General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Marketa Lazarova

Marketa Lazarová (Markéta Lazarová) is a 1967 Czechoslovak historical film directed by František Vláčil, freely adapted from Vladislav Vančura's 1931 novel of the same name. Set in mid-13th-century Bohemia amid the transition from paganism to Christianity, it follows a feud between the bandit clan of the robber knight Kozlík and the royal power that hunts them down. In a 1998 poll of Czech and Slovak film critics marking the centenary of Czech cinema, it was voted the most important Czechoslovak film of all time.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Production	Filmové studio Barrandov, Czechoslovakia, 1967; black and white, 2.35:1 widescreen³
Runtime	160 minutes per the National Film Archive; other sources list 159, 162, 165, or 166 minutes¹^•⁴^•⁵
Structure	Two parts, Straba and Beránek boží (Agnus Dei), with intertitles introducing each episode¹^•⁶
Key creatives	Director and co-screenwriter František Vláčil; screenplay with František Pavlíček; cinematography Bedřich Baťka; music Zdeněk Liška; editing Miroslav Hájek³
Principal cast	Magda Vášáryová (Marketa), Josef Kemr (Kozlík), František Velecký (Mikoláš), Ivan Palúch (Adam), Michal Kožuch (Lazar)³
Filming	16 January 1965 to 10 September 1966, largely in Šumava-region exteriors⁷^•³
Canon status	First place, 325 points, in the 1998 critics' poll for the best Czechoslovak feature film of the century²

Spoilers

Story and source

The plot is set in the harsh mid-thirteenth century, when robbers attacked travelers on the royal roads and Christianity still contended with the old pagan faith. The robber knight Kozlík and his numerous clan fall from grace after his sons detain the young Saxon count Kristián, and the Bohemian hejtman (royal captain) Pivo becomes their dangerous pursuer. Kozlík's son Mikoláš rapes Marketa, the daughter of the cunning squire Lazar, while Kozlík's daughter Alexandra, who has had an incestuous relationship with her brother Adam, falls in love with the captive young man. The pursuit ends in a great slaughter in which the wounded Kozlík is captured; Mikoláš fails to free him and is mortally wounded. Before father and son reach the scaffold, the hejtman marries Mikoláš to the pregnant Marketa. Alexandra kills the maddened Kristián. A wandering monk, Bernard, observes the events.¹

The source novel, published in 1931, was written by Vladislav Vančura, a modernist novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and resistance figure who was murdered by the Nazis in 1941 as part of the reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The National Film Archive notes that Vláčil and Pavlíček turned away from the whimsical, humanely benevolent original toward a harshly lyrical vision, and that the film is by no means a model example of literary adaptation.⁸^•⁹ A scholarly account of the adaptation adds that the filmmakers also drew on Vančura's Obrazy z dějin národa českého (1939–1940), combining material from both texts into a distinct narrative.¹⁰

Production

Scale. Work on the project took nearly seven years. Vláčil and screenwriter František Pavlíček spent about three years converting Vančura's linguistically demanding text into a screenplay, and filming in the Šumava exteriors took another three years, followed by a demanding edit.¹¹ The Senses of Cinema account describes a 548-day shoot during which meticulously researched settlements, costumes, and artifacts were built to be lived in, an environment rather than a conventional set.⁸ At the time of its release it was the most expensive project in the history of Czechoslovak cinematography.¹²

Exterior locations listed in the production record include Horní Planá, Nová Pec, Mrtvý Luh, Kvilda, the castle Rabí, the Basilica of St Procopius in Třebíč, the peat bog Soos near Františkovy Lázně, and the church of St Michael the Archangel in Dražovce near Nitra.³ For the key roles Vláčil cast by appearance and mentality rather than by star status; the title role went to the then sixteen-year-old Magda Vášáryová, for whom it was her second film.¹¹^•¹³

The production chronology recorded by Filmový přehled runs from approval of the literary screenplay for the first part on 9 September 1963, through the start of filming on 16 January 1965 and its end on 10 September 1966, to approval of the first copy of both parts on 31 March 1967. The festival premiere took place on 6 October 1967 at the 18th Film Festival of Working People, and the nationwide premiere, closed to minors, followed on 24 November 1967.⁷

Style and sound

Vláčil's aim, as the Criterion Collection summarizes it, was to re-create the textures and mentalities of a long-ago way of life rather than make a conventional historical drama; with its widescreen cinematography, editing, and sound design the film plays as an experimental action film.¹⁴ The narrative structure is complex: chronology is repeatedly broken by fragmentary reminiscences and visions of some characters, and each episode is introduced by intertitles hinting at the action.¹

The soundtrack is unusually rich. It mixes laconic dialogue with literary monologues, cries and interjections, the shrieks of birds of prey, and a narrator's voice, all treated with unusual reverberation.¹ Zdeněk Liška's score, performed by the Film Symphony Orchestra with the Kühn Mixed Choir under František Belfín and Pavel Kühn, is only loosely derived from the attributes of medieval musical culture, placed instead within the stylistic frame of early twentieth-century music and partly the New Music; a Charles University thesis analyzing the score describes it as a complex musical structure matched to the film's character through its chosen musical language.³^•¹⁵ Janus Films' synopsis calls the film, shot in stark widescreen black and white and driven by Liška's choral, percussive soundscape, perhaps cinema's strangest, most beautiful, totally unrepeatable medieval vision.⁵

A central theme is the collision of Christianity and paganism: Kozlík's clan represents the old pagan ways, while Lazar's clan is moving toward Christianity, as seen in his plan to make his daughter a nun. The film refuses to take sides, presenting the savagery of the pagan Kozlíks and the violence of the king's Christian army as equally brutal parts of the same world.¹⁶

Reception and canon status

The film collected domestic honors soon after release: the main prize for the literary screenplay at the 1965 art competition for the 20th anniversary of liberation, multiple awards at the 1967 workers' film festivals (including the main jury prize and audience prize at Olomouc), the Trilobit for direction in 1968, the State Prize for 1967 with the honorary title of laureate of the Klement Gottwald State Prize for Vláčil and Pavlíček, and the special jury prize Malý kondor at the 9th Mar del Plata International Film Festival in 1968.³^•² A journalists' poll at the 1994 Karlovy Vary festival also named it the best Czech film of all time.¹¹

Abroad, the film remained little known for years. It was not released in the United States until 1974, in a severely edited version that received mixed reviews, its medieval setting distancing it from the contemporary-social readings foreign critics applied to more successful Czech films.¹⁶ At home it gradually faded from public view, screened rarely in cinemas and shown by television mostly late at night, though it escaped the censorship bans of the early 1970s; renewed critical attention came only from the late 1990s.¹²

Canonization. In the Projekt 100 poll held for the centenary of Czech cinematography, organized by the magazine Film a doba at the 1997 Karlovy Vary festival and announced on 19 January 1998, Czech and Slovak critics gave the film first place as the best Czechoslovak feature film of the century with 325 points; respondents cited its harmony, balance, and resistance to time.²^•¹⁷ It has since placed highly in other surveys, including fourth among experts and third among listeners in Czech Radio's 2018 Kánon100 poll, and it was the highest-rated Czech film in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll at number 154.²^•¹⁸ The Criterion Collection released it on home video in the United States in 2017.¹⁴

Restoration

The film was digitally restored in 2011 and presented in the restored version at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival that year.¹⁹^•¹¹ A new 4K restoration, distributed by Janus Films, was scheduled to screen at Film at Lincoln Center in New York from 4 to 13 September 2026 as part of its New Releases series, in Czech and German with English subtitles.⁵^•²⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026