zedz wrote:It's a simple medieval tale of village politics, vindictiveness and revenge, told in the glancing, impressionistic style of many a New Wave classic, but strengthened by a wonderfully tactile sense of its world, very much in line with Vlacil and Tarkovsky (though the timeframe doesn't seem right for either Andrey Rublyov or Marketa Lazarova to be a direct influence, since Dragon's Return was made in '67).
Marketa Lazarová premiered on 6 October 1967.
Dragon's Return premiered on 10 May 1968.
But it seems pretty clear from the interview with Eduard Grečner in the indispensible
Golden Sixties box that
Dragon's Return was completed some considerable time earlier, belatedly released during the Prague Spring, shortly after which Grečner was blacklisted from directing and worked in a dubbing studio for over a decade.
And I can't see how either Grečner or Vláčil could have seen
Andrey Rublyov - which, although complete, was then shelved. It certainly wasn't an influence on Vláčil, since both
Marketa and
Rublyov were shooting at the same time in 1965-66.
Incidentally, Grečner also reveals that the "glancing, impressionistic style" in this case was achieved by shooting 90% of the film through long lenses - initially an expedient method of getting the sets to look less artificial.
Oh, and I agree with you about the score, though Grečner is seriously pushing it when he claims that the film "initiated that whole style of music". Zdeněk Liška's score for Vláčil's
The Devil's Trap (1961) alone gives the lie to that!
