Issue #27 Aug. 1, 2024
Sins of the Father: František Vláčil’s Adelheid
By Steven Huff
Adelheid (1969). Directed by František Vláčil. With Petr Cepek, Emma Cerná, Jan Vostrcil, Milos Willig. Written by Vladimir Korner and Vláčil, based on Korner’s novel. Producer: Věra Kadlecová. Music: J.S.Bach, Johann Strauss, arranged by Zdenek Liska. Cinematography by František Uldrich. 1 hr., 39 mins. In Czech and German, with English subtitles. Color.
Streaming on Prime
[Note: While I do not reveal how the film ends, the following essay does hit on important plot points.]
It’s hard in the West to get a good dose of František Vláčil’s films. Mubi lists twenty of them but, frustratingly, even cruelly, they are only trailers. It’s a bit like grabbing the fork out of my hand just as I’m about to bite down on a juicy steak. If you’re lucky enough to speak Czech, there are several of his films available on DVD without English subtitles, provided that you also have equipment that plays European format. Ah well, Criterion to the rescue with Marketa Lazarova, and Prime with Marketa and Adelheid. I work with what I’ve got.
Memorial to František Vláčil
Many critics call Marketa Lazarova Vláčil’s best film, and I’ll be writing about it in a future issue. But this time I am going to focus on Adelheid, a dark and enigmatic story.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Milos Forman, Vláčil did not go to FAMU, the Czech film school; instead, he studied art history and aesthetics at Masarek University. Yet he demonstrates a splendid cinematic sensibility in Adelheid’s opening scene. The camera is mounted on the nose of a train as it winds through the mountainous autumn landscape of Sudetenland in northern Moravia, part of Czechoslavakia, and the scene is made even more breathtaking by a Bach chorale soundtrack drowning out the rattle of the train.
World War II has just ended. The land is still beautiful, although it will momentarily be juxtaposed with scenes of the ugly condition of people picking up the pieces of their lives. No family is intact, all have lost fathers, mothers, siblings. Three million German-Sudetans in Moravia, formerly occupied by Hitler, are subject to persecution by Czech authorities bent on vengeance. Some are deported, some are put to work in the fields. Often their property is appropriated.
When the train arrives at the station, Czech lieutenant Viktor Chotovický (Cepek), who is suffering from stomach ulcers and has spent the last months of the war stationed with the RAF in Scotland, chafes at being told to show his papers. He is beaten for his insolence, and pitched into the office of Sgt. Hejna (Vostrcil), an utterly corrupt official. After a phone call, Hejna realizes that Viktor is a legitimate officer who has been ordered to take over and inventory the manor house of a vicious Nazi, Alfred Heidenmann, who is currently imprisoned in Russia (the rest of his family are presumably killed or scattered). He apologizes and gives him back his gun. He also suggests that Viktor take a machine gun along with him to the manor. “I don’t want to come by and find you with your throat slit.”
What? Who is going to slit his throat?
But Viktor is ill and war weary, and though skeptical about his assignment, he eschews anyone’s help. He is a dour sort, the kind who suffers their ulcers in private. On his way to the manor house, he inadvertently wanders into a minefield, until he’s warned away by a young peasant woman who gives him fresh milk. When he tells her that he is single and has no family, she replies, “At least you don’t have to take care of anyone.” He barely recognizes his own country. He says, "I was looking forward to going home. And now I've found only strangers."
The green is Moravia in the Czech Republic
The manor is a once-palatial home stolen from a Jewish family, now in a dilapidated state without electricity. When Viktor enters the house he finds an attractive young German woman, Adelheid (Cerná), scrubbing the floor and keeping the place at least somewhat homey with woodfires and lamplight, and he takes her for a domestic. She hands him the keys. There are only two, she tells him.
When Hejna visits, he informs Viktor that she is Heidenmann’s daughter, which naturally changes the complexion of everything. Hejna shows him an outdoor cage where the old Nazi had kept Polish prisoners during winter. “God only knows what she’s witnessed.” To Hejna, she is beyond saving and he wants to put her in a camp with other German-Sudetens, but Viktor, sardonically smitten with her, convinces Hejna to let her stay. He needs a good cook. Although Hejna doesn’t trust her, he reluctantly agrees—for the present.
Viktor and Adelheid spend many hours together as he works on the inventory. He pursues a romance with her, at first as an imperious master, telling her to “Go and wait in my bed,” but it doesn’t work.
Why is she there, and what does she want? Cerná shows herself, with all her tough demeanor, to be a subtle actor; and one of the film’s great strengths is Adelheid’s inscrutable face. Does she feel like a prisoner? What guilt does she bear as her father’s adult daughter? What are her sympathies: is she the same ilk of Nazi as her father? She speaks little, and only in German, claiming she cannot speak a word of Czech. Is she lying, and can she understand what is being said about her? What does she really think of Viktor, and of his efforts to thwart Hejna’s orders for her to leave the house for the prison camp? And what of the crude intruders in her father’s house, including Hejna, who orders her about, swills her father’s cognac, and –-clearly for drunken retribution--shoots holes in the ceiling and a delicate mural. She unnerves the old official. “Look at her,” he growls in his chair, “staring at us.” And he gets up to attack her. Again, Viktor intervenes.
When Viktor has a brutal ulcer attack, she comes to his aid, but her face remains unreadable.
Meanwhile, the house reveals some of its mysteries. Tucked behind the books in the library is Heidenmann’s stash of liquor, which Viktor uses to pay off Hejna to allow him to keep Adelheid. Viktor finds her childhood diary, a document of a young girl’s indoctrination to Fascism.
The romance between Viktor and Adelheid is finally consummated, but in the morning nuns arrive to tell her that her father was hanged the day before in in Russia. She is distraught. It’s at that point that Viktor discovers her secret, that there was a third key after all, and that she has been hiding her brother in the house, a German soldier in a desperate state. Now, Victor must fight for his life against the brother.
Counting his early short films, Adelhied is Vláčil’s twelfth film. In 1968, the year before its release, the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia and stamped out the liberal Prague Spring. All intellectuals and artists were affected, and Vláčil’s Adelheid fell afoul of authorities who saw it as a metaphor for the Soviet occupation. He didn’t make another feature-length film until 1977’s Dým bramborové nate. He died in Prague in 1999 at the age of 74.
Other Notes:
Petr Cepek also made the Valley of the Bees (1968) with Vláčil. Western audiences saw him in the title role in Oldrich Lipsky’s I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen (1970) and The Three Veterans (1984), Jiri Menzel’s My Sweet Little Village (1995), Jan Svrvak’s The Elementary School (1991), and the title role in Jan Svankmajer’s Faust (1994). One hundred twenty-eight films in all before his death at age 54.
Emma Cerná starred in Jan Svrvak’s Kolja, Oleg Stepchenko’s, Forbidden Empire (2014), and Jiri Svoboda’s Uncle Cyril (1989). Forty-seven films before her death at 81 in 2018.
Sources and Further Exploration
“Adelheid”. Kinoblog web.archive.org/web/20140528091917/http://filmjournal.net/ kinoblog/category/directors/vlacil-frantisek/ 26th November 2007
Hames, Peter. “ Adelheid: a Film by František Vláčil.” Second Run DVD. www.secondrundvd.com/release_more_adelheid.html
Weston, L. K. “Sins of the Father. Cine Outsider : Beyond the Mainstream. http://www.cineoutsider.com/reviews/dvd/a/adelheid.html.
Thanks to Barry Voorhees for his editorial eye.
Text copyright 2024 by Steven Huff