Abstract
Two anecdotes appear to be commonly associated with František Vláčil's magnum opus Marketa Lazarová. The more famous one is that it was voted by critics as the best Czech film ever made.
The other one is that the entire crew spent a year living in the wild, using only historical means of survival in order to create such material conditions as to be able to see through the eyes of medieval humans. This experience as part of the creative process came to be part of the film itself, as it is in many ways unlike anything else done by the makers.
A sprawling, ever-evolving chaos defying linearity and perspective, perhaps it could be best described as an arrangement of parts connected in complex relation with little that would resemble a unity into which all parts would disappear. The elements then form a multiplicity: the film is consciously one and many at the same time and forms no organic whole.