“A jaw-dropping masterpiece, an exercise in pure cinematic storytelling that captivates, enchants and terrifies in each scene” Yes, it would be remiss of me not to point out that this quote from The Geek Show‘s Graham Williamson adorns the cover of the latest Blu-ray release from Second Run, the 1968 masterpiece of Czechoslovakian cinema, Dragon’s Return. And who am I to disagree with m’colleague? This movie really is something.
Based on the 1943 novella by Dobroslav Chrobák, an exercise in what the Czechs called naturizmus (simply put, naturism); a lyrical, almost mature fairytale approach to the folk fables favoured in Eastern Europe that explores the land and nature, Dragon’s Return tells the story of a one-eyed potter who returns from exile to his homestead in the midst of a crisis and stirs up suspicions and collective guilt as he attempts to regain the trust of the villagers who had him banished in the first place. Chrobák’s novella found favour with Czech audiences and a film adaptation was originally mooted as early as 1948, just five years after the original publication. Initially tasked with bringing the work to the screen was Béla Balázs, the Hungarian writer, critic and prominent proponent of formalist film theory. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the post-war period, significant liberties were taken with Chrobák’s work in order to present it in a contemporary socio-political context. The original ambivalent, folkloric nature of the Dragon character, cast out by his community only to return like a mythical saviour was expunged in favour of a dramatisation that firmly roots the villagers prejudice as superstitious and sees his exile occur in the city, where a stint of manual labour in a ceramics factory purifies him as the model citizen. This Stalinist propaganda earned the thumbs up from the approval committee which deemed it to have “the potential to become a strong and purely Slovak drama”, but the project ultimately came to nothing.
Step forward Slovak filmmaker Eduard Grečner. Whilst at the Prague Film School, Grečner read and fell in love with Chrobák’s novella. Despite being mindful of the difficulties in translating the elusive lyrical qualities from page to screen, he began to produce a screenplay for the director Stanislav Barabáš. This was approved for production in 1959 but the notoriously sensitive shifts in what was deemed ideologically permissible for socialist audiences – a high-wire feat of diplomacy that Eastern European filmmakers would have to traverse until the collapse of the Soviet Union decades later – ultimately saw it fall out of favour and the dragon once again lay dormant.
In 1963, Grečner found himself at the heart of what was subsequently to become known as the Czech New Wave, when he served as the assistant director to Štefan Uher on The Sun in a Net, the film that Miloš Forman famously called “the John the Baptist of the New Wave”. Capitalising on this new relaxation within the Communist regime, Grečner returned to his pet project and, arguing that Dragon’s Return would depict the cultural heritage of the Czech people, he won the approval he had sought for so long.
“… merging percussive music with choral notes such as disembodied whispering, laughing or murmuring that flood the gaps in the movie’s sparse dialogue to actively communicate the emotion or feeling of its characters. It’s a remarkable experience, perfectly harmonious with Grečner’s modernist visual style”.
Set in no clearly defined time or place – is it medieval, the present or some kind of dystopia? – Dragon’s Return tells the story of the eponymous character played by Radovan Lukavský, a taciturn figure in a film whose dialogue is already sparse. We are introduced to Dragon (we do not learn his real name, Martin Lepiš, until forty minutes into this eighty-four-minute film), an itinerant potter, as he returns to the rural township he has once called home. A villager noticing his arrival appears visibly startled (presumably not just because of Dragon’s eye patch and the livid facial scar beneath it) and hurries into town to announce his imminent return. It becomes clear from this moment that Dragon is someone considered ‘bad news’.
Through the film’s non-linear narrative, we discover that Dragon was tolerated in the village once and even loved by Eva (Emília Vásáryová), who is now married to Simon (Gustáv Valach), a man who is unsurprisingly not happy about Dragon being back. A notoriously bad harvest saw the villagers in need of flour and, mistaking Dragon’s stores of clay for it, they set about him, resulting in Simon taking his eye. Superstition sets in and, deemed a source of their misfortune, Dragon is banished from the village. With bitter irony, his return has coincided with yet another drought – one which sees the villagers’ cows and their grazing lands imperilled by a forest fire. Dragon, in an attempt at reconciliation with his old community, offers to set out and rescue the cows, taking them to safety on the borders of Poland. The villagers hold a meeting and, whilst some suspect Dragon of an ulterior motive, plotting revenge by selling the herd to Polish bandits, the consensus is to take him up on his offer – providing the distrustful Simon accompanies him. To say any more would be to spoil the movie.
There’s a lot going on in Dragon’s Return and I’d like to explore some of the themes. On the surface, it’s a curious mix (to the eyes of those jaundiced by Hollywood especially) of a Western and a Folk Horror. The former may appear as a strange connection at first. Still, when you consider the story’s elements, the dignifiedly introverted and much-discriminated loner, a Man with No Name, the farming homestead, a past love and a present antagonism, it all adds up. It’s not the stuff of the Fordian Western, the old Hollywood tribute to those ancestors who won the West by true grit and sheer determination, it’s much more akin to the kind of Western the Italians were telling at the time that Grečner made this; horse operas in which cowardly capitalist homesteaders would sacrifice their hero and saviour in their hour of need. It’s a format that Hollywood would not bend to until the era of the Revisionist Western in the subsequent decade, pioneered by Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, an eerie, supernatural oater which proved he learned a trick or two from Leone.
The supernatural leads us nicely into the other genre Dragon’s Return reminds me of, Folk Horror. Any fable or folk ballad will share an affinity with this genre, but Grečner isn’t one to let any comparisons simply be drawn by bloody scenes of a ritual sacrifice of sheep to appease the gods of harvest, the intoxicating, heady air of superstition, the femininity of white-adorned Eva at the pinnacle of a violent love triangle and a protagonist with a fucking eye-patch and a scar who makes pagan folk-art. There’s a receptivity to the surreal and nightmarish evident in the movie’s stunning soundtrack; a successful experiment from composer Ilja Zeljenska in merging percussive music with choral notes such as disembodied whispering, laughing or murmuring that flood the gaps in the movie’s sparse dialogue to actively communicate the emotion or feeling of its characters. It’s a remarkable experience, perfectly harmonious with Grečner’s modernist visual style.
But I know what you’re thinking; this is a Czech film from the Communist era, so there must be an allegory to be made here? There is indeed, and it is a prophetic and ironic one. Throughout the film, the audience will no doubt appreciate that, no matter what Dragon does, reconciliation will prove difficult at best and elusive at worst. This tension between the individual creative and the wider society around them, their needs as a community and a collective, is hard to miss. The movie’s final shot is one redolent with many an artist operating under the Communist regime at the time, Grečner included. As the Prague Spring gave way to the repressive normalisation process and art/freedom of speech became compromised, Grečner more or less retreated from filmmaking beyond some television work. He spent the many years prior to Glasnost working as a dubbing director, before bridging the twenty-five-year gap left by Dragon’s Return with an adaptation of DH Lawrence’s The Fox, released to cinema as Earthly Disturbance in 1992. Jasek’s Dream followed in 1996, another adaptation of a work by Chrobák, but in recent years the filmmaker has moved into academia, teaching at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Banksa Bystrica.
This Second Run release boasts a new and exclusive documentary shot this year featuring Grečner himself and a newly filmed introduction by the Slovak Film Institute’s Rastislav Steranka. Transferred over from the 2015 DVD release is an appreciation of the movie by Slovak cinema expert Peter Hames and writing from Jonathan Owen. The Blu-ray is presented from a HD transfer of the new 2K restoration from the Slovak Film Institute and looks stunning.
DRAGON’S RETURN IS OUT NOW ON SECOND RUN BLU-RAY
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Dragon’s Return
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