The Witchhammer, 1969

(...) The film Hammer against the Witches (The Witchhammer) was about one of the last court trials of the Inquisition in Europe, one of the most disgusting time in world cultural history. In the town of Sumperk in Moravia, thanks to a bigoted countees, a Catholic and her personal priest came to power. The book’s author, Vaclav Kaplicky, wrote the novel from authentic testimonies preserved from the torture rooms. I got them on my desk in written copies where I read the confession of the Dean Lautner, an intelligent man of the Enlightenment who, in addition, poor man, was sleeping with his cook. Before the Inquisition court it was perfectly proven that both the cook and the Dean were in contact with the devil. Their bodily torture and testimonies were a sample of the results of their totality, they were in a symbiosis together, when the bones in the cook’s foot where crushed by the so-called Spanish boot, what else could the poor girl do than confess? Yes, she had had intercourse with the devil, she had travelled to meet with witches on a certain hill where orgies and the cursing of God had taken place.both were burned, but the inquisitor. Who at the time had long been busy as an innkeeper in the Moravian city of Olomouc and now came to power again, as an experienced and seasoned inquisitor, fought his way through, I guess, three hundred executions by burning, confiscated the properties of the dead and in the end, in blessed advanced age, even managed to marry a young girl from Sumperk. All this in the course of three years.
The story was a sort of parallel to the totalitarian regime which existed here at the time, and the piece had to be written in such a way that it would be allowed to be filmed at all. Otakar Vavra as a fellow script writer was a very good partner. We worked on the script for quite a long time: he had the first version of the script already prepared, but it was necessary for us to get inside the story. Every day, I prepared the possible psychological positions of the characters in action and deducted dialogues from them.
Here we face and important matter: the screen writer must respect the literary base but, as I have already said, s/he must make it her own, feel with it. The study of such a terrible event was very troublesome for me. Director Vavra, to fulfill my wish, even obtained a photograph of a portrait of the burned intellectual, the Dean Lautner. I hung it above my desk and was looking at his smart face, his prominent nose from morning till evening. My compassion for him and my admiration of his mental strength had a good influence on me. I realized that I too must have so much strength to be able to evoke in the viewer the same sympathy and the same compassion – and with this realization, my torment ceased. That is: the subject became a matter of my personal honor. It was the defense of and the respect for the Dean who had been fond of women, played the violin and had liked to drink a glass with his friends one in a while. His bad fate should have been a warning – in many respects Lautner resembled Socrates.
Every day I realized more and more that that man was very close to me and so I even prepared for Director Vavra dialogues that did not come out of the text of Vaclac Kaplicky’s book, but that maintained his ethics and meaning.
I think that you will be interested in a description of a discussion between Otakar Vavra and myself. One day, he read one of the dialogues that later we together would shorten, deepen or throw out – and he told me: Dean Lautner in his time would never have said this. I answered: Dean Lautner now is in our hands. Very person whether written literarily or filmcally is, in essence, a phantom. It is we who input into that character what he will or will not say. And then it will be the truth. We are on his side, we’re keeping our fingers crossed for his personal freedom – and we treat it like our own personal freedom. After a longer argument, we agreed on what to leave in and what to cross out. But the phantom of a beautiful human being remained.
I think, this is an example. In fact, of how to treat a literary base, or, in this case, a historical subject. Not to be frightened by what one could or could not say. To say it is for him . Of course within the frame of veracity and the style of realistic perception.
In the margin, I would like to note: Emil Filla, the famous Czech cubist painter, wrote the thought: Free art is destined exclusively for free people.
And Pablo Picasso told the stunned Gertrude Stein. Who after seeing her portrait screamed, “But I don’t look this way!” but one day, everyone will see you this way.
The change of one value into another one is in fact the essence of creative work. What role will be played by feeling and intelligence, perceptiveness, decency, ethics, humility – rests upon the shoulders of the one who creates it. The narcissist can never win, nor can a megalomaniac or wheeler-dealer.
Through all this that I am telling you, I want to say that the literary basis is the foundation of one’s own understanding, of one’s approach to oneself, the search for oneself which is the most important element of our actions, even where art not concerned. To summarize. I would say: to make everything thoroughly into your own, read a hundred time the passages which remain alien and if they still remain aline, better avoid them than to slavishly work them into the script. It won’t be truthful, it won’t have its own warm blood, its own essence. In the contrary in places where I have found myself, I remember the sources of thought and feeling that were secret, about which I may not have known very much. There the exciting work begins: to go from the original intention on circuitous roads of reason and feeling and, of course, of talent to preserve the thought of the other author and, at the same time, for it to be processed in a living way by another living person. (...)
– Excerpt from Ester Krumbachová's lecture on screenwriting in the form of a letter to Josef (Pepi) Lustig for students at American University in Washington, D.C., 1994
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