Fantastic World of František Vláčil

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Sunday, 06 February 2011 23:39

Written by L E Shannon

The Film Society of Lincoln Center presents The Fantastic World of František Vláčil running February 2 -10, 2011 at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater in New York City.  Appearing in person are actor Jan Kacer (Valley of the Bees) and critic Peter Hames (author of The Czechoslovak New Wave).

A major figure of the 1960s Czech New Wave, albeit a lesser known one, Vláčil’s preferred themes were conformity vs. free expression, and using history to clarify the present. His films have been called “visual poetry”.

His 13th-century epic Marketa Lazarová was voted the greatest Czech film of all time in a 1998 poll, but Vláčil did not stop there.  From his first film in 1960, his work spans the genres from children’s tales to critiques of post-WWII Czech politics and society. Forcibly put into hiatus due to accusations of subversion following the Soviet invasion of 1968, Vláčil returned to filmmaking in the late 1970s and remained active until his death in 1999.

Some of the selections screening are:

Marketa Lazarová (1967)
Based on a novel by Vladislav Vancura, and a must-see on the big screen, “Vláčil’s towering medieval masterpiece has justly been compared to Tarkovsky, Eisenstein and Welles for its expressionistic portrait of a pious young woman, Marketa Lazarová, who finds herself caught in the crossfire of a violent internal clan rivalry during the shift from Paganism to Christianity.” With Magda Vášáryová, Josef Kemr

The Devil’s Trap / Dáblova past (1961)
This is the first in Vláčil’s cycle of historical epics, set in 16th-century Bohemia in a drought-stricken village. The local miller and his son come under investigation by an Inquisition priest who believes their prosperous mill to be the work of Satan himself. “[T]his gripping account of free will at odds with religious dogma ranks among Vláčil’s finest work.”

The Valley of the Bees / Údolí vcel (1967)
Vláčil’s second foray into medieval mythology recounts the odyssey of a young man, Ondrej, consigned as a boy to a puritanical order of Teutonic Knights following his attempted sabotage of his father’s marriage to a beautiful younger woman. When the adult Ondrej breaks free of the order and returns to his Bohemian village, his ascetic mentor gives chase in an attempt to win back his acolyte. With Jan Kacer (who introduces the film on Feb. 5), Petr Cepek, Vera Galatíková.

Adelheid (1969)
Vláčil’s first color film is a romantic drama set in the post-WWII Sudetenland, where a former RAF airman is assigned to inventory the estate of a Nazi war criminal whose daughter is assigned to the airman as a servant. This film marks the departure from historic epics to the legacy of World War II, and was also the first film to reflect the Czech persecution of Germans during the expulsions of the mid-1940s. With Petr Cepek, Emma Cerná, Zdenek Mátl.

Smoke on the Potato Fields / Dym bramborove nate (1976)
Vláčil’s first adult drama after his filmmaking hiatus. After many years in France, a doctor returns to Czechoslovakia and sets up practice at a rural clinic. Newly separated from his wife, he soon develops a fatherly bond with a pregnant young woman turned out by her mother.

For further information, visit www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/vlacil.html.

The Fantastic World of František Vláčil
February 2 -10, 2011

Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center
165 W. 65th St., between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave.
New York City
(212) 875-5601

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