The White Dove

Some decades before Frantisek Vláčil released his first film Holubice (The White Dove, 1960), Pablo Picasso painted L’enfant au pigeon (Child with Dove, 1901). The painting depicts a child standing in a room of soft natural hues, her hands holding onto a white dove. There is caring (the child cradling the bird), unity (the child and the dove are one), and peace (the space is still). The dove would radiate as a symbol of political peace later in Picasso’s career, but here, during the artist’s Blue Period, we are left with a painting that shares similar themes but is different in intention. 

Pablo Picasso, L’enfant au pigeon, 1901. Oil on canvas.

A.D. Hope’s poem The Death of the Bird details the last migration of a bird and, within that journey, its unexpected and quiet death. The winged figure is dressed in a similar fragility to the one in Picasso’s painting, but a tenacity is present as well – it is a tiny little creature that floats above the world backwards and forwards, charged with an unyielding instinct.

For every bird there is this last migration;
Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.¹

I was reminded of Picasso’s painting and Hope’s poem when I watched Vláčil’s The White Dove, which is structured around a boy’s relationship with a bird and a girl’s loss of one. The titular dove is part of a flock of carrier pigeons. Released in northern France and bound for Germany (it belongs to a young German girl [Kateřina Irmanovová]), it loses its wbtay and ends up in Prague. Perched above the city, it rests until it is marked by a small boy (Karel Smyczek) who shoots it for target practice. When the boy retrieves the injured dove that has fallen from the rooftop, it awakens in him a dormant sense of humanity. First drawn to the bird as a target, when he is close to its tiny, injured body – the physical thing, feathers stained in blood – it compels feelings that may have never otherwise formed. Just as he begins to indulge in his regret, the dove returns to its feet and the boy, with the care of another resident (Václav Irmanov), looks after it. Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometres away, the girl waits for her dove’s return.

The White Dove

Vláčil’s debut feature belongs in an evocative and free-floating world, barely distinguishable from poetry. It is crafted with layers of glass, feathers, human skin, jellyfish, masses of sand, and clay. When I watch it again, I am hypnotised by its material and textural quality. Glass belongs in this world, just as much as the dove and its feathers, the young boy and his round eyes, and the mortal and moral pulse passing through it all. The White Dove vibrates with magic.

Here, already, Vláčil’s gaze is charged with a graphic artist’s visual flair, a painter’s interior patience, and the soft sensitivity of a poet. It is a sublimely beautiful offering, muted in comparison to his brutal and bewildering Marketa Lazarová (1967), but running within the same realm. 

The White Dove is dipping its wings in cinema’s otherworldly, non-linguistic magic. There are scenes in the netherworld of dreams, and some so superbly evocative (I think of the shot where the camera rotates 180 degrees while the girl turns in her bed – so expressive, so eerie) that as time goes on, I begin to forget about the other existing parts of the film; they dissolve with time, yet these potent pillars of unyielding poetry remain. 

Many of Vláčil’s films seem to want to draw out time, not by halting the moment, but by seeking that which is minutely fragile and beautiful within it. This atmosphere exerts a pull on us, and in the shape of a fable it becomes immediately cinematic. The White Dove possesses this form, and it reminds me of another film, closer to home, that follows its unique contours: Henri Safran’s Storm Boy (1976). Here, too, time stretches while death slowly follows, and in that alchemy between child and animal, all comes together.

The birds in Hope’s The Death of the Bird, Safran’s Storm Boy, and Vláčil’s The White Dove live beneath a vast sky. Within their stories we see, there and then, a realm that is both mysterious and merciless – feathered, tiny creatures that are fragile yet tenacious, existing in a world in which the indifference of death looms. Unsurprisingly, the white dove, shared by both Vláčil and Picasso, became the most enduring symbol of peace. Not only are we drawn to its poetry, but its undeniable toughness. This is the reason The White Dove shines: it belongs to the grit of the real world, yet it unfolds in the slowness of poetry.

Holubice/The White Dove (1960 Czechoslovakia 76 mins)

Prod Co: Barrandov Studios Dir: Frantisek Vlácil Scr: František Vláčil Phot: Jan Čuřík Ed: Miroslav Hájek Art Dir: Oldrich Bosák Mus: Zdeněk Liška Cos Des: Vera Cernocká, Jan Koblasa, Theodor Pistek

Cast: Kateřina Irmanovová, Karel Smyczek, Anna Pitašová, Václav Irmanov, Gustav Püttjer

Endnotes