661 Marketa Lazarová

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domino harvey
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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#76 Post by domino harvey » Sat Oct 26, 2013 9:57 am

movielocke wrote: I can't believe there's so little post release discussion.
Probably because many of us already saw this several years ago and discussed it in the Second Run thread

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movielocke
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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#77 Post by movielocke » Mon Oct 28, 2013 6:28 pm

domino harvey wrote:
movielocke wrote: I can't believe there's so little post release discussion.
Probably because many of us already saw this several years ago and discussed it in the Second Run thread
Thanks. I read through the nine pages and saw these two posts with substative comments about the movie (Most of the thread is about the consternation over what source was used for the 2007 dvd release).
http://criterionforum.org/forum/viewtop ... 75#p317430" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://criterionforum.org/forum/viewtop ... 00#p401184" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

(note that there are also numerous substantive links of interest in the Second Run thread).

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Sandman
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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#78 Post by Sandman » Mon Oct 28, 2013 7:40 pm

This may well be my choice for release of the year. At the very least, it will be my "best discovery."

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movielocke
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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#79 Post by movielocke » Tue Oct 29, 2013 6:05 pm

The documentary on Vlacil is pretty good, he reminds me, on camera personality wise, of a combination of Bergman and Kieslowski. I may have to check out the Vlacil set on another label because I presume Criterion is done for the next decade or so.

The interview with the costume designer was quite fun, he's so enthusiastic, his story of how he became a costume designer on the white dove is pretty amusing, so many people accidentally fall into careers in the movies. Also, it's pretty amazing that his credit is artistic contributor, rather than costume designer, on Marketa Lazarova.

I loved Gunning's essay on the film, just superb writing, in particular, I loved this paragraph:
In less than two minutes, Vláčil creates a world tensed with potential violence yet interwoven with a harsh natural beauty. This is a world of hunters and victims, of watchers and the watched, of confined hiding places and vast emptiness. The camera self-consciously brings us either too close to things to see clearly or too far from them to make them out. Yet this obscurity never alienates us from this environment but rather sets it vibrating with threat. We are lost in an enigmatic place whose dangers must be figured out if we are to survive. Without setup or explanation, we watch the Kozlík brothers attack a small caravan of German knights. The bandits spy them from the thicket, attack stealthily, and kill mercilessly. The camera peers through branches, creeping along like a predator itself, hiding and observing at once. Action fragments the screen, and the death throes of the prey obscure our view as blood stains the snow. In an image that serves as an emblem for the film, Vláčil shows a motionless wolf pack watching in expectation and then leaping forward to devour the victims left by human violence. Violence comes suddenly but with a wild lyricism, as if fulfilling the desire of a sadistic Nature or God. Few films are as cruel as Marketa Lazarová, and yet it is so vital, as filled with life as it is full of death, evoking sensual pleasure as if to compensate for portraying suffering in all its forms.

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/ ... a-lazarova" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
and the other essay more or less persuaded me to pick up the brand new translation of Marketa Lazarova.

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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#80 Post by Rolad » Thu Nov 21, 2013 9:59 am

There's something about Marketa Lazarová that feels so appropriately medieval. It's full of striking juxtapositions, mixing beauty and ugliness in a way that I find very captivating. Nothing in the film feels orthodox, from its bleak cinematorgraphy with atypical composition, to its heavy post-sound work which often gives it eerie silences combined with its unsettling soundtrack, but it all feels right. The only other film that I think has a comparable atmosphere would be Anrei Rublev. Also, I think one of the best things I had read about František Vláčil was that he was "The Czech New Wave's formalist, postexpressionist wrecking ball."

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Re: Criterion & Eclipse Cover Art & Packaging Babble-on Vol.

#81 Post by MichaelB » Mon Dec 02, 2013 4:57 pm

Lowry_Sam wrote:Personally, I think content is taking more of a hit than packaging (look at Zatoichi). Nice packaging is a plus, but I become more disheatened by smaller bit rates (Fanny & Alexander) and sparse features (Marketa Lazarova) for the titles that really warrant more discs.
Marketa Lazarová's extras were fine - not the least bit "sparse".

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Re: Criterion & Eclipse Cover Art & Packaging Babble-on Vol.

#82 Post by feihong » Mon Dec 02, 2013 6:29 pm

I would have loved to hear a commentary on Marketa Lazarova, but maybe it wasn't possible. This is one of those movies, though, that would have benefitted from the kind of commentary we got on the disc for Fassbinder's Lola, which was both an analysis of the film and a review of Fassbinder's whole career. Vlacil is someone about whom most of us know very little. But maybe that's part of why there was no commentary.

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Re: Criterion & Eclipse Cover Art & Packaging Babble-on Vol.

#83 Post by swo17 » Mon Dec 02, 2013 6:32 pm

feihong wrote:I would have loved to hear a commentary on Marketa Lazarova, but maybe it wasn't possible. This is one of those movies, though, that would have benefitted from the kind of commentary we got on the disc for Fassbinder's Lola, which was both an analysis of the film and a review of Fassbinder's whole career. Vlacil is someone about whom most of us know very little. But maybe that's part of why there was no commentary.
I mean, a commentary would have been nice, but it is a long film, and anyway, the documentary on the disc provides a nice, if brief, overview of Vláčil's career.

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Re: Criterion & Eclipse Cover Art & Packaging Babble-on Vol.

#84 Post by feihong » Mon Dec 02, 2013 6:38 pm

I guess I just prefer commentaries. For me it's the form of information disbursement to which I'm most receptive. It's true that commentaries have never really been an obligatory extra for Criterion, but I always thought it was one of their best ideas. The scholarly commentary in particular seems to be predominantly the work of Criterion.

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Re: Criterion & Eclipse Cover Art & Packaging Babble-on Vol.

#85 Post by zedz » Tue Dec 03, 2013 12:03 am

Lowry_Sam wrote:I wasn't saying that all releases are short on features, just that some could have made stellar 2 (blu-ray) disc packages, while other releases with nice features seemed to lower the bit rate to cram them onto a single disc.
MichaelB wrote:Marketa Lazarová's extras were fine - not the least bit "sparse".
This is the one I was most disappointed with as it presented a really good opportunity for a stacked package. Extras could have easily been expanded for a second disc of extras, while leaving the first disc to max out bit rate, commentaries & trailer. There could have been a documentary on the book itself, its author and the difficulty of translating it into other languages, as well as its historical importance. I do believe a lot of the story & film gets lost on contemporary audiences not familiar w/ history of Europe or of Christianity. Interviews with those now translating it into English & challenges they had would be nice. A more comprehensive/career-spanning doc on Vlacil also would have been nice & his relation to Czech new wave. Also absent is any of the documentaries on the career of Zdenek Liska since his music is so integral to the film & not widely available.
Almost all of those proposed features would have had to be generated from scratch, making an already risky release far more expensive and quite likely totally infeasible. The disc as released contains more than two hours of extras, for heaven's sake!

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Re: Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

#86 Post by matrixschmatrix » Tue Dec 03, 2013 12:06 am

As far as the bitrate thing goes, unless you can point to specific artifacts or errors or another release with a higher bitrate that looks better, it seems fruitlessly hypothetical to me.

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Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

#87 Post by MichaelB » Tue Dec 03, 2013 2:49 am

zedz wrote:Almost all of those proposed features would have had to be generated from scratch, making an already risky release far more expensive and quite likely totally infeasible. The disc as released contains more than two hours of extras, for heaven's sake!
Indeed - and for a Czech film that was completely unknown in the US before Criterion released it.

I thought they did a fine job.

Put it like this: I bought it even though I already had the Czech BD with its well-nigh identical transfer. I certainly wouldn't have done that if Criterion's extras genuinely had been "sparse"!

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Re: Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

#88 Post by Perkins Cobb » Wed Dec 04, 2013 2:39 pm

MichaelB wrote:Indeed - and for a Czech film that was completely unknown in the US before Criterion released it.
Well, that's a slight overstatement -- Marketa had some exposure in New York and Los Angeles throughout the 2000s either singly or as part of a Vlacil retrospective, enough to probably develop more of a cult than, say, the Pierre Etaix films or the individual WCF titles. But of course that still puts it far towards the obscure end of the Criterion catalog.

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Re: Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

#89 Post by mteller » Wed Dec 04, 2013 3:04 pm

It's also fairly high on the They Shoot Pictures list (currently #292, between Philadelphia Story and Harold & Maude), which was enough for me to seek it out 6-7 years ago. I'm sure many other like-minded list-completers did the same.

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domino harvey
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Re: Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

#90 Post by domino harvey » Wed Dec 04, 2013 3:06 pm

And plenty of Americans here imported the Second Run disc years ago

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Re: Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

#91 Post by swo17 » Wed Dec 04, 2013 3:21 pm

mteller wrote:It's also fairly high on the They Shoot Pictures list (currently #292, between Philadelphia Story and Harold & Maude), which was enough for me to seek it out 6-7 years ago. I'm sure many other like-minded list-completers did the same.
It saw a huge surge this year thanks to the latest Sight & Sound Poll. Note its placement over the last eight years: 919 → 997 → 0 → 0 → 0 → 0 → 755 → 292. (Those zeros are years it didn't place at all.)

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Re: Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

#92 Post by Lowry_Sam » Wed Dec 04, 2013 7:24 pm

MichaelB wrote:Indeed - and for a Czech film that was completely unknown in the US before Criterion released it.
Well I certainly knew about it (and have been emailing Mulvaney to add it to the catalog for the past decade or so) and I knew about it because I saw the Pacific Film Archive's print, which has also toured the country. So for one of the big US film archives to own a copy & tour it regularly over the past several decades bodes well for at least a few people knowing about it. Moreover the film was polled as the greatest Czech film of all time (by those in the Czech industry) in the 90s & has remained at the top of that list. As it is also an adaptation of a Czech literary classic, it is also familiar to those in Czech/Slovak/Eastern European studies.....and the theme of paganism vs. Christianity make it also of interest to those in the studies of the history of religion.

The reason it is not well known in the US (outside of Americans' disdain for history and things foreign) is because much of the film's themes get lost on American audiences as they are not familiar with the history the film covers or the book. The English translation still hasn't been published yet (though it's supposedly due soon). It's a complicated text to translate & it's very connected to Czech history and religious history, so the question of whether to use lots of footnotes is probably a consideration. Since most Americans' purview of European historical narratives doesn't extend much beyond WWII & Holocaust films, more supplemental material would have given the package a much broader appeal & perhaps help bring it to a wider audience. Without more context, I think the film will always remain a "niche" interest for those interested in pretty cinematography or enrolled in Czech studies.

So if and when Criterion releases The Devils, we should likewise not expect any supplemental material on Aldous Huxley & The Devils Of Loudon or the time period/religious history it covers?

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Re: Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

#93 Post by zedz » Wed Dec 04, 2013 10:28 pm

Lowry_Sam wrote:
MichaelB wrote:Indeed - and for a Czech film that was completely unknown in the US before Criterion released it.
Well I certainly knew about it (and have been emailing Mulvaney to add it to the catalog for the past decade or so) and I knew about it because I saw the Pacific Film Archive's print, which has also toured the country. So for one of the big US film archives to own a copy & tour it regularly over the past several decades bodes well for at least a few people knowing about it. Moreover the film was polled as the greatest Czech film of all time (by those in the Czech industry) in the 90s & has remained at the top of that list. As it is also an adaptation of a Czech literary classic, it is also familiar to those in Czech/Slovak/Eastern European studies.....and the theme of paganism vs. Christianity make it also of interest to those in the studies of the history of religion.
Nobody is disputing the film's importance or quality, but the bare fact remains that this was not and never was (until very, very recently) a well-known film outside of Czechoslovakia. It's never had much of a presence in the English language critical literature, never had a commercial release (or, as far as I can tell, much of a festival presence at the time), and not been available on home video in English language markets until Second Run released it a few years back. All of these factors give it only a very small ready-made audience (compared to practically everything else Criterion releases) and make it a tough sell for Criterion. Compared to the profile of other 60s Czech films like A Blonde in Love or Daisies (which, lest we forget, was relegated to an Eclipse set), this film is very small potatoes commercially, and it's gratifying and surprising that Criterion went to such lengths with this release.
The reason it is not well known in the US (outside of Americans' disdain for history and things foreign) is because much of the film's themes get lost on American audiences as they are not familiar with the history the film covers or the book.
No, the reason that it is not well known in the US is because, for whatever reasons (too challenging, too brutal, never made it to a festival where an American distributor could see it, 1960s sales agent was a complete asshole), it's a film that happened to be bypassed by history, like dozens upon dozens of other out-and-out masterpieces of the past. If a film doesn't manage to make an impact on the festival circuit at the time of its initial release and - even more crucially - doesn't secure a commercial release in a major foreign market, and if the filmmaker doesn't attain subsequent fame that might spark high-profile retrospectives, that's an enormous hurdle for an obscure foreign film to overcome, and it's really only drastic intervention (a high-profile punt on an unknown film by a trusted arthouse distributor / DVD label; a festival-circuit revival; a high-profile retrospective of the director) that can counter that kind of historical slight. This should all remind us that the apparent reversal of fortune for Marketa Lazarova is a very rare case, and that there are countless films out in the wilderness that are as great or greater that might never be rediscovered.

Terrific films like The Marines Who Never Returned and Reenactment are as celebrated in Korea and Romania as Marketa Lazarova was in the Czech Republic, but they too are just going to languish in relative obscurity until some bold label / distributor drags them into the North American light. At which point their reputation might take off or it might slip back into darkness and languish for another 50 years.

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Re: Why Won't They Release Only What I Want?

#94 Post by Sandman » Thu Dec 05, 2013 9:57 am

zedz wrote:...it's gratifying and surprising that Criterion went to such lengths with this release.
And I for one am so pleased that they did. This film has been a revelation for me and is one of my favorite discoveries of the year.

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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#95 Post by repeat » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:27 am

zedz wrote:Terrific films like The Marines Who Never Returned and Reenactment are as celebrated in Korea and Romania as Marketa Lazarova was in the Czech Republic, but they too are just going to languish in relative obscurity until some bold label / distributor drags them into the North American light.
Or O Drakos in Greece, or Eight Deadly Shots in Finland, or The Goat Horn in Bulgaria, all of which still remain to be dragged even into European light... Probably not the first thing on anyone's mind over there right now, but the EU really should get their stuff together for a WCF-type Euro film heritage project. (Or is there such a project already?)

Anyway this reminds me I really, really, really need to unwrap my Blu of Marketa Lazarová asap

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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#96 Post by MichaelB » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:40 am

repeat wrote:
zedz wrote:Terrific films like The Marines Who Never Returned and Reenactment are as celebrated in Korea and Romania as Marketa Lazarova was in the Czech Republic, but they too are just going to languish in relative obscurity until some bold label / distributor drags them into the North American light.
Or O Drakos in Greece, or Eight Deadly Shots in Finland, or The Goat Horn in Bulgaria, all of which still remain to be dragged even into European light... Probably not the first thing on anyone's mind over there right now, but the EU really should get their stuff together for a WCF-type Euro film heritage project. (Or is there such a project already?)
For years the only English-friendly release of Szindbád (a strong candidate for Hungary's equivalent - it's invariably included somewhere on both critics' and audience polls, and it's topped more than one) was a VHS tape with such poor colour reproduction that it made a nonsense of the film's greatest asset. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that a decent DVD came out, we had to wait to 2011 for an anamorphic DVD, and there still hasn't been a Blu-ray.

In fact, that could be a really interesting pan-European box set project - restored copies of what people in each member state thinks is their greatest film masterpiece, with subtitles in every official language.

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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#97 Post by jindianajonz » Thu Dec 05, 2013 12:35 pm

MichaelB wrote:In fact, that could be a really interesting pan-European box set project - restored copies of what people in each member state thinks is their greatest film masterpiece, with subtitles in every official language.
I'd kickstart that.

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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#98 Post by jsteffe » Thu Dec 05, 2013 2:00 pm

MichaelB wrote:In fact, that could be a really interesting pan-European box set project - restored copies of what people in each member state thinks is their greatest film masterpiece, with subtitles in every official language.
That is a fantastic idea! I'm sure it would result in the rediscovery of some truly great films, and it's exactly the kind of cultural project that the EU should support.

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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#99 Post by repeat » Thu Dec 05, 2013 2:38 pm

They did sort of embark on something a little bit like that in 2001, when 15 prominent Euro directors were invited to curate a pan-European series of screenings of their respective countries' underexposed treasures (referenced here in the National Lists thread). But that system did lead to some debatable selections, and national polls can be fickle indicators of cinematic worth as well (like Michael Atkinson pointed out in this excellent article). With prominent critics curating it shouldn't be impossible to reach a consensus in most cases though. It's funny it hasn't been done yet - I bet anyone in their right mind who is not a filmmaker would certainly rather see Euro cinema subsidies going into something like this than 90% of the dreary contemporary festival fodder that no one will ever want to rewatch :roll:

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Re: 661 Marketa Lazarová

#100 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu Dec 05, 2013 2:54 pm

That article seems sort of sneering and weirdly dismissive towards a number of movies, Marketa Lazarová included- like, Mon oncle Antoine is a pretty great movie, and Mad Max is an extremely widely beloved one. Using 'if you're so great why haven't we heard of you' logic seems like the opposite of the whole idea of trying to rescue lost or underknown gems from various national cinemas.

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