**Adelheid

Making Home: Adelheid

Above all, František Vláčil’sAdelheid (1969) is a film about the place and (dis)placement of home. How to define home? The warmest corner of the world, or a space which “holds childhood motionless in its arms.”1 The point between one’s comings and goings; an orientation of shelter and being.Adelheid opens in any such direction homeward, with one extended tracking shot of a train ride through a Sudetenland forest. Upon arrival at the station, a man tumbles out of the carriage with an oversized rucksack; he is to continue the journey on foot. A lumbering trek through weed-knotted minefields finds him at the gates of a large manor, its front yard strewn with broken furniture – at the threshold of the home of another.

While most recognised for his medieval epics such asMarketa Lazarová (1967) andÚdolí včel (The Valley of the Bees, 1968), Vláčil also directed a cluster of films set in early postwar Czechoslovakia; elegiac ruminations on its political landscape in the years preceding the Communist coup.Adelheid, the first of his films to be shot in colour, stands as one such study, alongsideStíny horkého léta (Shadows of a Hot Summer, 1977) andPasáček z doliny (The Little Shepherd Boy from the Valley, 1984). An adaptation of the 1967 novel by Vladimír Körner,Adelheid is a microcosmic treatment of the forced expulsion and expropriation of Sudeten and Carpathian Germans in Czechoslovakia following the Allied victory. The horrors inflicted by Nazi Germany during the military occupation had led to a pervasive postwar distrust of the ethnic Germans, as “a fifth column on Czechoslovak soil [who were deemed] incompatible with a lasting peace.”2 Between the violent, “disorderly transfers” (divoký odsun) effected by the Beneš decrees and the coordinated deportations sanctioned by the Potsdam Agreement, approximately 3,000,000 ethnic Germans were expelled by the state between 1945 and 1948.3 Formerly the largest ethnic minority in Czechoslovakia, almost one-quarter of the total population was forcibly displaced as a result; a demographic devastation for the state.4

The visitor is revealed to be lieutenant Viktor Chotovický (Petr Čepek), appointed to manage the family home of Hansgeorg Heidenmann, a German Nazi awaiting execution. The house appears at first a place of infinite inwardness; its sunless rooms, furred with dust, give the impression of a space hermetically sealed from the external world. Yet as Viktor advances through the building, traces of the exterior betray themselves through quivers of motion: ribbons of light through broken shutters, a flitting of birds disturbed from roost, and the idle descent of their feathers. The house becomes, then, a zone of in-between, in-difference; a hesitation. Viktor discovers that he is to inhabit this realm with another – the eponymous Adelheid (Emma Černá), a young German maid. “Heidenmann’s daughter,” announces Hejna (Jan Vostrčil), the local sergeant. She is to cook and clean for him, maintain the house in good keeping.

Whilst unable to speak the other’s language, Viktor and Adelheid gradually forge a connection through the house-space, which functions as an interstice of hierarchical slippage between master and servant. Being of both Czechness and Germanness, the materiality of the house becomes a screen of familiarity through which each allows oneself to perceive the unfamiliar Other. Viktor watches Adelheid furtively, from behind corners and the top of the stairs – angles which her eclipsed spectacle cannot escape. He develops a penchant for gazing at her through the scattered bullet holes of a small wooden panel, broken off from a painting once used as target practice by Hejna’s soldiers. Amidst such a hunt, Adelheid begins to return Viktor’s gaze as an animal unafraid, meeting his eyes while scrubbing floors and fixing meals. To see is to have at a distance.5 By reciprocal visual address so they begin to possess one another.

Viktor and Adelheid are equal in their duties of service to the house. They undertake various repairs and refurbishments, tending to the damage sustained during the war, and thereby fortify their private, interior world against external forces. As the outside dwindles in strength, the house itself appears to shrink into a kind of cocoon, clinging as protective film to the characters. We are pulled into cramped close-ups of their bodies drawn against walls and cabinets; severe camera angles are exchanged for languorous pans along the eyeline and intimate, handheld tracking of gestural subtleties. One scene finds the characters in a room with boxes of foreign cigarettes – Viktor’s, from a previous assignment in England. We follow a cigarette pack as it travels from Viktor’s hand to Adelheid’s, which expertly plucks one out to light. What ensues is a swift eternity between the pursed drag and the scattering of smoke; a measure of shared indulgence in an otherness distinct from that of each other.

Eventually, all that remains are questions of love. Can it be born of or in spite of fear, does it account for abjurations of duty or honour? Viktor’s tenderness for Adelheid grows total; she becomes to him both an injury and object of affection. He protects her from Hejna’s orders to be sent back to the labour camp, bribing him with bottles of cognac found in the library. Yet this safety is a refuge to be endured; Adelheid stays imprisoned in a lowliness of home and body, beheld by the wider world as a flesh of politics or pleasure. One night, Hejna and his soldiers come to the house for dinner. They eat, drink and listen to Strauss on the gramophone; the men share chronicles of war, all the while leering at a dancing Adelheid. It is a rare moment of release. She laughs, aglow in her former splendour, until a Nazi march inadvertently blares into the room. The triumphant tune carries away the image of Adelheid the host; she returns as beast, offensive in being. “Look at her, how she stares! I’d like to kick her!” cries Hejna. His rage is placated only by Viktor’s defensive command for Adelheid to wait for him in bed; she is to exist merely between desire and revulsion.

For the trespassing Viktor, Adelheid is an allowance of belonging: after waking in the same bed together, he murmurs to her, “When I rose and saw you here, I thought I was home.” To Adelheid, Viktor signifies the very loss of home. How then to belong together?Adelheid is a glimpse into the cleave of a love unendurable, down the thin blade of ambivalence.

Adelheid (1969 Czechoslovakia 99 mins)

Prod Co: Filmové studio Barrandov, Kouzlo Films SpolečnostDir: František VláčilScr:Vladimír Körner, František VláčilPhot: František UldrichEd: Miroslav HájekMus: Zdeněk LiškaProd Des: Jindrich GötzCos Des: Theodor Pistek

Cast: Petr Čepek, Emma Černá, Jan Vostrčil, Jana Krupičková, Pavel Landovský, Lubomír Tlalka, Miloš Willig, Karel Hábl, Zdeněk Mátl, Alžběta Frejková, Josef Němeček, Karel Bělohradský, Vlasta Petříková

Endnotes

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (London: Penguin Classics, 2014), p. 29. ↩
2. Bradley F. Adams, “Morality, Wisdom and Revision: The Czech Opposition of the 1970s and the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (March 1995): p. 236. ↩
3. Adams, p. 234. ↩
4. Adams, p. 244. ↩
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 164. ↩