Often proclaimed the greatest Czechoslovak film ever made, this dense, hallucinatory medieval epic, pitting clan against clan and Christians against Pagans, is a rush of indelible, high-contrast, black-and-white ’Scope imagery, shot with an ever-prowling camera, edited furiously and restlessly switching between objective and subjective points-of-view. Trying to keep up with the labyrinthine plot is secondary to giving into the film’s experiential potency, as Vláčil’s painstaking insistence on authentic 13th-century period detail and hardscrabble brutality is raised, by stunning atmospherics inclusive of Zdeněk Liška’s majestic choral-electronic score, to the order of the sublime.

Preceded by The City in White (1972). A short symphony for snowbound Prague made when Vláčil was effectively blacklisted from feature-film production.

Both films courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.