Better Jump Down a Manhole, Light Yourself a Candle: The Devil’s Trap

Long his most widely disseminated work, František Vláčil’s baroque Middle Ages masterpiece Marketa Lazarová (1967) often serves as a discombobulating introduction to his oeuvre. For a long time, it was the only film of his much shown abroad – notwithstanding that it was scarcely known in the West until as recently as 2007, when British label Second Run released it on DVD, or that it was but one of three tremendous black-and-white features set in bygone eras that comprise a loose trilogy.

Marketa’s immediate, more readily digestible predecessor Ďáblova past (The Devil’s Trap, 1962) is far more than a mere dress rehearsal for its magnificent successor. An adaptation of Alfred Technik’s 1956 novel Mlýn na ponorné řece (“The Mill on the Subterranean River”), it’s a captivating, poetic film which likewise immerses viewers in a period setting with an uncanny sense of lived-in verisimilitude: the Moravian Karst¹ region circa 1722, during the Counter-Reformation. Moreover, The Devil’s Trap can now be seen as a clear precursor to the Czechoslovak New Wave’s protean interrogations of totalitarianism, in its concerns with dogmatism and abuse of power, readable as allegory – especially in the wake of Czechoslovakia’s appalling show trials of the early 1950s.

It additionally anticipates veteran director and FAMU²-co-founder Otakar Vávra’s harrowing Kladivo na čarodějnice (Witchhammer, 1970), which rigorously recreated the witch trials of 1670s Moravia, offering clearer parallels still to those events of the 1950s, as well as possessing a profound contemporary resonance after the suppression of 1968’s Prague Spring.

Opening with a choir intoning ominously, The Devil’s Trap’s striking first image is of a haggard statue of Christ dominating the right foreground, pointing, as if accusatorially, at a figure treading a barren landscape in the distance. He’s miller and freeman Jan Spálený (Vítězslav Vejražka), en route to the corpulent Regent’s (Čestmír Řanda) manor home to offer unwelcome but sage advice not to build a granary on ground he deems unsafe.

As the miller departs, the Regent cryptically states to a visiting bishop, to whom he had been losing at chess, “you cannot burn a burnt man,” before commencing a story dating back nearly a century concerning Spálený’s grandfather, who was likewise a miller.

He speaks of Swedish soldiers’ descent upon a mill in the countryside, whereupon we are treated to an extraordinary flashback shot (set to become a leitmotif) in which the camera takes flight towards the building’s upper storey entrance, pitching from side to side as if the mill is being beset by a preternatural force (anticipating tracking shots suggestive of malevolent forces’ approaches in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead [1981]). The mill, from its thatched roof down, is soon ablaze.

Yet the miller and his family survived the resulting inferno. And “ever since”, the Regent explains, “the mill has been called ‘At Those Who Burned’.” (Spálený – the miller family name – means “burnt”.) Moreover, he adds, “whomsoever is not hurt by fire, need not fear Hell,” casting aspersions that the bishop appreciably comes round to. After the Regent bellows for “light!”, the film cuts to a sleepy, lone horseman directly beneath the harsh noonday sun, riding onto the Regent’s land. The rhyme with a classic Western trope is striking.

He is Jesuit priest Probus (Miroslav Macháček), summoned to investigate the substance of these aspersions, putting him in an uncomfortable alliance with the boorish Regent and on a collision course with the honest, unsuperstitious miller and his handsome son, also named Jan (Vít Olmer). Further intrigue is generated by Jan Jr.’s love with Martina (Karla Chadimová), a subject of the Regent who is not wholly immune to whispers that the Spálenýs, in light of their ancestor’s fabled immunity to incineration, must practice witchcraft; she is also coveted by gamekeeper Filip (Vlastimil Hašek), a pernicious meddler who seeks for the Regent to grant him her hand in marriage.

Nonetheless, the Spálenýs are respected in the community. After all, they are generous in sharing their little understood bounty of fresh water with those obliged by the Regent to till an ostensibly parched land. But a spectacular calamity upon completion of the granary’s construction has the priest attempt to rally the whole community against the miller and his son. For how could the miller possibly have known the ground beneath it wasn’t stable, unless he were privy to knowledge of diabolical provenance? Surely this calls for the dispensation of summary justice…

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Vláčil took an unorthodox route to filmmaking: instead of attending film school, he undertook a placement in the Czechoslovak Army Film Unit. He’d previously studied art history and aesthetics in Brno, supporting himself by assisting on local cartoon productions. For his films, he drew exquisite storyboard sketches of everything he would shoot, to be adhered to painstakingly. Hence the breathtaking visual compositions – whether still and painterly, or frantically kinetic and modern – that riddle his cinema, at their most pronounced across his distant past trilogy. Remarkably, despite their accomplished visual consistency, each of The Devil’s Trap, Marketa Lazarová and the 13th century-set Údolí včel (Valley of the Bees, 1968) featured different cinematographers: Rudolf Milič, Bedřich Baťka and František Uldrich, respectively.

Many of Vláčil’s other key collaborators in The Devil’s Trap were keepers, however. The brilliant editor Miroslav Hájek worked with him across the whole trilogy, as well as on films to either side. Ditto costume designer Theodor Pištěk, later to win an Oscar for his work on their compatriot Miloš Forman’s Mozart biopic, Amadeus (1984).

Most critically, as in eight other Vláčil features (and two shorts), The Devil’s Trap features a remarkable score by Zdeněk Liška, who incorporated foley from another regular collaborator, František Fabián – the sounds and cadences of horses’ hooves, birdsong or scything in wheatfields – into a richly period-evocative score also featuring diegetic folk music and extradiegetic plainsong. 

Sound is every bit as integral to Vláčil’s cinema as his extraordinary visual sensibility; moreover, in The Devil’s Trap, sound carries great narrative significance. Exaggerated echo affects are applied liberally throughout the film, portending doom – for it’ll be echoes within a subterranean chamber that’ll prove the undoing of the persecutory forces who don’t listen to young Jan’s sound advice, informed by words in a hefty, weathered tome left by his father in the cave beneath the mill. That book soberly advises against taking the third of three paths available, as on that path, “every step and every sound spell destruction.” That path is the one marked by a cross… 

But perhaps the key ingredients in all of Vláčil’s cinema were the director’s own adamantine determination to capture on film exactly what he wanted, along with an iron constitution and, one might have supposed, contrary to both attributes, his steadfast alcoholism. As Vít Olmer described, Vláčil “would have liked to do everything, to run the camera, to control the lights, to act, to do simply everything… because he had it all in his head, and more.”³

Describing shooting the scene towards the denouement where Jan Jr. ventures beneath cave waters, Olmer added that Vláčil, unsatisfied with what they’d shot, and “a little drunk”, “simply walked into the Punkva,⁴ into that lake, and disappeared. He climbed out to show me how it was supposed to be done […] He then continued filming until the morning like this.” This despite “the temperature [being] about one or two degrees Celsius” and that “he drank only rum, and he ate almost nothing at all. And he was able to keep going like this for several decades, and on top of this was able to shoot such beautiful films.”⁵

Ďáblova past/The Devil’s Trap (1962 Czechoslovakia 85 min) 

Prod Co: Filmové studio Barrandov Prod: Ladislav Novotný, Bedřich Kubala Dir: František Vláčil Scr: František A. Dvořák, Miloš V. Kratochvíl, based on a novel by Alfred Technik Phot: Rudolf Milič Mus: Zdeněk Liška Sound: František Fabián, Bohumír Brunclík Ed: Miroslav Hájek Prod Des: Karel Škvor Cost Des: Theodor Pištěk

Cast: Miroslav Macháček, Vítězslav Vejražka, Čestmír Řanda, Karla Chadimová, Vít Olmer, Vlastimil Hašek

Endnotes