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.

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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)