Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Marketa Lazarová
1967 · František Vláčil · Marketa Lazarová on Sightlines
Snow comes first. A white field fills a frame much wider than it is tall, and a file of horsemen in furs crosses it, small and dark, their breath hanging in the air. Before we know who these men are or what they want, we know what the cold is doing to them. That order matters. František Vláčil's Marketa Lazarová puts the weather ahead of the story and the body ahead of the psychology. It shows people as one more kind of animal moving through a world much older and larger than they are.
The story itself is simple to state. Mikoláš, son of the robber chieftain Kozlík, takes part in a raid that leaves his clan holding a young German hostage of noble blood. Royal retribution is now coming. Mikoláš rides to the neighboring lord Lazar to demand an alliance, is refused, and in revenge carries off Lazar's daughter Marketa on the eve of her entry into a convent. That is the premise. The film refuses to tell it the way such stories are usually told.
Start with the snow, because Vláčil and his cinematographer Bedřich Baťka built the film's look around it. Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books classifying the kinds of images cinema can make, has a name for space like this: the any-space-whatever. Normally a film's setting is a stage for action. It is the road you ride down or the hall where you fight. An any-space-whatever has come loose from that job. It is a stretch of space felt for its own sake, a void or a fragment, and it no longer tells the characters what to do next. Baťka's snowfields work this way. They aren't so much places in Bohemia as blank white pressure on the edges of the frame. Deleuze also points to a line of filmmakers, Dreyer above all, who built feeling out of white and light rather than out of shadow. He calls this lyrical abstraction. Vláčil inherits it directly. The flat gray faces of Dreyer's Day of Wrath, held against darkness in a story of witchcraft and pagan dread, return here as faces caught in shafts of light inside near-black huts, cut against the blinding white outside.
So why bring Deleuze in at all? Because the film is trying to do something historical drama almost never attempts. It wants to show a mind that no longer exists. This is Bohemia at the moment Christianity is pushing paganism back, and Vláčil isn't interested in costume. Deleuze's concept of the originary world fits what he does. In certain films, Deleuze says, a concrete historical setting turns out to be a thin surface over a savage, older world of hunger, appetite, and violence. That older world is the true ground the setting rests on. The clan of Kozlík lives on that ground. Its people rob, feast, scuffle, and take what they want, and the convent Marketa was promised to sits on the far side of a line the film keeps crossing. The furs, weapons, and dwellings carry lived-in weight. Nothing looks like a prop.
Then there is the editing, which is where first-time viewers get lost and where the film's real invention lives. Miroslav Hájek cuts the story into shards. Scenes break off and interleave. Dreams and memories slide in without a signal to tell us we have left the present. In the classical cinema Deleuze calls the movement-image, each shot hands off to the next the way an action leads to a reaction, and the story moves along that chain. Here the chain is cut. What joins one image to the next is association and rhyme, which Deleuze calls the irrational cut: two shots joined across a gap, with no line of cause running between them. You have to put chronology together yourself. That is the point. Hájek is translating the archaic, broken texture of Vladislav Vančura's 1931 novel, and in a world where omens and dreams count as much as events, a cut that won't sort dream from fact is simply being faithful.
The sound pulls the same way. Zdeněk Liška layers wind, animal cries, whispered and declaimed voices, and chant. Intertitles and a narrating voice frame the action in an older register, as if these events were fated and long past. Deleuze describes a voice that doesn't converse but legends. It speaks the way a chronicler or a teller of sagas speaks, and it lays a second time over the image. We watch the fight happen now while a voice recounts it as legend. The soundtrack often works against the picture or runs past it, and the two never quite settle into one moment.
The actors are treated as landscape too. Magda Vášáryová, very young, plays Marketa almost without speeches, as a presence that suffers and changes. Josef Kemr's Kozlík and František Velecký's Mikoláš have a feral gravity. Acting comes down to posture, gaze, and the body's endurance, which is what Deleuze means by a cinema of the body: the body carrying time and belief in how it stands and moves. The lore says the cast lived rough through a two-year shoot. Treat that as legend if you like, but the weathered faces on screen are not acted.
Film theory has an old argument running through this film. André Bazin praised cinema for its faithfulness to physical reality, the real mud and real breath that a camera records and a painter can only imitate. Eisenstein built history as composed, ritual tableau. Marketa Lazarová refuses to choose. The handheld camera shoves among bodies with documentary roughness, then stops for an image as severe as an icon. The lineage is visible in both halves. Alexander Nevsky taught the fusion of medieval battle and choral music that Liška's vocal score extends. Ivan the Terrible supplied the hieratic, non-psychological performance. Bergman's The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring showed faith, death, and sudden violence in stark monochrome. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood made fog and wind into characters and set the camera moving through them. Vláčil folds all of these into a film that stood apart from the ironic Czech New Wave around it. Later, Tarkovsky would cross the same ground of art-cinema medievalism by his own means.
Its significance is close to a dare. In 1998, Czech critics and historians voted it the greatest Czech film ever made, and the case rests on this: it showed that an epic could be built out of immersion rather than plot, and that a historical film could take us inside a vanished way of thinking instead of dressing the present in old clothes. So watch it as weather. Let the cuts work as associations rather than mistakes. Hear the narrator as someone telling an old story by a fire. Then ask the question the film keeps open: what did the world look like to people who had not yet decided whether it belonged to God or to the forest?
Concepts in play
- espace quelconque — Baťka's blinding snowfields and landscapes flattened into abstraction, felt as white pressure on the anamorphic frame more than as a setting for action
- lyrical-abstraction — Extreme contrast of white snow and near-black interiors, faces isolated in shafts of light; the debt to Dreyer's Day of Wrath and its flat gray faces held against darkness
- originary-world — Bohemia at the turn from paganism to Christianity is shown as a world of robbery, feasting, abduction and violence beneath the historical surface; the robber clan of Kozlík and the abduction of a convent-bound noblewoman
- interstice / the AND — Hájek's elliptical, non-linear editing organized by association, juxtaposition and rhyme, so the viewer assembles causality from shards
- onirosign — Dreams and memories cut together with events without conventional signposting
- acte de parole (legending) — Intertitles and a narrating voice in archaic diction that recount events as fated and long past, with passages of near-incantation
- audiovisual-disjunction — Liška's score, chant, wind and declaimed voice that frequently pull against or exceed the image
- attitudes & postures — Performances reduced to gesture, gaze and physical endurance; faces used as landscape (Vášáryová, Kemr, Velecký)