New Wave Film: "Beer Goggles"

"Little Brother"

All References

1. 

New Waves in Cinema by Sean martin 

2. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSe1Yuk0jsc (war clips)

3.
Avant-Guarde to New Wave
Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the sixties  by Jonathan L. Owen.

Czech New Wave Video Essay Script

Context Of the Czech new wave:

The Czech New wave, otherwise known as the "Czechoslovakian Film Miracle" is a term used to describe the "Film Revolution" that was led by a select group of Czech Filmmakers, whom wanted change in their native country. This film movement happened primarily in the 1960's in which it evolved out of the Devetsil artistic movement of the thirties. this was a group of Czech Avant-Guarde artists whom experimented with a wide variety of artistic outputs however primarily focused on themes such as magic realism as well as poeticism. These themes would later be emulated by the directors, in example films of the Czech New Wave, whom would also become graduates of the Film and Tv School of the Academy of Performing Arts, or the FAMU as it was otherwise known. In fact one director whom we are exploring the works of in this video essay, Vera Chytilova was a notable alumni of the FAMU.
Before we can examine the films from Directors whom were involved in the Czech new wave, it is best to further understand the circumstances in which they were forced under, which subsequently fuelled their determination to speak out about the social-political state of their country.
During the second world war of 1939 to 1945 Czechoslovakia was invaded by Germany and became overrun by the Nazi regime. This led to years of oppression upon the people of Czechoslovakia, which was enforced by the Gestapo. Czechoslovakian citizens were forced into labor such as coal mining and the arms deal industry in order to supply to the Nazi armed forces.

As stated in the book "New Waves in cinema" by Sean Martin, "The war itself did, strangely enough, bring good things to the Czech film industry." The nazi's even expanded Barrandov Studios which is located in Prague, as a cheaper alternative to filming propaganda films in their home country. Subsequently, the foundations of the expanded studio were further built upon in order to make it one of the largest and best equipped studios in Europe. This them stemmed on into the establishment of the FAMU in 1946 which is where the founders of the Czech New wave, of course, were later going to attend.

However in 1945 Czechoslovakia would be irradiated form the Nazi rule by the Soviet union whom were allied with Czechoslovakia at the time. Later on in the same year the communist democratic government was elected, which resulted in a "New Wave" of oppression. This prevented any form of "group identity" case in point, the contributors of the Czech new wave. The communist government would simply rule out any notable group identity as conspiracy. This made it difficult for any revolutionaries to make their voices heard. However some were persistent.
Certain films that were made in Czechoslovakia in the 1950's were able to slip under the radar of communistic censorship. A few examples include the works of Jiri Trnka. Because they were animations and produced on a small scale, in tiny studios, these films were able to be released on a large scale without censorship, as the underlying meaning of these films were hidden by a pleasant aesthetic and visual metaphors. It was assumed by the censors that the films were intended for children as some were based on folklore and fairytales, however the works of Trnka, such as his last film "The hand" (1965) was in fact intended for adults and was a comment on the communist regime that was currently oppressing the voices of the citizens of Czechoslovakia.
It was these methods of hiding from censorship that influenced the visual and narative style of films produced during the Czech New Wave.

The films that we're looking at are very conventionally similar. This is due to the fact that the Czech new wave directors occasionally collaborated with each other, on each of their films. The members of the Czech New Wave film acted as a family of sorts due to the fact that they all came from the same film and social background and therefore understood each others messages that they wished to convey through their films.



The films that I will looking at include Vera Chytilova’s 1966 film “Daisies”, Jaromil Jires’ 1970’s film “Valerie and her week of Wonders” and Juraj Herz’s 1972 film, “Morgiana".
What conjoins these three films is their similar conventions, one of which is the surrealist element. All three of these films also include elements of magic as if it were rational in the real world. This references back to the aforementioned Devitsil Artistic movement which focused on magic realsim. This shows how that movement has truly made an impact on the films of the Czech new wave. Another way of looking at it is to interpret the NewWave as a domino effect, with one film making an impact on the other as time goes on, as they continue to emulate their predecessors. However there are some films that share certain conventions that others do not, such as loose narrative structures. This trait is shared by both Daisies and Valerie and her week of wonders. On the other hand films such as "Morgiana", has a solid narrative structure, but that does not mean they are any less personal and poetic. Morgiana could also be described as loosely experimental. this is not because it is experimental in the way of narrative structure, but because of it's occasional use of experimental camera movements and practical effects.

The recent communist regime that had overtaken Czechoslovakia at the time resulted in political corruption, food shortages and media censorship which meant that living day to day in the country would be a rough road ahead. However it gave something meaningful and relevant for the film makers of Czechoslovakia to make movies about.
The comments of the social/political state of their country would be seen as a form of protest, something the filmmakers, weren't about to shy away from.
Vera Chytilova, tired of being a politically charged film-maker and having her work suppressed by the authorities, protested to regain her right to practise her chosen profession. In a letter that that she wrote to then Czechoslovakian president Gustav Husak in order to appeal for her right to make films, she describes her 1966 film Daisies (which subsequently led to her banning from filmmaking)  as a "morality play" in which the "roots of all evil are shown as 'canceled in the malicious pranks of everyday life.
Czechoslovakian film Critic Zdena Skapova rightly commented on the intentions of Chytilova when making Daisies, as to "disguise"the serious social commentary of the film "as  a charming and playful spectacle".
The film itself centres around two teenage girls, both whom are called Marie, who engage in bizarre pranks after they decide to "turn bad". They believe the world around them to be "spoiled" and adopt an attitude where nothing, food, clothes, men, war, is taken seriously.  This film was made by Chytilova to comment on issues engulfing her country at the time. For example the dining room scene in Daisies, in which they trash the dining hall, throwing and stomping on food, is in fact a comment on the previously mentioned food shortages at the time. Therefore in effect, the content of that scene would have been very offensive and would not have been deemed acceptable to the people of Czechoslovakia at that time.

The Making of My Own New Wave Film: Film Brief

The Making of My Own New Wave Film: Film Brief 

- I am thinking of making a film based around the connotations that come with certain foreign films, whether they are new wave or not. Such as: 

-Including Subtitles in my film even though the films language will be english. I am torn between deciding whether I should include english subtitles or translating the films dialogue to Slovak and including those subtitles. 

- I am also thinking of writing a very loose narrative structure which is common in films that came out of the Czech New Wave. Example's include Daisies and Valerie and her week of Wonders. 

- I am thinking of involving animals in the story and shooting parts of the film from their point of view, similar to the techniques used in Morgiana.

- Many filters will be used in the making of this film, maybe could use a few practical effects such as shooting through different coloured plastic sheeting. I want to avoid as many special effects that are available in post production, as possible, as these were not available during the time that these examples of new wave films were made. Therefore practical effects were used and this is what I wish to emulate in my New Wave Film.

- I eventually decided on including a loose narrative consisting of man wandering around his home town which is transformed into a "mystical wonderland" before his eyes whilst he is inebriated. 

Exploration of the Czechoslovakian New Wave

Context Of the Czech New Wave 

Devetisil

The Devětsil (Czech pronunciation: [ˈdɛvjɛtsɪl]) was an association of Czech avant-garde artists, founded in 1920 in Prague. From 1923 on there was also an active group in Brno. The movement discontinued its activities in 1930 (1927 in Brno).

Founded as U. S. Devětsil (Umělecký Svaz Devětsil - Devětsil Artistic Federation), its name was changed several times. From 1925, it was called the Svaz moderní kultury Devětsil (the Devětsil Union of Modern Culture).

The artistic output of its members was varied, but typically focused on magic realism, proletkult, and, beginning in 1923, Poetism, an artistic program formulated by Vítězslav Nezval and Karel Teige.

The group was very active in organizing the Czech art scene of the period. Members published several art magazines - ReD (Revue Devětsilu), Disk and Pásmo, as well as occasional anthologies (most importantly Devětsil and Život) and organized several exhibitions.

For the most part, Devětsil artists produced poetry and illustration, but they also made contributions to many other art forms, including sculpture, film and even calligraphy.

For about two years Devětsil functioned without any particular theoretical grounding, but as the members changed and those that remained developed and modified their style, it was decided, particularly by Karel Teige, that they begin formulating theories behind their activity. Most of these theories were to be spread through manifestos published by the group. Like any good theorist, Teige was always ready to change his ideas and sometimes moved from one aesthetic to an opposite one. The group formulated a movement that they called Poetism. The long echoed cry, “make it new,” was vital to the Poetists way of thinking. The Devětsil members were surrounded by the new in science, architecture and industry. Even their country was new. In order for art to survive, or at least in order to be worthwhile, it had to constantly be ahead of other changes in life. The Poetists advocated the law of antagonism. This law explains historical progress as reliant on discontinuity. New types and styles of art are continuously necessary for development and vital to these changes are conditions of contradiction. The first manifesto of Devětsil urged new artists to look deeper into ordinary objects for poetic quality. Skyscrapers, airplanes, mimes, and poster lettering were the new arts. Inspired by the Berlin Dadaists, Seifert claimed “art is dead.” Following him, Teige remarked, “the most beautiful paintings in existence today are the ones which were not painted by anyone.”

Between 1923 and 1925, the picture poem was a popular form among the Devětsil artists. Typography and optical poetry was the new lexical standard. Teige explained this transformation of language into visual art as relating to the rise of photography, film and new developments in book printing. For several members of Devětsil, the picture poem replaced painting and eventually both pictures and poems made their way from the page to film. Teige and Seifert began writing film scripts and using the dissolve technique as a way of poetically morphing objects into other objects.







References: 

1.  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devětsil#cite_ref-mccourt_1-0

2.
 Karel, Srp (May 1999). “Karel Teige in the Twenties: The Moment of Sweet Ejaculation.’’ Karel Teige/ 1900-1951 L’enfant terrible of the czech modernist avant-garde. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Morgiana 1972

Morgiana (1972)

"Delirious gothic fairytale with Janzurova playing both the roles of 'good' and 'bad' sister in this adaptation of Alexandr Grin's Edwardian-set novel. Tom Hutchinson has called it 'living Aubrey Bearsdley', which captures perfectly the ornate costume and set design, but not the hallucinatory Hammer-like atmospherics and the drenched colour. Often shot from the point of view of the cat (Morgiana), the film is an elegant, beautifully executed, post-'60s essay on sex and repression."

References: 

1. http://www.timeout.com/london/film/morgiana

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

A masterpiece of erotic confusion, Valerie comes as a delightful introduction to prolific Czechoslovakian director Jaromil Jires, whose career spans five decades. Jires blends reality and illusion to the extent that a synopsis does a disservice to the film, yet the literary story would work quite well on its own. Jaroslava Schallerovà, only 14 years old at the time, plays Valerie, a pretty young girl who lives with her grandmother in a beautiful yet antiseptic house. Her boyfriend (or perhaps brother), who goes by the name Eagle, sets off a chain of unusual events when he steals her earrings. A troupe of actors, or perhaps a wedding procession, comes into town, bringing with it a man who may be a monstrous vampire but may also be Valerie's father. Soon after Valerie's grandmother either disappears or dies, her Cousin Else shows up at the house and bears more than a striking resemblance to the grandmother (indeed, I believe these characters are played by the same actress). Things progress much along these lines, with eventually Valerie experiencing a major reawakening. Jires films in an impressively sensual manner, creating a mood through imagery rather than plot point. At times, however, the details get rather confusing, which can unfortunately shift attention from the beautiful composition and editing to deducing narrative developments. Many sequences appear to occur within the story but then end with the suggestion that they have just been imagined, introducing a need to constantly second-guess one's perceptions. Schallerovà plays the role with stunning (perhaps genuine) innocence. Without overindulged serenity, Valerie mystifies and befuddles through an agenda of symbol-soaked imagery and fantastic storytelling.

A fantastic fairytale
"Maiden, do you know what you are...?"[1]

Jaromil Jireš' Valerie a týden divů (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Czechoslovakia, 1970) is one of those haunting, dream-like films that once seen is difficult to forget. The sexual awakening of adolescent Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) provides the major theme, ornately rendered as a symbol-soaked gothic fairytale. Elements drawn from the horror genre operate in conjunction with the type of gentle soft-core art imagery that can be found in other European sexual initiation films of the 1970s, such as Emmanuelle (1974), Bilitis (1977) and The Story of O (Histoire d'O, 1975).[2]

This heady generic mixture is well-suited to the film's focus on the ambiguous status of various thresholds and the mysteriousness of awakening sensuality, conflicting desires and duplicity. One of the seductive attractions of Valerie a týden divůis its magical trance-inducing quality. The carefully-crafted sets, the hypnotic harpsichord, flute and choir-based music, and the predominance of thematically significant white in the colour co-ordinated palette all add to the film's particular audio-visual ambience of artifice. In addition to the use of elliptical editing, the crystalline quality of the photography is simply stunning, capturing in some scenes the beauty of early summer light sparkling on water and illuminating the pastoral landscape, which is set against dark, decaying, cobweb-strewn crypts.

The film bears some resemblance in stylistic terms to the East German fairytale films made by DEFA (such as The Singing Ringing Tree [Der Singende, klingende Bäumchen, 1957]), sharing the use of fantastic, almost surrealist imagery. That the film makes the sexual subtext of many fairytales overt in transgressive terms is perhaps what attracted UK-based Redemption, a company that specialises in sexploitation and horror films, to release the film on video in 1994. With its non-linear story structure and characters that transform in the blink of an eye, Valerie a týden divů twists and turns much in the irrational manner of a dream. Events unfold from Valerie's subjective point of view, beginning when her brother (if he really is her brother) steals the pearl earrings she inherited from her apparently dead mother. The theft coincides significantly with the onset of her first period. From then on, Valerie is plunged into the strange world of adult desire, with its terrible and intriguing secrets.
Enigma and mutability
"Is there some secret in these earrings?"

Valerie's burgeoning sensuality is established in the opening credits: the camera lingers with fetishistic fascination on her mouth, face and hair. Variously, she tastes the bright water bubbling from a fountain, eats ripe cherries, nestles a dove against her chest and drinks in the scent of a bunch of small, white, wild flowers. Everything in Valerie's world becomes full of wonder, which she experiences in an invigorated and heightened manner. Like the heroines of pre-sanitised fairytales, she faces all the mysteries that come her way boldly and with wide-eyed curiosity.

Tailing the opening sequence is Valerie's contemplation of her bell-like earrings, which carry magical powers. While there are many enigmas in the film, the earrings seem somehow key to the events which follow. Their symbolic significance is underlined early on, as the aural motif that represents them (a series of sing-songy notes played on the glockenspiel) also accompanies the fall of a few drops of Valerie's first menstrual blood onto a daisy. The earrings have a central place in the film's "family romance." Valerie's white-haired, smooth-faced grandmother tells her to get rid of them, as they are a danger to her; she claims to have bought them from the vampire-priest-constable who acts—albeit slightly ambiguously—as the villain of the film (and who may or may not be Valerie's father).

Yet Valerie's brother (at one point Grandmother calls him an actor) states that the earrings will protect her from harm and that the vampire-priest-constable wants them back to sustain his vampire-life. But the status of the earrings is never made entirely clear; in keeping with the film's associative poetic structure, they evade any fixed, one-to-one correspondence of meaning. They do appear to keep Valerie from harm: protecting her from the sexual advances of the local priest, bringing her and the priest back to life, and preventing her from dying when burned at the stake. But, like almost everything else in Valerie a týden divů, the earrings have their own obscured and transformational agenda in symbolic and mythic terms.

Change, artifice and duplicity—nothing here is what it seems—also finds resonant embodiment early in the film when a carnival comes to town. Valerie looks out onto the street to see a masked figure wearing a black cloak; removing his animal mask, the figure reveals a hideous nosferatu face, grinning with an apparent malevolence that causes Valerie to gasp and call him a monster. The mask is replaced and again taken away to uncover the face of a handsome young man. In this topsy-turvey, artifice-laden world, no one is who they seem to be; everyone wears different faces, a device that can be said to express the duplicitous and endlessly deferred nature of desire.

Variously throughout the course of the film, old age turns into youth, piety turns to lust, evil becomes the object of pity, death turns to life and back again, fathers turn into monsters, Valerie's grandmother becomes a wanton vampire, and innocence gives way to knowledge (it is worth noting that an image of Adam and Eve can be seen at the beginning and end of the film, that Grandmother's mirror carries the same image and that Valerie is often shown eating apples). Angela Carter's phrase, "mutability is having a field day," applies so very aptly in relation to this unsettled and unsettling film.[3]
Family romance
"When you awake, my love, keep your secret safe."

At the source of the film's originality is its imaginative-mythic construction of the subjective world of a girl on the borders of becoming woman. Following the breadcrumb path laid down by surrealism, this rite of passage is inflected by psychoanalytic-based ideas of the unconscious as a reservoir of enigmatic overdetermination, dissemblement and creativity. Valerie's increased awareness, born in part from the tangible materiality of her body's new rhythm, reveals adult sexuality as an intriguing masquerade of desire. As with Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984), Valerie's wondrous world is manufactured as the product of a self-tailored fairytale that expresses the particularities and changes in perspective that accompany her burgeoning adolescent sexuality.

Soon after attending a rather strange, lustful sermon given by the vampire-priest-constable in the local church to a group of maidens all dressed in pristine white dresses, Valerie encounters the vampire-priest-constable in the street. Of her own free will and in the name of pity, but driven by curiosity, she enters his "kingdom"—replete with captured songbird and smoking cauldron. He forces her to look through a hole carved into an engraving of a demon (shot through a keyhole-shaped mask), and Valerie sees her formerly pious grandmother in a state of sexual agitation. With a dress torn to reveal not very grandmotherly breasts, and pleading with the priest for sexual attention, Grandmother flagellates herself at his feet.

Rescued from this shocking sight by her brother, Valerie mutters "I'm asleep and dreaming all this" as he carries her away. This is a perverse and overdetermined scene, with the putative demon-father (the vampire-priest-constable) forcing daughter-Valerie to watch her mother/grandmother (she is positioned in the film as both) indulge in, from Valerie's perspective, mystifying sexual behaviour with the missionary priest. While this is not exactly the primal scene, it nonetheless resonates with psychoanalytic-based ideas of the fantasy of seeing or overhearing parental sex: a fantasy that relates to the enigma of origins. The erotic charge of many sex-based films trades on the promise of seeing the secret sexual life of others: Valerie a týden divů confronts this secret with knowing and contrived reflectivity.

As Freud argues in his 1909 essay "Family Romances,"[4] it is common for children to fantasize about family intrigues and secrets. Jean Laplanche expands on this idea by suggesting that the coded speech and actions of family members present enigmas to children that have their impetus in a drive to knowledge.[5] These putative, puzzle-laden messages become repressed and thereby structure unconscious fantasy, only to re-emerge in retrospective form during adolescence. The sexual dimension of the family romance is given shape within Valerie a týden divů in fairytale terms, and Valerie's imaginative relations with her brother and the vampire-priest-constable touch base with Oedipal and incestuous desires (and their prohibition).

In accordance with Freud's central notion that fantasy is subject to the distortions of the primary process, the Oedipal connection becomes diffuse here, subject to disavowal. It is never clear that Valerie's brother is indeed her brother, for example, or that the vampire-priest-constable is her father. They are both objects of Valerie's desire (as she is the object of their desire), yet to keep such a pretty game in play, these potential sexual relationships are invoked only to be deferred. That all the central characters in Valerie's world do not have definitive, stable identities locates that world as subjective artifice. Valerie imagines a range of scenarios in which her family members are endowed with magical powers, their status inflated to fairytale proportions, all along the lines of Freud's family romance.

A crucial interaction takes place between Grandmother and the vampire-priest-constable that reveals another aspect of the Oedipal family romance around which this feux d'artifice spins. Observed by the hidden Valerie, Grandmother asks the vampire-priest-constable to restore her former beauty. He promises to do so only if she gives back the house he gave her. She claims that this is problematic as Valerie would be disinherited, but the demonic vampire-priest-constable exploits the tension between her conflicting maternal and self-gratificatory desires. After signing a Faustian pact, Grandmother is restored to beauty as a vampire and takes on the exact guise of Valerie's mother as shown in a portrait. At first she dissembles as Valerie's cousin, a guise soon dropped, and then attempts to seduce her son/grandson.

Fearing that Valerie has usurped her in the affections of both the Constable and her son (?), she sets out to destroy Valerie and drink her blood. This (grand)mother-daughter rivalry is much the same as that found, subtextually, in the Snow White tale (made overt in Michael Cohn's 1997 film, Snow White: A Tale of Terror). In both texts, there is a competition of beauty and power that circulates around the figure(s) of the father. Yet the difference in Valerie a týden divů is that Grandmother, according to the film's emphasis on mutability, oscillates between a desire for sexual attention and power on the one hand and a concern for Valerie on the other. Moreover, according to the illogical nature of fantasy and the Freudian "return of the repressed," Grandmother's death is only temporary.

Like many fairytales, Valerie's wondrous world is rife with the seductions and aggressions born of family relationships, a factor that continues to give Jireš' film thematic relevance. Added to this is the way the film constructs adult sexuality as strange, mysterious and enigmatic: the people we think we as children know so well turn out to have dark, bestial desires that undermine our earlier idealisation of them. Lorna Sage writes that "we're obsessed with origins and originality, but though the womb in our heads/the Wunderkammer is indeed full of amazing things, the myths and the magic are of our own contrivance... Demystify motherhood, and you abolish the last hiding place for eternity."[6] While Sage is referring to the work of Angela Carter, her observation applies equally well here. Within Valerie a týden divů, fantasy maps childhood monsters onto the sphere of family relationships: the mother figure is desanctified to the point of transforming into a green-eyed vampire, made murderous from jealousy. A rare event in mainstream cinema, she becomes, crucially, a desiring agent in her own right.
Social context
"Publishing houses and film studios were placed under new direction. Censorship was strictly imposed, and a campaign of militant atheism was organized."[7]

It is likely that for most Western viewers the appeal of Valerie a týden divů lies primarily in its striking visual style and eroticised family melodrama. The mythic and fairytale aspects of the film, framed as they are through psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and the Oedipal relation, does tend to universalise its major rite of passage theme in what can appear to be essentialised, gendered terms. But what of the more localised industrial, cultural and political context in which the film was produced?

Valerie a týden divů was made during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, when the national film industry was heavily censored in an attempt at minimising widespread burgeoning dissent. While it is all too easy to oversimplify the relationship between theme and broader historical events, I would suggest that there are certain aspects of the film that resonate with the cultural context in which it was produced.


UK video release of Valerie


During the post-war period, Czechoslovakia became increasingly industrialised, with a significant decline in agriculture and its particular organisation of the landscape. The film's bucolic setting chimes with the somewhat picturesque evocation of sexual innocence. With its focus on rhythms and cycles that link the body to nature there is a pagan inflection to Valerie a týden divů, a return to the myth and romance of a lost agrarian life. Of course this was not a phenomenon experienced only in Czechoslovakia, but throughout the industrialised world. As such, a nostalgia for an imagined authenticity of a back-to-nature lifestyle, laced in local, idiosyncratic, folk-knowledge, informs many other occult and fantasy-based films—and other forms of popular culture—made elsewhere.[8]


Relating more specifically to the context of Soviet domination is the film's treatment of organised religion, namely Catholicism, the country's predominant faith. In accordance with Soviet manoeuvres to enforce atheism, Valerie a týden divů embraces an anti-Catholic stance, particularly in relation to sexual morality. This factor enabled the film to tap a wider, "hip" audience in the West that was inclined towards greater sexual permissiveness and sought liberty from enforced reverence (something that also informed Surrealism's mischievous anti-Catholicism).

Throughout the film, each of the characters connected to Catholicism (the devout grandmother, missionary priest and vampire-priest-constable) are shown to be playing with double moral standards. Soon after a speech about saving a "negro" woman from the sins of the flesh, the vampire-priest-constable enters Valerie's pristine white room, tearing away his cassock to reveal a necklace composed of jagged animal teeth, before he tries to rape her. The message is clear: bestial desire lurks behind pious appearance. Saved by the earrings, the Priest commits suicide, only later to be (incidentally) resurrected by Valerie, after which he burns her as a witch because she "tempted" him. These examples indicate the film's playful attack of the repressive, distorting and colonising values of Catholicism. Like Grandmother, the vampire-priest-constable is a duplicitous hypocrite who preaches one thing yet does another. The defamation of the priestly father, however, has further resonance that might be read as a tacit critique of the contemporary regime.

Using tropes derived from the broader, contemporary, pop cultural fascination with devils, witch burnings, vampires, corrupt priests and duplicitous parents, Valerie a týden divů seems to carry a veiled critique of Soviet domination of Czech culture. In 1968, and under the Warsaw pact, the Soviet authorities took active steps to stamp out increasing anti-communist activism (Czechoslovakia's history is full of occupying forces and it had only a short period of independence between World War I and 1939, until 1991 when Soviet authority collapsed). Correlations are fuzzy—understandably so given the monitored context in which Jireš was working—but the allegorical approach to repression and power struggles in the film resonates with contemporary struggles between liberal reformism and Soviet repression. Masquerading as a slightly titillating fairytale of becoming woman, we might extrapolate from Valerie's fantasy a metaphoric rendition of willful Czechoslovakia seeking freedom and difference from the tryanny of several successive monstrous fathers: Hitler, Stalin, Brezhnev. As Valerie herself says towards the end of the film: "Would that this witching might end."
Coda

One of my strongest impressions when seeing this film for the first time was its similarity to The Company of Wolves, which Jordan directed from a story by Angela Carter. Carter's revisionary fairy- and folktales collected in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) share with Valerie a týden divů the same heady, symbol-soaked assemblage of lush sexual imagery, best emblemised by the shared image of a flower transformed from fresh virginal white to blood red. Jireš' film was screened at the National Film Theatre in London soon after it was made, and according to Roz Kaveney, Carter was present and impressed with it.[9] Jireš' and Carter each make the rite of passage into sexuality the very centre of their tales. Both have heroines who "run with the tigers"[10] (or wolves; in the case of Valerie—the weasel), rather than becoming their sacrificial victims. Valerie is the putative origin of events, so not only does she run, in her fantasy, with the tiger: she is the diegetic author of this running.

In its baroque allegory of transformations and mutability, Valerie a týden divů provides a precursor to more recent horror-fairytale combination films that focus on females. Riffing as they do on the becoming-woman, rite of passage-into-sexuality theme, Snow White: A Tale of Terror and Ginger Snaps (2000) are perhaps the most obvious examples here. Reading back and forth, Jireš' film is an important, and critically neglected, precursor to recent developments in the horror genre, particularly with the dominance of the "final girl" character and the active targeting of horror to female audiences through witchcraft and fairytales, as indicated, for instance, by The Craft (1996), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Practical Magic (1998).[11]

References: 

1.  

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066516/

2.

http://www.kinoeye.org/03/09/krzywinska09.php

Daisies (1966)

Daisies 

"Maybe the New Wave’s most anarchic entry, Věra Chytilová’s absurdist farce follows the misadventures of two brash young women. Believing the world to be “spoiled,” they embark on a series of pranks in which nothing—food, clothes, men, war—is taken seriously. Daisies is an aesthetically and politically adventurous film that’s widely considered one of the great works of feminist cinema."


"Daisies (Czech: Sedmikrásky) is a 1966 Czechoslovak comedy-drama film written and directed by Věra Chytilová considered a milestone of the Nová Vlna movement. Made with the support of the state-sponsored film studio, it follows two teenage girls, both named Marie, played by Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, who engage in strange pranks.

Innovatively filmed, and released two years before the Prague Spring, the film was labeled as "depicting the wanton" by the Czech authorities and banned. Director Chytilová was forbidden to work in her homeland until 1975. The film received the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association."

‘Daisies,’ From the Czech Director Vera Chytilova, at BAM

"THE Czech New Wave is perhaps best known for wry, poignant tales like Milos Forman’s “Loves of a Blonde” and Jiri Menzel’s “Closely Watched Trains.” Accompanying the thaw in Czechoslovakia’s political climate during the early to mid-1960s, these and films by Jaromil Jires, Ivan Passer and Jan Nemec demonstrated new creative freedom, stylistic panache and the possibility of social critique. International acclaim followed, including two Oscar victories.

But the extraordinary 1966 film “Daisies,” which begins a weeklong run at BAMcinématek on Friday, represents an exhilarating, lesser-known strain of the Czech New Wave. This radically mischievous work was the second feature of the wave’s sole female director, Vera Chytilova. In her visually arresting, capricious film — full of colorful experiments, dazzling collage effects and surrealist antics — two dangerously bored young women have anarchic fun in a series of loosely connected episodes.

This was apparently too much for the Communist government. One petition from a member of the country’s National Assembly read, “We ask these cultural workers: How long will they poison the life of working people?” “Daisies” was banned from theaters and export, along with Mr. Nemec’s Kafka-esque “Report on the Party and Guests.”"

In a phone interview from Prague, Mr. Nemec, 75, said of “Daisies,” “They didn’t understand what the whole movie was about, but they had a feeling that its celebration of anarchism or revelry was dangerous.” (Ms. Chytilova, 83, declined through a family member to be interviewed.)

Both movies resurfaced during the Prague Spring of 1968, but the Soviet invasion that August stymied the country’s political and cultural change. Ms. Chytilova was able to shoot another film, “The Fruit of Paradise” (1970), but was otherwise refused permission to make movies at the Barrandov Studios in Prague.

After a few minutes of the film’s free, unpredictable energy you see what made people nervous. The two young women turn a food-filled banquet table into a catwalk, prank older male suitors on humiliating dates, and get drunk at a nightclub and upstage its performers. They lounge half-dressed in their green-accented flat, the walls covered with phone numbers and flower engravings, munching on pickles and sparring playfully in singsong tones.

Their creativity and destructiveness are “two sides of the same coin,” Ms. Chytilova said in an interview during the 2002 Prague on Film Festival in London. The twinned heroines — one blonde and laureled like a nymph, the other a taller brunette — act like dolls run amok, but they’re also impish adolescents tweaking society through their experiments in self-definition. “We can try anything once,” they exclaim in their existential repartee.

But especially amid the flux of 1960s Czechoslovakia their free-spirited activity was open to unsettling interpretations. Do their games represent the dangers of idleness and ideological shapelessness, or do the women personify a punklike liberation? And what to make of the archival war footage that opens and closes the film?

“It’s very ambiguous!” Michal Bregant, director of the National Film Archive in Prague, wrote in an e-mail. “It looks like an anarchist statement, but the director wanted to warn what might be the consequences of irresponsible human behavior.”

For Ms. Chytilova the attraction of filmmaking had been anything but ambiguous. Born in Ostrava, she studied philosophy and architecture in Brno for two years and had stints as a draftswoman, photograph retoucher and model. But she found her calling at FAMU, the estimable Prague film school. “I became like a hunter focused on his goal,” she says in a 2004 documentary. But as in other precincts of international cinema Ms. Chytilova found herself in the minority.

“She was the first female director in our country, and it was not so easy,” said Mr. Nemec, who noted her dominating character. (Years later Mr. Nemec and Ms. Chytilova would teach in the directing department of FAMU: “Now at this late age, she is my boss. It’s very funny!”)

After making a thesis film in 1961 — evocatively titled “The Ceiling” — Ms. Chytilova was not eager to become someone else’s assistant at Barrandov Studios. It was directing or nothing. “I said, forget it. I don’t want to be alive,” she says in the 2004 documentary.

Eventually she made a feature, “Something Different” (1963), a vérité-inspired tale also about two women (a gymnast and a housewife), followed a few years later by “Daisies.” And she later fought being banned from filmmaking. In 1975 she petitioned President Gustav Husak directly (stating, “I want to work!”) and was allowed to make “The Apple Game” (1976), a vindicating popular success.

Ms. Chytilova also had outstanding collaborators. “Daisies” would not be what it is without Ester Krumbachova, an artist and costume designer who wrote the screenplay with Ms. Chytilova and helped design the film, and the cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera, who died in 1991 and was Ms. Chytilova’s husband. The leads are played by winningly game nonprofessionals, Ivana Karbanova and Jitka Cerhova.

Together the team created a film filled with eye-catching imagery, like Ms. Karbanova wearing nothing but strategically placed butterfly pin-boards, or a scene in which the two women appear to slice and dice the screen, shattering the image. (“Daisies” screens at BAMcinématek in a new 35-millimeter print from Janus Films; Criterion Collection’s recent box set “Pearls of the Czech New Wave” pairs Ms. Chytilova and Mr. Nemec’s banned films.)

Ms. Chytilova continued to make films into the 2000s, but “Daisies” remains her best-known work.

“You don’t really begin working creatively until you are at a point where you don’t know,” she said a year after making “Daisies.” Today her film still has that fresh, try-anything outlook.

Photo

References: 
1. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisies_(film))

2.  (https://www.criterion.com/films/27854-daisies)

3. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/movies/daisies-from-the-czech-director-vera-chytilova-at-bam.html?_r=0)

Health and Safety in the Studio Environment

Many precautions were made in order to ensure the safety of those involved in working in a studio environment.
For example it was enforced that no liquids such as beverages or anything that could be spilled was brought into the studio in order to prevent anyone from slipping and falling which may result in injury. Another reason that liquids we're not allowed into the studio was the possibility of it being spilt onto any electronic studio equipment such as lighting and the cameras themselves that can cause damage to the equipment as well as encouraging the chance of shorting out an electric circuit which would result in an electric shock.

The floor was also ensured to be kept clear at all times. This means no electrical cables lying around in case of anyone tripping over the wires and falling. This also applies to other objects that can be left on the floor which are also a tripping hazard.
It should also be ensured that there are no sharp objects lying around the studio that can cause injury to people working in there. However if that sharp object is necessary for either operation of the equipment or props for the shoot etc. then it should be made sure that that object is well out of the way until it is needed.

When using tripods, it is always a necessity to ensure that they are safe and secure both when they are in use and when they are not. By secure, it is meant that it must be made sure that the tripods are ensured to neither fall and break studio equipment nor fall of and injure anyone in the studio. This also means keeping the tripods out of the way of people working in the studio to lessen the chance of it being physically knocked over.

In order to prevent people fro tripping over any wires that are on the floor of the studio, they have to be taped down to the floor. This ensures the safety of both the people and the equipment whom/that are present in the studio environment. Additionally, when the studio lights are not in use, they must be switched off. This both saves electricity as well as prevents injury. If the studio lights are left on for too long they because very hot. This runs the risk of people working in the studio bring themselves on studio lights that have been allowed to become to hot. The studio lights need to be turned off to allow them to cool down as they will need to be handled when the studio session is finished. 

The Theory Of Light as it Applies to Camera Lenses

The theory of light as it applies to camera lenses: 

According to this book (book title) the light rays travel from a specific point on the subject of the shot.

How Shutter Speed affects moving Image

The shutter-speed determines how much light is being captured by the camera's sensor by restricting the amount of time that the sensor is exposed to the light source. If the shutter speed is set to a higher general setting then the longer the sensor will be exposed to the light source and vice versa. If the shutter speed is set to a high general setting then it also runs the risk of making the resulting image overexposed by late depending on the environment in which the image is being captured. If it was captured within an environment with high light levels then the image will run the risk of being over exposed however if the environment didn't have enough light then a high shutter speed will be needed in order to achieve the correct exposure.


This is a clip that i shot with the shutter speed set to 30: 



It can be seen that there is a lot of motion blur in this clip as the camera is rotating. The motion blur gives a much more smoother feel to the shot.


This clip was shot with the shutter speed speed set to 80:

Czechoslovakia New Wave Sources

1.
The Czechoslovak New Wave was a movement in cinema beginning in 1963 and lasting until the end of the Prague Spring reforms of 1968. Led by students of the Film and Television School of the Academy of the Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), the arrival of this new wave of cinema came about largely as a result of new directions in the arts generally and the pressure for social and political reform that developed both inside and outside of the Communist Party in the 1960s – a collective pressure that led to the abolition of censorship and the movement towards increased democratisation.

The three films that launched the wave were the debut features of Milos Forman (Black Peter), Vera Chytilová (Something Different), and Jaromil Jires (The Cry). They were followed by the work of a whole range of debut directors, among them Jan Nemec, Evald Schorm, Pavel Jurácek, Jan Schmidt, Ivan Passer, Jiri Menzel, Hynek Bocan, Juraj Jakubiso, Dusan Hanák, Elo Havetta, and Drahomira Vihanová. Each tended to go in different creative directions and find their own individual approaches, although their films often shared a common sense of humour, absurdity, pathos, and sometimes startling surrealism.

While the attack on tradition and the falsifications of Socialist Realism was spearheaded by the younger generation, an older generation who had paved the way for the New Wave, joined in with the new freedoms of the 1960s and began producing some of their best and most groundbreaking work. Among them were Frantisek Vlácil, Stefan Uher, Vojtech Jasny, Karel Kacyna and the directing team of Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos who won the first Czechoslovak Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1965 for their film A Shop on the High Street.

Daisies, directed by Věra Chytilová (1966)

Taking advantage of the movement’s international success, some of its leading figures, such as Milos Forman and Vera Chytilová, began making bolder attacks on the communist authorities. Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball (1967), set at the annual ball of a small town’s volunteer fire department, portrayed the corruption and incompetence at every level of society, while Chytilová’s irreverent Daisies(1968) ridiculed the establishment through the anarchic pranks of two young girls who refuse to take any of it seriously. Other directors took their inspiration from Czech literature, most notably Jiri Menzel whose adaptation Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Observed Trains won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1966, and Jaromil Jires’s, whose adaptation of Milan Kundera’s The Joke(1968) was described by Amos Vogel as “possibly the most shattering indictment of totalitarianism to come out of a Communist country”.
The climate of liberalisation in Czechoslovakia that had allowed such creativity to flourish culminated in the 1968 Prague Spring when new leader Alexander Dubcek came to power. His plans to bring “socialism with a human face” to Czechoslovakia through reform was quickly crushed, however, when Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into the country and reinstalled the most hard-line communist government in the country since the Stalinist era. The intervention brought the Czechoslovak New Wave to an abrupt end and resulted in Milos Forman, Jan Nemec and others, fleeing the country to resume their career abroad. Others who remained faced censorship of their work or were, for some years, prevented from working in cinema at all.

(Webpage: http://www.newwavefilm.com/international/czech-new-wave.shtml)

2.


What is it? Not so much a formal movement as a loose collective of filmmakers with a passion for taking the piss out of communists, the Czech New Wave put plenty of noses out of joint on the greyer side of the Iron Curtain. Its tart and often hilarious takes on the fumbling regimes of the time emerged from Prague’s famed FAMU film school, which turned out gifted directors galore. When one of them, Jiri Menzel (‘Jiri Dazeem’, if you’re John Travolta), claimed the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967 with his comic masterpiece Closely Watched Trains, they were suddenly a force on the world stage too. Like many of his peers’ films, Menzel’s bildungsroman took its inspiration from Czech literature. He adapted novelist Bohumil Hrabal’s tale of a young railway worker in World War II into a wistful comic classic in the best tradition of great coming-of-age films, with unrequited love, sexy nurses and foiled Nazis galore.


Satirical in an equally sly way, Milos Forman and Ivan Passer’s The Fireman’s Ball was a communist roast so spiky, it was banned by the ruling regime forever. As the Prague Spring fomented resistance to Soviet occupation, Forman – who would head to Hollywood in 1971 and later win Oscars for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus – could be found at Barrandov Studios working alongside Passer, Menzel, Ivan Kadar and Vera Chytilova (the so-called “first lady of Czech cinema”) to define the country’s cinema. Then, of course, the Soviets put a stop to all that by banning their films. It being extremely hard to argue with a man in a tank, the movement petered out in the early 1970s.





What to watch: Loves Of A Blonde (1965) (pictured above), The Shop On Main Street (1965), Closely Watched Trains (1967) (pictured top), The Fireman’s Ball (1967)


What did it influence? Ken Loach, among others. He picked Closely Observed Trains as the film he’d most want to share with future generations.






Webpage: (http://www.empireonline.com/features/film-studies-101-movie-movements/p13)

Experimenting with Lighting

Experimenting with lighting:

Using a Reflector:



In this clip, it shows us experimenting with the reflector,  a circular frame of reflective material that is used to illuminate specific areas by reflecting light from a specific light source. This is used to illuminate any areas that wouldn't normally be illuminated by the current lighting set up. It's the lighting equivalent of filling in the gaps.


High Key Lighting:



In this clip, this lighting setup makes sure there are no dark areas in the shot as all the lights in the studios are being utilised.




Low key Lighting:



Butterfly:



This was a second attempt of sorts, of the Rembrandt lighting technique. We wanted to fully establish the "butterfly" underneath the nose that wasn't so evident in the Rembrandt clip. In this clip it still isn't perfectly established however it is much clearer than the previous clip.


Edge Lighting:



Edge lighting consists of the subject being illuminated by the singular light source, only on the one side, leaving the other half of the subject in a lower key lighting creating a very distinctive contrast. In this case half of my face has a shadow cast upon it with the other half completely illuminated. This was achieved through a very simple set up of  singular light being shone on one side of my face.

Rembrant:



In this lighting set up, it is most commonly identified by a shadow that is cast underneath the nose of the subject which resembles a butterfly in flight. It can also be identified by a emmitence of light in the shape of  triangle that appears on the right side of the subjects face. As shown in the following images:

The triangle of light has been achieved on the subject however the butterfly was proven hard to establish. It took a lot of experimentation with different angles with the Key light in order to achieve satisfying results. This showed us that this particular lighting set up isn't the easy to set up on the first attempt but after a few more attempts then the "butterfly" will become more apparent.


3 Point:



The 3-point lighting set up is used to fully illuminate the subject, in this case it was used to fully illuminate my face. It was defiantly one of the easiest set ups despite the fact that it consists of three lights. These are the Key light, the Fill Light and the Back Light, as shown in the following image:

Experimental:







Image Sources: 

1.    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/3_point_lighting.svg/2000px-3_point_lighting.svg.png

Editing Footage to Music

This is the end result of an exercise in which we edited footage of your choice to a song that we were given to edit to. This was to help us understand how specific and time consuming the editing process can be especially when making particularly short and precise cuts. The precise cuts included cutting to the beat of the song so that the images corresponded to the music. This is done in order for the video to appear more rhythmic and therefore flows much more smother that a video that isn't cut as specifically as the video would feel out of time as well as out of place with the background music.



I found that there were a few issues when editing this video. The primary issue was how time consuming the process is. Therefore i was unable to utilise the entire song in the time we had. this meant that the video ended up being fairly short.

Due to the style of the song, it left much room for experimentation. I felt like the mood of the song could be associated with the quietness and moodiness of outer space. I therefore chose a number of clips which relate to this theme to include in the video.
I then went on to edit these clips to specific beats of the song, with different images symbolising different aspects of the beat such as kicks and snares with light flashing/scene changing. This turned out to represent the atmosphere I felt when listening to the song and therefore is an effective accompaniment to the sound track.

Cutting the different clips precisely to the beat became a challenge, however the specific space that was being searcher for was found with perseverance and trial and error.
I incorporated many different clips from music videos that I knew, one of which was of a drummer drumming in slow motion. I felt like the slow motion amplified the song quite well due to its slow pacing. However the video became more and more abstract as it went on as there were many random elements added.

Overall the task showed me the strong and weak points of my editing skills. I am now more knowledgeable of where I need to improve.

The conversation - A short film made within roughly 4 hours

How Aperture Affects Moving Image

In this clip, I shot with an aperture setting of 2.8. This provided a very shallow depth of field which means more of the shot is out of focus rather than in focus. This allows the viewer to naturally draw their attention to the point of focus.

 

Czech New Wave Summary

The Czechoslovak New Wave was an artistic movement in cinema which evolved out of the earlier Devětsil movement of the thirties. Disgruntled with the communist regime that had taken over in Czechoslovakia in 1948, students of the Film and TV School of The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (also known as FAMU) became the dissenters of their time. Their objective in making films was "to make the Czech people collectively aware that they were participants in a system of oppression and incompetence which had brutalized them all."[1]

Trademarks of the movement are long unscripted dialogues, dark and absurd humour, and the casting of non-professional actors. The films touched on themes which for earlier film makers in the communist countries had rarely managed to avoid the objections of the censor, such as the misguided youths of Czechoslovak society portrayed in Miloš Forman's Black Peter (Czech: Černý Petr 1963) and Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky 1965), or those caught in a surrealistic whirlwind in Věra Chytilová's Daisies (Sedmikrásky 1966) and Jaromil Jireš' Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Valerie a týden divů 1970).

The Czechoslovak New Wave differed from the French New Wave in that it usually held stronger narratives, and as these directors were the children of a nationalized film industry, they had greater access to studios and state funding. They also tended to present films taken from Czech literature, including Jaromil Jireš' adaptation of Milan Kundera's anti-Communist novel The Joke (Žert 1969). At the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers Union in 1967, Milan Kundera himself described this wave of national cinema as an important part of the history of Czechoslovak literature.[2] Forman's The Firemen's Ball (Hoří, má panenko 1967), another major film of the era, remains a cult film more than four decades after its release.

As Alexander Dubček came to power over the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia with plans to present "socialism with a human face" through reform and liberalization (a brief period known as the Prague Spring), the Soviet Union and their Warsaw Pact allies invaded to snuff out reform. The movement came to an abrupt end and Miloš Formanand Jan Němec fled the country, while those who remained faced censorship of their work.











        "Czech culture is known for its black humour, pessimism and        cynicism as well as its interest in fantasy, magic and surrealism."
- Contemporary World Cinema (Sohini Chaudhuri)

References:
 Reference: Book: Contemporary world cinema by Sohini Chaudhuri 

1.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovak_New_Wave

How ISO affects Moving Image

This is a short experiment regarding different levels of ISO. The ISO setting is the setting that establishes how sensitive the cameras sensor is to the available light source. In the video above I used a relatively low ISO setting considering how little light I was able to work with at the time. The ISO seeing i used was ISO 800. You can see that the image is crisp and more detailed than it would have been if I used a higher ISO setting. However the image is also much darker and underexposed and therefore less clear.

In the video below

Unit 31 Task: Film Editing- Shot/Reverse Shot

Shot reverse Shot is a cinema technique that is used to represent two sides of a conversation that is happening within the scene. During the conversation the shot reverse shot consists of a close up or mid shot of someone who is talking, then goes to a cut to the reaction of the other person who is listening (usually with an over the shoulder shot) and then only to then cut back to the original speaker. This cinematic technique fluently and efficiently presents the back and forth between two characters. The audience members presume that the two characters are talking to each other as they are looking in opposite directions, one character would be looking to the right and one to the left.  The characters don't necessarily have to be talking to each other for it to be a shot/reverse shot. It can also be two characters just looking at each other, back and forth.




A shot reverse shot can also be used to express an importance of a certain item that is being shown in the film. It would work the same way as a conversational shot/reverse shot, however replacing the shot of the person who is listening, with an inanimate object.

This is a unique example of a shot reverse shot as the conversation that the character of Norman Osborne is having, is with himself, or rather with his self made alter ego the Green Goblin, in which the shot reverse shot technique issued by Director Sam Raimi




References:              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_reverse_shot

Experimenting with lighting techniques

In this clip I provided a backlight upon the subject with a LED light, to create a shadow which will be cast upon the white screen in the background. The LED light source was not static, but hand held which distorted the showdown that was cast upon the screen. I also experimented with different levels of focus and to see how that affected the image.