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 ...

Just wanted to add a note about the apparent slightly negative comments about the visual quality of the Second Run DVD release - well, how petty can you get! This astonishing film is incredible to look at and is surely one of the most beautiful films ever made though not, it has to be said, in a conventional sense. Although some scenes feature genuinely authentic brutality, there is a strange dream-like quality to the film's look. The story itself demands total concentration throughout but, by the end, you will be fully rewarded for your efforts. A poetic masterpiece. Great work again by Second Run for making such a cinematic rarity available to view.

"Marketa Lazarova" was a film I saw in 1970 at a small film theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It left an indelible memory, and I've spent years trying to find a way to see it again. At least once a year, I find a note I left about a phone call I've made to some obscure library or other such place in the hope of finding a way to see it.

The film won an Academy Award, and it should be remembered. It is stunning in black and white; the story is remarkable in its content and direction.

If anyone has ideas about how we fans can possibly revive this movie, we should try to do so. It is worth all the trouble and more just to see it again and again.

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.

I bought the Second Run DVD, after reading about how this epic was considered the best Czech film, ever.

To be honest, not many other contenders spring to mind. And, who voted? As it was on special offer and I am a sucker indeed for that Russian style of gritty monochrome composition and beauty, how could I resist?

I'm on its second play and I'm no nearer following the story. There is undoubtedly one. Am I too overawed by imagery that I could only dream of? (even if I were able to!) Is it the savagery and feel of a certain reality?

I don't know. I can sense, however, an art film made with passion and unbounded imagination. Of folklore, both in a historical sense and a cultural one and of religious rebellion. Like Kurosawa at his best, an immediacy and connection. Yet, it is also dreamlike and distant, with an air of mysticism that I found increasingly confusing. The length of film means that by halfway through I've no idea what is going on, but am still enjoying what I see.

Unfortunately, I have docked a mark for the forced, electronically induced echo on the dialogue that probably is supposed to denote that other worldly strangeness. It seems to seep in and hang about, its constant use here cheapens the effect to being a bit of a pain. Whereas Kurosawa used that SFX so effectively on, say Roshomon, by using just once or twice.

I could see elements of the Brazilian 'Black God, White Devil' and like others have commented, Kurosawa's 'Seven Samurai' and Tarkov's 'Andrei Rublev'. Maybe some of the black magic in Bergman's late medieval classics, such as 'The Virgin Spring' and 'The Seventh Seal'. But more psychotic, more manic and disturbing than all these put together. Like madness itself, there is a real beauty deeply ingrained amongst the mayhem.

My conclusion would have to be that if you get the chance, go for it. Take it with a large pinch of salt and sprinkle sparingly. None of it is truly horrific or unpalatable to most adults and don't worry if you don't "get it". Be slightly proud and immodest that you've found a tarnished gem that hardly anyone else will have seen or are ever likely to.