One for the Ages: The Balladic, Painterly Cinema of František Vláčil

Despite rising to prominence in the 1960s, František Vláčil (1924–1999) was not a member of the storied Czechoslovak New Wave that emerged from Prague’s celebrated film school, FAMU. Rather, he had studied art history and aesthetics and came to cinema through performing military service, working for the Czechoslovak Army Film Unit.

Vláčil was famous for drafting detailed storyboards and exactingly adhering to their exquisite compositions during filming. Typically concerned with bygone eras, his productions routinely involved going to punishing lengths to obsessively create as authentic and lived-in depictions of the past as possible.

With all works sourced from the National Film Archive in Prague, this season includes his most celebrated and widely travelled work, 1967’s monumental, high-contrast black-and-white medieval epic, Marketa Lazarová, the middle masterpiece in a loose trilogy of visionary historical films bookended by The Devil’s Trap (1962, set in the 1700s and included in this season) and The Valley of the Bees (1968). Vláčil’s beautiful first feature, The White Dove (1960), a rare contemporaneous film, is also included, along with two works set in the immediate aftermath of World War II: his first colour film, Adelheid (1970), and perhaps his greatest late work, 1978’s Shadows of a Hot Summer.

Two shorts have been added to round out the program: 1958’s poetic Clouds of Glass, produced for the Army Film Unit, and 1972’s symphonic tribute to Prague, The City in White, scored by the great Zdeněk Liška, who also provided the extraordinary soundtracks for all of this season’s features.

Presented in partnership with the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia.