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The Hungarian maestro’s approach to slow cinema goes beyond mere camera movement or aesthetic style; it represents a unique way of perceiving and reflecting on life and humanity. His exquisitely crafted long takes serve as an assemblage of ‘crystals of time’, embodying the cosmic passage as in Werckmeister Harmonies. These ‘time-images’ contain no fragments, let alone montage; each moment is a microcosm, and every sequence shot has a duty to the time of the world.

During this seven-year stint, from 1951-1958, Vláčil worked on several instructional and propaganda films, alongside fellow future filmmaker Karel Kachyňa, as well as cinematographer Jan Čuřík, with whom Vláčil would collaborate numerous times. Their visually meditative short film, Clouds of Glass, which dramatised a young boy’s infatuation with fighter pilots, transcended its military trappings, receiving a special prize at the Venice International Documentary and Short Film Festival in 1958. After leaving the army, Vláčil directed his first feature, The White Dove, in 1960, which was honoured at the Venice Film Festival and brought the filmmaker international recognition. From there, he embarked on what would eventually become a trilogy of lavishly reconstructed historical dramas, beginning with 1962’s The Devil’s Trap. He followed this up with the hugely ambitious medieval romance Marketa Lazarová, which established Vláčil on the world stage and was voted the greatest Czech movie of all time.

Original unsold ads and postersPopularly known as one of France’s foremost novelists, Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) extended her imprint to cinema at the end of the 1950s and immediately broke new ground. First working with director Alain Resnais, acclaimed for documentaries including the powerful Night and Fog, Duras wrote a radical work of rapid intercutting and unprecedented hybridity in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Holding disdain for commercial cinema and its conventions, Duras wasted no time in continuing to innovate and build her themes with other key filmmakers.



