically placed on
the branch of a tree. She has a vision of Mikuláš’s bleeding face before he appears, throws her
down, pursues her, and rapes her. The vision links the scene with that at her father’s castle where
she had been the unseen observer of the vicious treatment meted out to Mikuláš by her father’s men.
In this sense, the rape can be seen as both retribution (there had been a vicarious element to her
watching) and an attainment of her subconscious wishes. There are various comments from watchers
and listeners at the sounds she makes during intercourse. This stresses the public and almost
ritual nature of the event, which is far removed from the conventions of twentieth-century
morality.

The force of sexuality is more directly embodied in the character of Alexandra and her close links
with paganism. We learn in flashback that Adam has lost his arm after making love to Alexandra in
the sanctuary. He had been bitten by a snake and Old Kozlík had been forced to chop off the arm in
order to save his life. Both Adam’s name and the associated imagery contain allusions to the Garden
of Eden, but there is no suggestion that this should be interpreted in the conventional manner.

Kristián is clearly destroyed by his experiences, the contact with unrestrained sexuality,
paganism, and the horrors of battle. His madness is conveyed in a hallucinatory sequence similar in
function and shock effect to those introducing Marketa and Alexandra. After the confrontation in
the woods between the Hetman and the Kozlíks, he lurches forward (subjective camera), running
through the snow and then flattened grass. In his disordered imagination, he imagines his
blood-stained father and Alexandra attempting to lead him away from the scene of battle. Alexandra
is captured but stabs one of the men. She is then set upon, dismembered by the Hetman’s soldiers,
and her severed limbs spread out on the hillside. In the Kozlíks’ stronghold, naked bodies are
piled high as if in an extermination camp. Kristián fires an arrow that pierces an eye. In the
third part of the film, Kristián is found crawling in a ditch almost unrecognizable, with his mouth
horribly swollen. When Alexandra kills him with a rock, his face and body return to their original
purity.

Kristián’s inability to survive the realities of this primitive and violent world finds its
parallel in the failure of organized Christianity. In fact, Vláčil seems to reject its solutions as
irrelevant. The religious wanderer, Bernard, is an embodiment of sentimental Christian imagery and
presumably relates to the tradition of the wise fool. However, he has no effect on those around
him, his lamb is destroyed, and he is beaten up. His virtues are simple-minded and irrelevant to
the real nature of man and society. At the end of the film, he is shown chasing after a little
goat-away from Marketa, who has just asked to join him.

If the virtuous individual can make no headway, religious institutions can only provide repression.
This is emphasized by the angular presentation of the convent in the early scenes of the film. When
Marketa later decides to join the convent, Vláčil stresses the freedom that she is about to give
up. As she moves forward, a deer turns its head in a freeze shot that draws attention to this and
recalls those that pass in an earlier and idyllic love scene with Mikuláš. There is a return to the
deer as she approaches the convent door, and as the camera tracks through, it flees. Marketa lies
prostrate before the cross, her hair spread out. Later, the fighting at Boleslav is intercut with
the verbal exchanges at the convent, the violent images contradicting the words and indicating the
irrelevance of Marketa’s proposed abdication from life. Like the woman in Buňuel’s Nazarin, she
chooses her lover rather than Christ.

The world of Marketa Lazarová is primitive and brutish, and, if anything, Vláčil’s film celebrates
the immediacy of its direct passions, which were, of course, the opposite of the compromise
required within his own society. While the Christian solution is rejected, the only hope for
tolerance and humanity is offered by the young generation and the transforming power of love (i.e.,
Mikuláš and Marketa). Their lives are sacrificed to the political feuds engineered by the old, and
in this respect, the film recalls William Wyler’s western The Big Country (1958). However, in the
latter film, the old eliminate each other. In Vláčil’s film, the old survive their crimes, and a
conclusion of false optimism is avoided.

The combination of elliptical narrative with a visually rich and evocative style produces a
powerful and fascinating film unique in the history of Czechoslovak cinema. In particular, the
powerful emblematic images should be emphasized the wolves, the raven, the snake, the hawks, the
deer, the lamb, a poetic menagerie of hunters and hunted with their associations of death and
freedom. The continual presence of the idea of the werewolf, a common superstition at that time,
provides an apt parallel for the lives of the film’s leading male characters.

Bedřich Balka’s use of black and white cinemascope strongly recalls such divergent inspirations as
Grigori Kozintsev and Akira Kurosawa. The setting of horses against landscape is reminiscent of
Kurosawa’s work in Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954) and Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jo,
1957). The influence of Bergman’s pioneering attempts to evoke the Middle Ages in The Seventh Seal
(Det sjunde inseglet, 1957) and The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukaellen, 1960) must also be acknowledged.
However, these influences should not be allowed to diminish the vision of either Vláčil or Vančura.

What is peculiarly characteristic of the film is its battery of poetic, associational, and
disruptive effects, which are in no way typical of Vláčil’s other films. They are primarily an
attempt to find an equivalent to the figurative and metaphorical ambitions of Vančura’s original.
The bardic titles that break up the film give it the epic quality of the picaresque novel and can
also be related to Brechtian distanciation. Similarly, the violence of the film’s rapid forward
tracking movements and its succession of visions, flashbacks, and flashforwards mark a significant
break with traditional narrative conventions.

In Valley of the Bees (1967), Vláčil again worked with similar material. While still concerned with
the “essential” passions of human beings, the film makes more explicit points about religion,
culture, and ideology. The visual style is restrained and more obviously derived from the geometric
rigor of Eisenstein or even Vávra, whose Hussite trilogy sometimes made up for lack of historical
insight with formal composition and structure.

Co-scripted with Vladimír Körner, whose novel Adelheid was to form the basis of Vláčil’s next film,
Valley of the Bees tells the story of Ondřej of Vlkov (Andrew of Wolfenberg), the son of a Czech
nobleman, who is raised as a member of the Order of St. Mary of Jerusalem (the Teutonic Knights).
At the beginning of the film, Ondřej rejects his father’s new teenage bride by hiding a collection
of squirming bats in a ceremonial basket of petals. A chant of exorcism is heard, and in his anger,
Ondřej’s father throws his son bodily against a stone wall. Appalled and fearing for his son’s
life, he vows him to the service of the Virgin should his life be spared. The shape of the film is
then simple, following Ondřej’s later return from the knight’s castle and its consequences.

Vláčil loses none of the opportunities for formal and geometric composition offered by the castles
and costumes of the knights. There are, of course, parallels with Alexander Nevsky – the knights
clad in white, the formal repressive force of Teutonic Christianity; the Czechs clad in black,
linked still to the traditions of primitive religion and the indulgence of sensual passion. This is
very much the same symbolic distinction as that made by Eisenstein-between the repressive force of
the Germans and the everyday humanity of the Russians. However, while it would be pointless to deny
this symbolism, Vláčil is not content with a simple propaganda exercise and tries to project
himself into the conflict of traditions and values with historical insight.

Following the film’s opening confrontation between father and son, during which the incipient love
of Ondřej for his stepmother, Lenora, is already suggested, the background changes from one of
spring celebration to the bleak, dark outline of the knights’ castle on the Baltic. As the camera
examines the formal perfection of the architecture, we hear Ondřej’s voice as he takes his vows. He
promises to renounce his father and mother, to harden his heart, and never to succumb to the
temptation of man, woman or his own body. The visual mass of the stone walls emphasizes the
repression that this implies and the rejection of humanity.

The suppressed feelings reemerge in the form of an unacknowledged homosexual relationship. Ondřej
is befriended by a handsome and bearded religious bigot, Armin von Heiden (Jan Kačer). The latent
homosexuality is emphasized when Armin first comes upon the naked youth crouched by the edge of the
sea. Later, when adults, Ondřej (Petr Čepek) lies naked in the sea with Armin, their arms locked in
a bondage that will destroy them both. The object of the exercise is “to numb the lower body for
the sake of the spirit.”

Ondřej’s desire to return to his homeland and escape from his religious prison is strengthened when
he sees a fellow knight thrown to the dogs for attempting to run away. When he does leave, Armin
obtains a special dispensation to bring him back. There is a scene of tremendous power that
superbly conveys Armin’s mixture of personal passion and religious mania. His helmeted figure
kneels in the pouring rain and cuts a cross into the wood of the seashore that marked their meeting
place. Later, when Armin reaches Vlkov castle, the scene is recalled as he approaches the door of
the church, again in pouring rain, and hammers on the wooden door with the haft of his sword.
Armin’s encounter with the opposite sex takes place only after he has entered Bohemia. He informs
the blind girl he meets, in a matter-of-fact tone, that if she were to touch him, she would lose
her hand.

 On Ondřej’s return to the castle of Vlkov, he finds that his father is dead – devoured by his own
hunting dogs – while his stepmother, Lenora (Věra Galatíková), and her predominantly aged retainers
eke out a frugal and apathetic living. He learns that his father had cursed her for what happened
and had been hoping to secure Ondřej’s release from the order. Lenora prays:


           O Lord, save us from the poison that went into the grave

           Let the grain ripen

           Do not let the werewolf poison the well

           Do not let the snake drink the cow’s milk

           May Vlkov castle live in peace.


When the passion of Ondřej and Lenora reasserts itself, she scourges herself since, according to
church law, such a relationship counts as incest. Nonetheless, the local priest, whose religious
views are more adaptable, is prepared to sanction their union. He likens their relationship to that
of the bees who immediately build a new house when the old one is destroyed. But the new spring and
the new hope are short-lived. Armin arrives at their wedding, in a scene that provides a precise
parallel to Ondřej at that of his father. Fatefully, Lenora’s insistence that he attend the wedding
feast leads to her death at his hands in the bridal chamber. Armin is thrown to the dogs and
explicitly likened to a werewolf, but, in the final analysis, Ondřej accepts his dying advice to
return to the order.

Valley of the Bees is a film in which the leading characters are destroyed by the logic of their
own passions, which include “technical” incest and unacknowledged homosexuality. Not least of the
film’s virtues lies in the way in which Vláčil shows his characters’ feelings as latent, as
motivating forces operating independently of conscious intention. Armin’s love for Ondřej is never
shown as anything other than an attempt on his part to return him to the path of true Christianity.
Similarly, his rejection of women forms part of the same ideology. Despite his beliefs, his
passions find a way even in the fulfillment of obligation. At the same time, he recognizes an
internal struggle, and life can only be meaningful for him if the guilty are punished. He must
believe that the angels would still exist even if the whole of mankind were to be destroyed.
Without them, he argues, men would be no better than dogs or wolves.

The film is set in the thirteenth century when Bohemia had already been a Christian kingdom for two
centuries. Nonetheless, Vláčil indicates the positive elements to be found in pagan survivals such
as the traditional mid-summer solstice and the accommodating, though almost irrelevant, form of
local Christianity. Against this is set the austerity of Armin’s foreign brand of Christianity,
which would seek fulfillment of the ideal at the expense of existing humanity. The explicit
Czech/German opposition is given added weight if the order’s subsequent career of aggression and
territorial aggrandizement is taken into account. Although the film is clearly opposed to the
dogmatism represented by Armin, Ondřej finally accepts the values of his “foreign brother,” less
because he believes in them than because there seems to be little else to do. It is a situation not
uncommon in Czech history.

As in Marketa Lazarová, life is shown to be crude, brutal, and violent. The references to
werewolves and cannibalism and the continuous presence of hunting dogs permeate the film. The
escaping knight, Ondřej’s father, and Armin are all, in the end, eaten by dogs. When Ondřej’s dogs
hunt down a deer, we see a tear roll from its eye when its throat is cut. The image is recalled
when Armin’s mailed arm draws a knife across the throat of the half naked Lenora – the unfeeling
destruction of beauty, of the positive elements in the human situation. As the human werewolf,
Armin’s actions link with the dogs/wolves/death associations.

Like Vláčil’s previous film, Valley of the Bees shows a remarkable ability to evoke the atmosphere
and cultural values of a past age. Although the ideological ascendency of the knights is finally
accepted, it is not shown as a solution to any problem, and Vláčil sides with the cause of pagan
humanity. The tragic outcome of the conflicts engendered by culture and ideology remains a constant
preoccupation with Vláčil, and the contemporary relevance of the theme is made more obviously
apparent by his next film, Adelheid (1969), which is set in the period immediately following the
Second World War.

Adapted once again in collaboration with Vladimír Körner, Adelheid is set on the northern Moravian
frontier and presents its story within the context of relations between the Czechs and Germans, who
were to be deprived of their property and expelled from the country. In a parallel context, Eugen
Loebl has described a visit to the Sudetenland after the war, in which he likened the Czech
treatment of Germans to the Nazi treatment of Jews:

When I came into the town from which the area was administered, I saw a lot of people wearing white
armlets. I was told these were Germans who were being gradually expelled. The white armlets were
the equivalent of the Star of David, which Jews had had to wear under the Nazis. These Germans also
received Jewish rations, that is, the starvation rations which the Jews received under Hitler. At
dinner in the evening, we were served by German girls, apparently from good families, and
apparently the preserve of the new supermen. When I got back to Prague, I told my friends and
relations how shocked I was by this. They were quite surprised at what they called my “decadent
liberalism:’ They said I had been in England during the war and knew nothing about the atrocities
committed by the Germans except what I had read in the newspapers, whereas they had been through it
all. They had been humiliated, tortured and persecuted. So any nastiness that was being done to the
Germans was less than they deserved. I gradually realised that Hitler had not really lost the war.
The power he had exploited was still there. His ruthlessness, his profound contempt for human
beings and their rights, had taken root. His ethics had not been destroyed with the Third
Reich.[10]

As is evident from Loebl’s observations, this is a controversial subject, and it is precisely
against such a background that the story of Adelheid is set. It examines the relationship between
Viktor Chodovicky (Petr Čepek), a Czech airman returned from service in the Royal Air Force, and
Adelheid (Emma Černa), the daughter of a Nazi factory owner now in captivity. She speaks only
German and he only Czech. Despite this undeniably schematic basis, Vláčil is not content to engage
in easy moralizing, to allocate blame on the one hand or preach a message of brotherhood on the
other. Instead, he carefully follows the nuances of a developing relationship between two people
broken by the conflict and divided by culture and history.

Adelheid is a film of considerably more interest than might be expected from Skvorecký’s
observation that it was basically a soap opera rescued by Vláčil’s art.[11] The opening of the film
provides an ominous setting for what is to follow, with the credit Adelheid appearing in red
against the black and white background of a railway tunnel. It is a violent and contradictory
effect that suggests blood, tragedy, and the emergence from nightmare. When the exhausted Viktor
refuses to show his papers at the frontier, he is forced off the train and hit with the butt of a
gun by the frontier guard (Pavel Landovský). He rolls down the embankment in slow motion to the
incongruous accompaniment of music by Johann Strauss. His face bleeds. A woman spits on the ground.
Besides conveying the habitual violence of the period, the scene suggests the sick and delirious
state of Viktor’s mind. The shock value of slow motion within a conventional context also serves as
an alienation effect, preparing the audience to look at what follows with a new awareness.

Viktor has returned from the war, but it is by no means clear why he has come to this part of
Czechoslovakia. The only answer is provided through the images of horses grazing in a lush green
landscape and the beauty of the mansion that Viktor is free to adopt as his home. But the images of
peace are deceptive. Behind the green fields are German women working in their white armbands, and
there are also minefields. When he opens a window in the house, the sound of machine gun ňre can be
heard in the distance.

He becomes aware of Adelheid’s existence the morning after his arrival when he finds her scrubbing
the floor. She has been assigned to him as a servant, and she asserts proudly that she does not
understand a single word of Czech. Viktor is informed by the local police chief (Jan Vostrčil) that
her father, Haldemann, had been “the biggest fascist in the district,” had originally taken the
house from a Jewish family, and was now about to be tried for his crimes. He is shown cages in the
gardens that had first been used for dogs and then for Polish prisoners. Like Loebl, Viktor is told
that the Germans deserve the treatment they are getting and that he should be careful not to treat
Adelheid too well.

Their awareness of each other is at first conveyed in small, delicate touches. She looks up from
her work at his bare feet and waist as he leans on the doorpost, looking out of the house. He
watches her movements as she reaches into a cupboard or pushes the hair back from her brow. At
first, his interest is obvious and voyeuristic, a point emphasized by Vláčil when Viktor looks at
her through binoculars and, subsequently, through the slats of a Venetian blind.

Gradually, through his exploration of the house and its contents, Viktor builds up a picture of her
family background. Most affecting is his discovery of a child’s birthday book, used for writing,
painting, and the exchange of poems and pictures. He notices that one of the pieces is written in
Czech and asks Adelheid in surprise if she understands Czech. The child’s book not only recalls a
past when racial differences mattered less, but suggests that the values of childhood were
different, that Adelheid had Czech friends. Her present stance is shown as a pose, a habit acquired
during the war and now maintained in self-defense.

This penetration into her past leads to a sequence of romantic intimacy. They sit together by the
fire, smoking, the black silhouettes of their figures outlined against the flames. She maintains
her silence, but, for Viktor, this is an advantage. He says that he’s pleased she doesn’t
understand him and is able to talk freely about his past and the house where he was born. He puts
his hand on her knee and then kisses her passionately. The falling rain and the firelight provide a
conventional accompaniment to their romance but are not overstressed.

This fragile mood is immediately shattered the following morning. The images of Adelheid washing,
stripped to the waist, are frank and unromanticized. She soon has a cigarette drooping from her
mouth as in previous scenes, and the return to reality is complete when two women come to tell her
that her father has been executed.

The final tragedy is precipitated by the return of Adelheid’s brother from the Russian front.
During a struggle between him and Viktor, she hits at them with an iron bar and kills her brother.
After her arrest, she and Viktor put their feelings into words, although the relationship is still
expressed in oblique references. She reveals that she stopped hating him when he saw her chopping
wood and he blushed. He tells her that he has no one else and offers to help. His offer is rejected
visually by an extreme close-up of her face followed by a long held shot of prison bars. The
barriers imposed by history are too great.

Viktor waits, an isolated figure at the far end of a large room – a deep focus shot in which his
situation is stressed by the impersonal framing of walls and ceiling. He runs from the room when he
hears that Adelheid has locked herself in the lavatory. But she has already hanged herself. Again,
the scene is in long shot and parallels the earlier image of Viktor. The lonely, isolated, and
pathetic figure recalls the stripped and degraded heroine of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar.
A policeman reads the formal report that converts her life into words and statistics.

Again, as in his previous work, Vláčil places his hopes in the possibility of human exchange
between individuals, and again it is the intervention of wider social and ideological demands that
prevents their realization. In Adelheid, the tentative understanding between two people is
threatened and finally destroyed by the intervention of the outside world, symbolized by regular
visits from the police chief. It is he who fires bullets into the pictures in Adelheid’s house,
exposes the cages in the garden, almost goads her into a stance of Germanic superiority by playing
a Nazi march on the gramophone, and meets a bloody death at the hands of her brother on his third
visit. He represents the official view of reality as conditioned by the war.

The main formal device in Adelheid rests on the fact that the two protagonists are unable or
unwilling to communicate with each other in words. The fact that this can be explained logically
means that Vláčil is able to make his observations without being accused of pretension or
formalism. The way in which he follows and observes his characters in everyday movement has much in
common with the work of Antonioni.

If his previous films could be read in an allegorical way, Adelheid must be regarded as striking
much harder and more directly at some of the simplifications of Socialist Realism. The conventional
treatment of the war, and one that has returned since 1968, has always stressed the heroism of the
partisans in the fight against the evils of fascism. In crossing the barriers, in having a German
heroine who was the daughter of a Nazi, in showing how the Germans were mistreated by the Czechs in
the postwar period, Vláčil broke quite radically with conventional stereotypes. He was not the
first to do this, and Adelheid came three years after the Kachyňa/Procházka Coach to Vienna (1966),
which also featured a silent heroine. However, Vláčil’s muted psychological analysis generates
greater force than the more polemical approach of Kachyňa and Procházka. It is a deeply felt
account of the distortions forced on humanity by racial and ideological conflicts beyond conscious
control.

The continuing theme of Vláčil’s work is the human distortion caused by cultural and ideological
conflict: East versus West (The White Dove), Christianity versus paganism (Marketa Lazarová, Valley
of the Bees), Czechs versus Germans ( Valley of the Bees, Adelheid).  With the exception of The
White Dove, a work that is beautiful but scarcely convincing, his vision may be characterized as
one of pessimistic realism. All of the last three films described here end in the death of at least
one of the principal characters. In holding the potentiality for freedom and humanity in
juxtaposition with the distortions of ideology, his approach is surely more Marxist that that of
approved propaganda. While he inevitably projects his own and his society’s preoccupations into the
past, his attempt to see historical periods including the postwar years in terms of their own
values and contradictions is genuine and rarely attempted. The absence of solutions can be seen as
part of a general trend within Czech cinema of the mid- and late sixties, the idea that audiences
should examine their own consciences and situation.

Vláčil’s interest in visual effect and formal composition owes much to his early training as an art
historian. While it is obvious that he has chosen specific visual approaches appropriate to his
themes, it is interesting that his cinematographers have differed. Jan Čuřík worked on the lyrical
The White Dove, Bedřich Baťka on the baroque Marketa Lazarová, and František Uldrych on the
visually more traditional Valley of the Bees and Adelheid. Although Vláčil’s work avoids some of
the more obvious formal innovations of the sixties, the strength of imagery quite clearly removes
his films from any consensus or establishment style.



In: Hames, Peter. The Czechoslovak New Wave. University of California Press, Berkley, 1985.








________________________________

[1] František Vláčil, interviewed in ibid., p.174

[2] Škvorecký, All the Bright, p.209

[3] René Wellek, “Vladislav Vančura,” Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, ed.
Horatio Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 842

[4] “A Film Epic: Marketa Lazarová,” Czechoslovak Film (1966-67), p.2.

[5] Jaroslav Boček,”En marge de ´Marketa Lazarová,´” Image et Son, no. 221 (November 1968), p.73.

[6] František Pavlíček, quoted in “A Film Epic: Marketa Lazarová,” Czechoslovak Film (1966-67),
p.3.

[7] Vláčil, interviewed in Liehm, Closely Watched Films, p. 175.

[8] “A Film Epic: Marketa Lazarová, “ Czechoslovak Film (1966-67), p.3.

[9] Vláčil, interviewed in Liehm, Closely Watched Films, p. 177.

[10] Eugen Loebl, Conversations with the Bewildered, trans. George Gretton (London: Allen & Unwin,
1972), p. 27.

[11] Škvorecký, All the Bright, p. 212.