Blu-ray, DVD Release: Marketa Lazarová

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: June 18, 2013
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion


Marketa Lazarová In its home country, František Vlácil’s 1967 historical drama-romance Marketa Lazarová has been hailed as the greatest Czech film ever made; for many U.S. viewers, it will be a revelation.

Based on a novel by Vladislav Vancura, this stirring and poetic depiction of a feud between two rival medieval clans is a fierce, epic, and meticulously designed evocation of the clashes between Christianity and paganism, humankind and nature, love and violence.

Vlácil’s approach was to re-create the textures and mentalities of a long-ago way of life, rather than to make a conventional historical drama, and the result is as harrowing as it is dazzling. With its inventive widescreen cinematography, editing, and sound design, Marketa Lazarová can best be described as an experimental action film—and we haven’t seen many of those!

Presented in Czech and German with English subtitles, the DVD and Blu-ray of Marketa Lazarová contain the following features:

• New high-definition digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interviews with actors Magda Vášáryová, Ivan Palúch, and Vlastimil Harapes and costume designer Theodor Pištek
• New interviews with film historian Peter Hames and journalist and critic Antonín Liehm
• New English subtitle translation
• A booklet featuring new essays by film scholar Tom Gunning and author and translator Alex Zucker and a 1969 interview with Vlácil by Liehm

 

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.