In addition to Vojtech Jasny, the contemporary of Helge's to achieve the greatest artistic success was Zynek Brynych. In "...And the Fifth Rider Is Fear" ("...a paty jezdec je strach" - 1964), he used the stories of the inhabitants of an apartment house in Prague during the Nazi occupation as a framework for an expressionistic and entirely contemporary commentary on how man acts in a situation where police terrorism makes ordinary honesty and decency a matter of life and death. Brynych also considered the fundamental questions of political morality in his later film "I, Justice" ("Ja, spravedlnost" - 1968), a fantastic story of a group of people who want to make the punishment of Adolf Hitler a matter of their own vengeful concept of justice. Oldrich Danek, the scriptwriter for "Hic Sunt Leones", who made his debut as a director in 1960 with the officially irreproachable "Three Tons of Dust" ("Tri tuny prachu"), also turned to history - "The Nuremberg Campaign" ("Spanila jizda" - 1963) - to seek metaphors for the present. In 1967, Danek made his best film, "The Royal Blunder" ("Kralovsky omyl"), a fourteenth-century tale about the relativity of despotic power.
Historical material was by far the best medium for Frantisek Vlacil, who in 1967 completed his unique reconstruction of thirteenth-century Bohemia, "Marketa Lazarova", based on the novel by V. Vancura. Supported by the photography of B. Batka, he achieved an almost flawless recreation of a period that hovered between paganism and Christianity and filled it with authentic portraits of people from another civilization. But in the last stages, Vlacil unfortunately lost artistic control of the large amount of material, which ultimately lacked the disciplined structure and the orderliness of the poetic original. In this sphere, he was more successful in another historically based film, "The Valley of the Bees" ("Udoli vcel" - 1968). The conflict between paganism and Christianity, between two moralities, two civilizations, is once again the central theme. But the things that had made of "Marketa Lazarova" a flawed great work of art, the immediate rawness and the poetic vision, were lacking in "The Valley of the Bees".
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