Marketa Lazarová

Marketa Lazarová (1967)

Putting the ‘dark’ back in the Dark Ages.

Mikolás and his brother Adam end up with a young German hostage of noble blood during a robbery. While their clan prepares for the wrath of the German king, Mikolás is sent to pressure his neighbor Lazar into a defense pact. Persuasion fails and he abducts Lazar's daughter Marketa on the eve of her initiation as a nun in an act of vengeance.

Date of release
1967-11-24
TMDB
7.8 / 10 (168)
Runtime
2h 46m
Genres
Drama, History
Director
František Vláčil

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Markéta Lazarová
  • Filmed in: Třebíč

Marketa Lazarová is a 1967 Czechoslovak New Wave epic period drama film directed by František Vláčil. It is an adaptation of the novel Marketa Lazarová (1931) by Vladislav Vančura. Set in the middle of 13th century when Christianity was taking over native Paganism in Central Europe, the film tells the story of a daughter of a feudal lord who is kidnapped by neighbouring robber knights shortly before she is to join a convent.

Production

Before production started, František Vláčil and František Pavlíček had to transfer the novel into screenplay. The text of the book was linguistically difficult and the transfer took a few years. The whole works on Marketa Lazarová took seven years.

Production itself took three years. The shooting started in 1964 and concluded in 1966. It took 548 days. The film was shot at multiple places in the current Czech Republic such as Lánská obora, Mrtvý luh and Klokočín Castle. Shooting took place during extreme conditions of tough winter. The intended budget was 7 million crowns but the film cost almost 13 million crowns in the end.

The film was originally intended to be longer. Vláčil wanted to make scenes named "Royal Pictures". These were supposed to be set at the royal court. These would feature the Czech king Wenceslaus I of Bohemia and the conflict between him and his son Ottokar II of Bohemia. These scenes were never filmed because the budget was already too high and the film would be longer than three hours.

The first picture would show old Kristián coming to the Royal Court asking for help to save his son. Present nobles would blame the king for being passive in the matter. The second picture would be set two years prior to the events. It would show the prince being convinced to overthrow his father. The prince would then start remembering when his father returned from a hunt injured and met his sons. The prince was afraid of him.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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