SFFP’s mission statement underscores restoration, preservation, access and advocacy: the four pillars that support a viable film culture. Adhering to the code of ethics laid out by the International Federation of Film Archives, SFFP aims to restore works in as faithful a manner as possible to their original appearance. When a restoration requires a new negative, SFFP commits to preservation and makes a new negative, which are then housed in the SFFP collection at the Library of Congress. Understanding, however, that access must be the end point of all preservation initiatives, SFFP is dedicated to providing access to films that were not previously accessible, either through their online portal or their thriving domestic and international loan program. The Festival of Restoration and Rediscovery is their latest initiative to provide access through the film festival experience, by which they advocate for the field of moving image preservation by raising awareness of preservation initiatives both within the Bay Area and beyond.
Venued at San Francisco’s historic Roxie Theater, Re:Vision will showcase astounding works of cinema from around the world across a wide variety of genres, decades, and styles. The ambitious and eclectic selection of films will be organized into 14 programs, each including a feature film and a short with added value of special introductions and guests. Although I won’t be able to attend Re:Vision in person—missing out on the best value added of all: the audience—I’m grateful to Tim Buckwalter and Trista Ngo of Associated Publicity for the opportunity to cover the festival remotely. Here is one program you shouldn’t miss.
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For decades, The Valley of the Bees has only been available in faded prints or unsatisfactory transfers. The 2025 digital restoration was sourced from the original sound and image negatives preserved by the Czech National Film Archive in Prague.
Writing for the Village Voice in June 2002 in an essay entitled “Plastic Fantastic”, Michael Atkinson celebrated František Vláčil (who “with just a handful of films to prove it”) Atkinson extolled as “the Czech New Wave’s formalist, post-expressionist wrecking ball” and a master of “pure film” whose atmospheric, symbol-laden works stand as monumental achievements in Czech cinema. “His best movies display a lackadaisical attitude toward narrative clarity,” Atkinson continues “and a hypnotic plastic originality.”
Which begs an understanding of “plasticity” in film. The plasticity of film refers to cinema's unique capacity to shape, stretch, transform, and even shatter time and visual form. Borrowed from philosophy and material science—and significantly developed in film theory through thinkers like Catherine Malabou—plasticity describes a medium that can both receive a shape and blow it apart.
As outlined by film theorists Debarshi Arathdar and Jayjit Sarkar, the plasticity of film relates to the malleability of time. They opine that film acts as a "plastic" organism because time itself is cut, stitched, slowed down, reversed, or superimposed in the editing room. Time does not just pass; it is molded like clay.
In their overview of Catherine Malabou’s theories, Benjamin Dalton and Ben Tyrer track the term “plasticity” to its historic understanding of the physical flexibility and chemical makeup of celluloid (plastic-based film stock) but expand that historicity towards a more current metaphoric description of how stories, characters, and human emotions bend under pressure or trauma on screen.
Atkinson’s ascription of plasticity is pertinent. Summarizing the plot of The Valley of the Bees (read Wikipedia) reveals—as Atkinson terms it—a “slight” narrative. So why then is it so compelling and its images so indelible, so “gorgeous”? Atkinson suggests that it’s because Vláčil is in pursuit of cinematic rhythm and texture over standard narrative clarity.
Visual composition is certainly key and SFFP’s digital restoration is stunning. Vlácil’s lens is a painter’s eye, using a palette of chiaroscuro shades and camera placement that thrill the senses. In his Letterboxd review, Graham Williamson argues that Vláčil’s compositional talent stands comparison with Carl Dreyer and Stanley Kubrick.
At Sight and Sound, Michael Brooke concurs that “[Vláčil's films have] a painter’s eye for telling and / or dissonant detail, an intensely realized sense of period and place, a preference for music over dialogue and a strong affinity with landscapes and their natural flora and fauna [...] the wild sprawl of Marketa Lazarová and the formal rigor of The Valley of the Bees, rank alongside Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Welles’s Chimes at Midnight as the most convincing evocations of the medieval era ever committed to film.”
The Valley of the Bees is the final installment in František Vláčil’s trilogy of historical epics (directly following his most widely heralded work, Marketa Lazarová (1967) and its predecessor The Devil’s Trap (1962). As stated previously, the narrative is simple and swift. Set in thirteenth-century Europe, youthful Ondrej (Petr Čepek) offends his father who nearly kills him in a fit of rage. Instantly regretting his violence, the father swears to God that—if Ondrej is allowed to live—his father will commit him to join the repressive religious order of the Teutonic Knights. Ondrej survives and is punished accordingly. While training with the knights, Ondrej befriends and is mentored by Armin (Jan Kačer), recently returned from the Crusades, who aims to instill in Ondrej passionate abstinence from all things natural. There’s a strong homoerotic tinge to his blatant miosogyny (as there so frequently is) and—when Ondrej, unable to stand it any longer, escapes from the Order—Armin feels compelled to pursue him to punish him for his betrayal, behaving as emotionally as a spurned lover.
Ondrej’s determination to escape Armin’s retribution reminds me of the seminal fantasy housed within Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ where a life separated from religious fundamentalism is imagined through a veil of pain. Ondrej wants only to be personally free to return home to lead a normal life with a wife and children. In his fanaticism Armin seeks to destroy that fantasy, which he has been indoctrinated to believe is sin.
