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This is only available as part of the František Vláčil box, but the individual disc has its own spine number so I thought it deserved its own thread.

Not least because it's getting reviewed separately by the likes of DVD Outsider.

I was wondering if this would get its own thread. I thought it was interesting, although the long takes of locations from Vlačil's films reminded me a great deal of the "Islands" featurette about Tarkovsky and Paradjanov (that was one of the extras on Kino's Paradjanov boxset).

On the other hand, Jirí Kodet does as good a job as one might expect in bringing the deceased director back to life. Still, the film felt respectful but perhaps overly contemplative.

Wouldn't it make sense to flop all four (five?) films in one thread ala the criterions?

knives wrote:Wouldn't it make sense to flop all four (five?) films in one thread ala the criterions?

I wouldn't be keen, personally - Vláčil is ghettoised enough already, and the likes of Marketa Lazarova and Adelheid are very different films.

Too true, though if discussion is any indication he's one of the least ghettoized of the directors they've released for.

Also against consolidation: the discs were released individually over an extended period, so if everything were combined into one thread (organised chronologically), the individual discussions of films could get garbled, and writers posting in film-specific threads probably weren't specifying which film they were talking about in their original posts.

Also, doesn't the 'greatest Czech film of all time' (TM) deserve its own thread on a film forum?

knives wrote:Too true, though if discussion is any indication he's one of the least ghettoized of the directors they've released for.

But the discussion is pretty much exclusive to these forums - at least in English.

And I speak with considerable authority here, as I must have read every scrap of material written about Vláčil in English when researching for my Sight & Sound article and the programme handouts for the BFI Southbank retrospective. In many cases there was no useful English-language material available at all (nothing on Serpent's Poison or The Little Shepherd Boy from the Valley aside from 50-word promotional blurbs).

Incidentally, I consolidated all my handouts into a single PDF file, which you're welcome to download - with the caveat that they had to be written very quickly to tight deadlines in a very busy month.

I especially apologise for the overly brief note for The Little Shepherd Boy from the Valley, which was based on a two-month-old memory of an unsubtitled viewing, so I'm fully aware that I left out great swathes of info (for instance, there's a substantial and surprisingly politicised discussion about education in postwar Czechoslovakia that's very well integrated into the narrative, but I couldn't recall enough fine details to write about it confidently). I'm also annoyed that most of the diacritics disappeared between submission and printing, but that was out of my control.

As per SR's newsletter, Sentiment is now available on its own through SR's website.

Michael Brooke discusses František Vláčil.

Don't get too excited - that's the same Sight & Sound piece from last summer, already linked to from the Adelheid thread.

Since I wrote it, I've managed to see Vláčil's last feature Mág, which sadly didn't do much for me - I suspect it speaks rather more forcefully to Czechs who are already familiar with the life and especially poetry of its subject, Karel Hynek Mácha, but even allowing for that it was a disappointingly conventional biopic in purely cinematic terms. I'm assuming this was why this and the Dvořák biopic were left out of the otherwise complete touring retrospective.