Marketa Lazarová

I've only seen this movie once, in a restored print at a film festival a few years back; it's apparently not available on video in the US, which is a real shame. It's a medieval epic, basically about the clash between the old pagan world and the emerging Christian one, but there's a lot more to it than that. Visually, it's nearly as stunning as *Andrei Rublev* (and a good bit faster-paced); some of the images - wolves roaming the barren forests, horsemen in snowstorms - will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. I'll admit that I'm a sucker for gloomy, wintry European art movies, especially if they work some bloody sword-fights in, too, but this is one of the overlooked Great Movies ...

Man was a beast before the Middle Ages, but now it was one racked with guilt. Violence was the constant and would continue to be the shaper of worlds but, with the advent of this new religion preaching mercy and penitence, it was probably the first time that this violence was experienced within unprecedented, new frameworks. What had been passed through the blood for centuries in the Teutonic woods as the only means of arranging the world in some order, this instinctive violence, was now felt to be abominable.

In this sense, the religious angst of the medieval man comes from trying to conciliate that ancestral world where carving a blood eagle on the back of a fallen chieftain pleased the gods, with the new ideas of perceiving it, where sins had to be atoned for.

Here we get the tumultuous chronicle of this, the writing of the middle part of history.

We get baroque, medieval art, steeped in religious terror and ancestral guilt. Chances are there's a slew of medieval films out there, but probably not one that is as pungent, with a single exception. We encounter this cruel, pitiless hell on earth where life is meaningless and crazed gods roaming it exact terrible, ironic tolls on the human soul, ten years later in Diabel, by the hand of a certified madman this time.

Spiritually I couldn't be farther apart from this godless vision of tortured human beings, essentially Christian. But as an experience to dwell upon and inhabit, the film offers no quarter. It's a better Valhalla Rising, thirty years before.

What new frameworks here though, how best to experience the torture of the medieval man? The director finds the answer in the Czech New Wave.

The intertitle that opens this delineates what follows as a saga, an epic story of murder and intrigue. The masterstroke here lies in how this saga is told, in fragmenting it from a linear notion where time is a succession (which is the artifice of history) and presenting us with those fragments as a vivid experience of a life bled for and anguished. Which is to say, Marketa Lazarova is not the history of what transpired but the memory of it, which is then arranged into a story.

The camera then sees inside this story deeper than any bard did. And what it sees is that these passions and sufferings are not linear, therefore building up to something or anticipated to come to an end that would justify the pain, but an exponential cycle turning indifferently and without pattern.

Yet here is where the film falters. Having broken this up, the film shies away from the opportunity to look directly at what hides behind it, if anything, and insists we read this as a rhapsody where it's not impossible to consider the degenerate as cruel, flawed heroes who defied the king's rule. Bombastic music swells up in crescendos now and then to remind us that all this is horrible, but fundamentally tragic.

This may be a quibble however. It's a harrowing experience watching these men, small and insignificant at the face of violence, struggle with a pain and madness immemorial, that predates their existence. Omens of skaldic doom abound here, black crows in the bony branches of trees. Whatever they signify or not, whether the gods cackle at all this or are indifferently absent, these sights curdle the blood.

The film's reputation very well precedes it; in the first moment that I learned of 'Marketa Lazarová,' I also learned it's regarded as perhaps the best Czech movie ever made. I can appreciate why - I'm not familiar with the novel the movie is adapted from, but the story is exquisite. The narrative is as bleak as it is expertly crafted, and deeply engrossing. There's strong attention to detail in all things - every shot, every article of the costume design, every sight of set design, and eye-catching filming locations. The vivid imagery of a historical drama becomes ever more stark captured in black and white, including the countenances of the actors. The assembled cast is outstanding - all those most prominent before the camera, of course (Magda Vásáryová above all, embodying the all-important title role with all due gravity) but even those in supporting roles, realizing every vivid emotion and tribulation. Factor in many extras as well, and the landscape of medieval Europe seems dazzlingly real and tangible.

However - for as superb as the narrative is, and for as excellent as the picture is as a whole, I cannot say it's perfect. I have a rather difficult time engaging with the film at points, especially in the first half. The presentation of the story is disjointed: some story beats, or facets of each plot point that would round them out, are not expressed clearly, or at all. There is a substantial amount of narrative that does not play out before the camera, or dialogue that is spoken by figures who are not on-screen, and the audience is left to pick up the pieces and discern what they may. Fine as the tale is, it's extremely difficult to truly parse it without an outside synopsis to provide the context and clarification that the feature does not. For all the characters that are introduced, and given plenty of attention at varying points, the fates of some are left vague. The end result is that 'Marketa Lazarová' comes off not just as historical fiction, but an art film ruthlessly indifferent to conventional narrative flow.

To be clear, I think this is a great, grand film. The story it tells is magnificent in and of itself, and complex, even as it's terribly grim. All technical aspects are fantastic, including the direction; the cast is swell; the writing, broadly, is marvelous. Some sequences are truly exceptional - outright phenomenal - particularly nearer the end. But there are also many ponderous gaps in the plot progression, and otherwise instances of inelegant telling, that gravely stymie the absolute mastery of cinema that the feature could and should have represented save for those faults. That 'Marketa Lazarová' nonetheless succeeds in being so splendid a work despite its flaws is a testament to the skills of all involved, but the deficiencies are unfortunate all the same.

The content is oppressively dreary, and the execution as a whole has no few problems. Still, for all that: the immense quality, from start to finish, manages to well outweigh the issues of its rendering. I think this is a superlative example of what cinema can achieve that deserves far greater renown outside the Czech Republic; would only that the blemishes could have been cleared up. For many reasons this won't be a film that everyone can enjoy, but if one can look past the sometimes laborious effort that the viewing experience represents, I dare say this is essential. Though regrettably imperfect, 'Marketa Lazarová' is a captivating, striking exemplar of film that earns my most hearty recommendation, and it's very much worth watching by whatever means one is able.

I appreciate overseas even to notice this film, although I keep my doubt about the translation, for even the simplified movie dialogues are high-art and historizing. The film is based on Vladislav Vancura's brilliant novel (of the same name) its language level makes it untranslatable. It apparently caused my colleagues-in-comment some misunderstandings, for sure Czech King was no German in that time(even the christianity didn't come in our land germanways), only the noble man and his kidnapped son were.

This film is especially remarkable due to successful conversion of a great book into the great film (I don't recall many other examples at this level) and due to its capture of medieval. I hate medieval films with clean, stylish and crafty interiors, clothes etc. and bright light, for medieval was DARK, HARSH and DIRTY. What's the best part, Kozlik and Lazar were not just family-chieftains or family-heads, they were NOBLE MEN (feudals) and no matter whether they looked (and acted) like prowlers or not. Neither manners nor dresses were the significance of nobles in early medieval, the sword was (which no commoner was allowed to posses), better say swords and estates were.

This film is basically about weakness and strength in men. Lazar is thief and coward, kind of vulture, but Kozlik with his sons represents the willful and harsh power and bravery that summons an admiration of a sort, for they fear only the God, what makes them better christians than the sneaky Lazar jaws-full-of-Jesus.

Marketa, the unspoiled sweet child resembles all the clear, bright and pure in this world (and the only positive aspect of Lazar's sorry life), and is spoiled as everything clean and pure in this world might be. And she's devoted, first to God, then to earthly Mikolas.

I love the metaphore with zealot and little lamb, the connection between Marketa and the God's beast is obvious. Agnus Dei is another clear and bright to be tainted and consumpted by wild Kozlik's House.

And the sound and music, that's the world if its own, there's no music but sudden choir impacts!

Some of the most rewarding film experiences I know of annotate the medium itself, oftentimes than not so elliptically it's almost impossible to see at first. I don't mean Fellini's "8 ½" (1963) or "F for Fake" (1974) and their ilk; these are explicitly self-referential films, not that there's anything wrong in that. The films I am referring to aren't really self-referentially about film on narrative level, rather about something else entirely; they become film allegories by extension, as if in the periphery, accidentally.

"Marketa Lazarová" (1967), so audaciously otherworldly, is a film like that. I've seen it twice now, and slowly it's starting to reveal its riches. The first time around my expectations misled me to approach it as something closer to Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev" (1966), and while there are similarities, the film is so radical it's not that fitting a comparison in my mind.

The backdrop for the film is a profound historical and cultural paradigm shift where Christianity and paganism battle it out. Two opposites, the film can be seen as a poetic exploration of this struggle, and thus as a social document. While interesting, something else speaks to me more. For me the two allegorical forces at play are those of image and sound, and their use in film world, in filmic language. They often go their own ways, images showing us something and the narration swerving to somewhere else altogether, and the complex array of characters and their unorthodox introduction and presentation in the film underline the effect of confusion very powerfully. The overdubbed, echoing dialogue, often out of sync with the image, distracted me on first viewing, but it's unmistakably fitting in the grand scheme of things. Some images are so powerful I can't get them out of my mind (not that I'd want to, mind you!)

And the music! It's the highest compliment I can think of when I say for a film so visually rich that you should not only see it but listen to it. Liska's contribution to the film in some ways contributes to the modest thesis I've been trying to form in so short a space, that is the wonderful interplay of sound and image. Kieslowski's "Trois couleurs: Bleu" (1993) might compare if I wanted to search for something as equally stunning as this.

And I can't write about the film without mentioning the most wonderful sound I've come across in film. It's the convent bell, and one can hear it towards the very beginning, during the revelation and just before the intertitles, I think, and I think it's repeated at least once later on.

All in all, what an experience. We're lucky to have two Blu-rays of the film, the first a Czech Region B, the second a Criterion Region A release. The first one does have English subtitles.