Frantisek Vlácil

Frantisek Vlácil was born on February 19, 1924 in Cesky Tesin, in the Moravian-Silesian region of the Czech Republic. He studied art and aesthetics at the Masaryk University in Brno. His dedication to cinema did not go through the famous Prague Film School, but he gradually approached celluloid, working in puppet and documentary animation workshops. His taste was detected by the film unit of the Czech army, which would commission him about thirty training and propaganda documentaries. He internationally attracted attention in Venice in 1957 thanks to the short documentary Sklelená Oblaka , a wordless story about a boy and an old man who share a passion for flying. His poetic spirit can already be detected in this early film, which enables him to shoot his first fictional work,Pronásledování (1959), the first half of the diptych Vstup zakázán .

His first completely solo work of fiction is The White Dove (1960), presented again in Venice. Aesthetically very beautiful, and with a leading girl, she is reminiscent of Albert Lamorisse ‘s The Red Balloon in approaches . As usual in his filmography, the dialogues are kept to a minimum. The film will be considered representative of the new Czech cinema that Prague Spring makes possible, although unlike other fellow filmmakers Vlácil is not one to be politically significant, he is dedicated to his artist’s work; he will even habitually place his stories in the past to avoid suspicion from the authorities. It marks his first collaboration with Zdenek Liska, who has since composed the soundtracks for his films.

The Devil’s Trap (1961) is therefore situated in the time of the Counter-Reformation, and it is a poetic and strange story, markedly pessimistic, about a miller in full communion with nature, which certain Jesuits consider suspicious and with diabolical overtones. This oblique look at religion –for some, a parable about the political context in which it lives, something not too obvious– as opposed to pagan customs will be present in her best-known but also cryptic work, Marketa Lazarová(1967), which describes in a far from simple way the rivalries between two clans in the Middle Ages, of which the young woman in the title will be a victim. An excessive film, which took two years to shoot, dazzles with its imagery and music, but its experimental qualities and the abstruse nature of the proposal make it an unconventional narrative film, reserved for aesthetes and specialists eager to investigate. Vlácil’s work invites comparisons with Ingmar Bergman and, above all, with Andrei Tarkovsky , although their openness to transcendence, their particular search for the divine, is more evident.

The 13th century pleases Vlácil, or at least his next film, The Valley of the Bees (1968), has the same historical context and the same concerns about the clash between pagans and Christians and the way this affects customs. . Again there is a forced love relationship, when the protagonist, formed among the Teutonic knights, considers marrying his father’s widow. There is undoubtedly more risk in Adelheid (1969), if only because the action takes place on the day after the end of the Second World War, and focuses on the way in which the defeated were treated. The protagonist, after serving in the RAF, receives a farm that belonged to the Germans, and a daughter of the former owners has to serve him, which little by little leads to a love affair.

The Soviet invasion makes it difficult for him to make movies as regularly as before. He participates in children’s films, but it cannot be said that he delivers a purely personal film until 1977, when he shoots Smoke in the Potato Field . His next film, Shades of a Hot Summer , is described as a Czech Straw Dogs . Vlácil would continue making films, albeit quietly, until almost a decade before his death. Recognition of his work is not as broad as might be expected, although in 1998, a year before his death, he was awarded a special award for his entire career at the Karlovy Vary Festival.