JULY 1-13

"One of the most important retrospectives in recent memory."  TONY PIPOLO, ARTFORUM

"A welcome salute to a director whose work should be world-renowned."  KRISTIN M. JONES, WALL STREET JOURNAL

A film poet and master of imagery whose visionary work has evoked comparisons to Tarkovsky, Eisenstein, Bergman and Kurosawa, František Vláčil (1924-1999) is perhaps the least-known major figure of the Czech Republic’s storied national cinema. Vláčil’s films rank amongst the finest Czech films of the 1960s, the heyday of the Czechoslovak New Wave, a movement with which Vláčil has been more or less associated. Because he was a good decade older than most of its major figures, Vláčil is typically seen not as part of the Wave but as an important immediate precursor and influence; Josef Škvorecký, who adheres to this view, has called him the New Wave’s “brilliant fellow traveller.” In any event, until 1998, when his magnum opus Markéta Lazarová (1967) was voted, in a survey of 100 Czech film critics, “the best Czech film ever made,” Vláčil largely escaped international notice. A subsequent stirring of interest led, in 2002, to the first touring retrospective of Vláčil’s work in North America (it was presented at Pacific Cinémathèque in November/December 2002). Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson, writing at the time, called Vláčil “one of the most inspired subjects for a retrospective in years,” declaring that “Vláčil requires an international reawakening.” A decade later, Vláčil’s work remains too-little-known; this new retrospective, more comprehensive, has so far travelled to London, New York, Chicago and Washington D.C., and continues the effort to give Vláčil’s remarkable films the international spotlight they merit.

Vláčil, who studied aesthetics and art history before taking up filmmaking, approached cinema as a form of visual poetry. “I have always striven for pure film,” he said. “I wanted film to act as music and poetry.” A Variety critic once described him as “the director with the eye of a painter.” “Both ‘poet’ and ‘painter’,” wrote the Pacific Film Archive’s Jason Sanders in 2002, “capture well Vláčil’s ability to use all of cinema’s tools — its narratives, sounds, and sights — to search for the grace, the madness, and the sorrow of humanity.” Conformity, iconoclasm, and conflict — ideology versus freedom, the individual versus authority, the clash and crush of cultures, orthodoxies, dogmas — were important themes of Vláčil’s career, not only onscreen but off. His visionary, darkly beautiful films, so full of mystery, metaphor and allegorical resonance, were bound to be viewed with suspicion, or as potentially subversive, by censorious Communist officials. In the crackdown that followed the 1968 Soviet invasion, Vláčil, like many other leading Czechoslovak filmmakers, found himself unable to work for a number of years. His returned to cinema by, at first, making children’s films.

Pacific Cinémathèque is pleased to join with the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Canada in presenting this retrospective in Vancouver.

Acknowledgments: This touring exhibition was organized and its Vancouver presentation supported by the following: National Film Archive, Prague; British Film Institute; Czech Centre London; Czech Center New York; Irena Kovarova; and Petra Klobusiakova, Embassy of the Czech Republic in Ottawa.