Long his most widely disseminated work, František Vláčil’s baroque Middle Ages masterpiece Marketa Lazarová (1967) often serves as a discombobulating introduction to his oeuvre. For a long time, it was the only film of his much shown abroad – notwithstanding that it was scarcely known in the West until as recently as 2007, when British label Second Run released it on DVD, or that it was but one of three tremendous black-and-white features set in bygone eras that comprise a loose trilogy.
