[locke]

In less than two minutes, Vláčil creates a world tensed with potential violence yet interwoven with a harsh natural beauty. This is a world of hunters and victims, of watchers and the watched, of confined hiding places and vast emptiness. The camera self-consciously brings us either too close to things to see clearly or too far from them to make them out. Yet this obscurity never alienates us from this environment but rather sets it vibrating with threat. We are lost in an enigmatic place whose dangers must be figured out if we are to survive. Without setup or explanation, we watch the Kozlík brothers attack a small caravan of German knights. The bandits spy them from the thicket, attack stealthily, and kill mercilessly. The camera peers through branches, creeping along like a predator itself, hiding and observing at once. Action fragments the screen, and the death throes of the prey obscure our view as blood stains the snow. In an image that serves as an emblem for the film, Vláčil shows a motionless wolf pack watching in expectation and then leaping forward to devour the victims left by human violence. Violence comes suddenly but with a wild lyricism, as if fulfilling the desire of a sadistic Nature or God. Few films are as cruel as Marketa Lazarová, and yet it is so vital, as filled with life as it is full of death, evoking sensual pleasure as if to compensate for portraying suffering in all its forms.

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2809-cinema-of-the-wolf-the-mystery-of-marketa-lazarova

I just watched this for the first time in the last week, and I think it's the greatest film ever set in the middle ages, in medieval Europe or portraying the struggle between paganism and christianity, illustrating visually, aurally and narratively the tension between the sacred and the profane. (but which is sacred and which is profane, hmm? the film suggests both are)  It's a tremendous achievement, bleak, nihilistic, brimming with passion and aggression.



I can't embed it, but check out image seven here:
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2803-marvelous-images-from-marketa-lazarova

If you're interested in picking up the film, it will be on sale next week for 50% off at Barnes and Noble (and you can coupons or the member discount to lower the price further).  You will not regret it, it's the closest thing to Bakker on film you're likely to ever get.

British scholar Rajendra Chitnis, author of the only major study of Vančura in English, dubbed him “the heart of the Czech avant-garde,” placing him at the “radical center” of Czech literature between the two world wars. He was matchless in his stylistic range: through three short-story cycles, ten novels, five plays, one children’s book, and an unfinished multivolume chronicle of Czech history, Vančura, unlike his peers, embraced the contradictions of pursuing a progressive artistic agenda via mainstream genres. A pivotal example of his independent-mindedness was his withdrawal from the pathbreaking avant-garde art association Devětsil, only four years after he cofounded the group in 1920. Is the idealism of political progress a waste of time? Is modern bourgeois society the only possible reality? Is it we as human beings who fail, or the world we live in? As Chitnis observes, these were constant themes in Vančura’s writing.
...
In the decades following World War I and the Russian Revolution, these were more than just academic matters. The most important debates among intellectuals and artists in 1920s and ’30s Prague revolved around the question of whether it was possible to pursue one’s work without explicitly invoking politics or adopting a political stance. Vančura never embraced or abandoned either point of view, instead remaining committed to the subversive power of language—its capacity to stretch the limits of human resourcefulness, even (or especially) when working within the constraints of form or genre.
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2810-marketa-lazarova-vladislav-vancura-and-his-novel

[Francis Buck]

Yeah, I'll definitely be checking this out.

Another movie that strangely reminds me of TSA is Valhalla Rising (also one of my favorite movies ever). Very dark, brooding, mysterious, with a strange mysticality to it that's brimming just beneath the surface. It's extremely light on dialogue and to some extent, plot, however, and the middle drags a bit, but the first half hour to forty five minutes is one of my favorite sequences in cinema.

Also Mads Mikkelson plays Odin, so yeah. Badass.

[The Great Scald]

I saw this Czech movie a couple years ago, though I didn't see any similarities with Bakker's work.

I agree that the movie's aesthetic fits with Eärwa - especially the black-and-white color scheme, fitting for a world of black-and-white moral absolutes where everyone is either sacred or damned, even though all of them are morally "grey". 

[Baztek]

Watching Valhalla Rising atm. It just oozes Bakker

[Madness]

These suggestions remind me of Beowulf and The 13th Warrior, neither of which remind me particularly of TSA.

I like the stylistic choice by Beowulf to only include sounds from the movie, especially.