New Prints!
When a 1998 survey of Czech film critics named Markéta Lazarová (1967) "the best Czech film ever made," interest was piqued in the career of its iconoclastic director Frantisek Vlácil (1924-1999). Vlácil was a talent who steadfastly refused to fit into any school or "wave." Whether making historical epics or more intimate, personal dramas, Vlácil approached cinema not as a rival art to poetry, but as a vision of its ideals. "I have always striven for pure film; I wanted film to act as music and poetry," he claimed. Variety took a slightly different approach, terming him "the director with the eye of a painter." Both "poet" and "painter" capture well Vlácil's ability to use all of cinema's tools-its narratives, sounds, and sights-to search for the grace, the madness, and the sorrow of humanity.
Vlácil's works are often compared to three quite disparate directors: Sergei Eisenstein, whose poetics of composition and montage Vlácil studied while at the Barrandov Film Studios; Akira Kurosawa, whose sprawling samurai works are well matched by Vlácil's overwhelmingly visceral medieval epics; and Ingmar Bergman, whose interior psychological dramas are echoed in Vlácil's steadfastly Central European way. Almost unknown in the United States, Vlácil's works, from his feverish 1960s masterpieces to those made under strict censorship in the bleak, mundanely repressive 1970s and 1980s, inspired several generations of Czech directors, and now serve as a fascinating rediscovery of an era when directors could still be poets, and cinema could be poetry.
-Jason Sanders
