Oldrich Danek, the scriptwriter for "Hic Sunt Leones", who made his debut as a director in 1960 with the officially irreproachable "Three Tons of Dust" ("Tri tuny prachu"), also turned to history - "The Nuremberg Campaign" ("Spanila jizda" - 1963) - to seek metaphors for the present. In 1967, Danek made his best film, "The Royal Blunder" ("Kralovsky omyl"), a fourteenth-century tale about the relativity of despotic power. Historical material was by far the best medium for Frantisek Vlacil, who in 1967 completed his unique reconstruction of thirteenth-century Bohemia, "Marketa Lazarova", based on the novel by V. Vancura. Supported by the photography of B. Batka, he achieved an almost flawless recreation of a period that hovered between paganism and Christianity and filled it with authentic portraits of people from another civilization.