Marketa Lazarová

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František Vláčil’s staggering medieval epic, adapted from Vladislav Vančura’s landmark modernist novel, plunges into the blood-soaked borderlands of 13th-century Bohemia amid the uneasy transition from paganism to Christianity. Frequently hailed as the greatest Czech film ever made, Marketa Lazarová begins when the brutal Kozlík clan ambushes a noble procession and carries off a bishop-to-be, bringing the king’s soldiers down upon their forest stronghold. The violence soon reaches Marketa (Magda Vášáryová), a young woman promised to the convent, whose abduction by the nomadic horde’s fearsome Mikoláš (František Velecký) becomes the film’s harrowing emotional core. Shot in stark widescreen black and white and driven by Zdeněk Liška’s choral, percussive soundscape, Vláčil’s masterful epic remains a one-of-a-kind experience and perhaps cinema’s strangest, most beautiful, totally unrepeatable medieval vision. A Janus Films release.