Rediscovering Chytilová

By Agata Pyzik

Daisies, 1966, film still

Some artists become associated only with one work, the interest in which often doesn’t lead to further exploration of their output. This has been the case with the Czech film director Vera Chytilová and her astonishing film Daisies (1966), which now has an international reputation as a cult feminist and Marxist film. There’s no doubt Chytilová’s deeply subversive work profoundly engaged with the intricacies of socialism, but unlike some of her contemporaries, it’s hardly limited to it. Daisies can be viewed as a critical conversation about the possibilities of politics, socialism, labour, feminism, love, sex and the relationship between genders within the conditions of socialism. What’s more, her work generally can be understood as a precocious critique of both capitalist consumerism and authoritarianism, especially now her little-known and fascinating body of work post-1966 can be properly seen., thanks to the recent retrospective at the BFI in London, and the mainstream DVD release in March of two of her films, namely the psychedelic Fruit of Paradise (1970) and the post-communist black comedy Traps (1998). Both will help to situate the-often confusing curio Daisies in a wider context.

So, how was it possible to make such a flamboyant and experimental work within the supposedly bleak and controlled conditions of state socialism? First of all, Chytilová and her contemporaries were a product of the 1960s – possibly the freest decade in the era of Soviet communism, thanks to Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’ and the end of Stalinist repression, which had been especially brutal in Czechoslovakia. Literature, art and music all flourished, and a new generation graduated from film schools, such as the Film and TV Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague. However, female directors were rare. The artistic eruption of the ‘Czechoslovak New Wave’ (which evolved after the French and Polish ‘waves’ of the 1950s) reflected new forms to both realism and surrealism, but in a way that differed greatly from the war-obsessed morality tales of Polish cinema. Czech film was in turn joyous and funny and responded to the absurdities of the system in distinctively bittersweet ways. Chytilová created a critical, leftist cinema comparable to that of Jean-Luc Godard, but the questioning of consumerism extended to a questioning of the male gaze in the cinematic presentation of women, who never resembled Godard’s sexy beauties.

Chytilová’s first two films, Ceiling (1961) and her first feature About Something Else (1963), maintained a controlled, monochrome documentary realism in the manner of early Milos Forman. Yet she broke with it in one radical feature: almost all of Chytilová’s films focus on women and their role in 1960s society before the ‘sexual revolution’, their limited career options and their submission to men and the possible alternatives. These roles are explored both in an experimental and realistic manner. About Something Else is about two women, the famous gymnast, Eva Bosakova, and the fictional bored housewife, Vera. The film jumps from one story to the other; Eva’s exhausting routine intersperses with Vera’s boring tasks in a typical petit-bourgeois arrangement with her indifferent husband and young son. Documentary-style fragments of street realism and gymnastic training mix with long takes of housework; even the sex scenes between Vera and her lover are interspersed with Eva’s exercises, to stress the connection between two women and their different ‘performances’. In the end, the consumerist aspirations of Vera, who jilts her lover as soon as her husband (who cheats on her, too) buys a car are juxtaposed with Eva’s self-efficiency and discipline: she finally wins the world championship. Yet the juxtaposition of the two women isn’t a morality tale: the film suggests, rather, that our society doesn’t offer equal opportunities for women who want to combine career and motherhood. Despite her sporting success, Eva is often lonely and misunderstood; caught in a dead-end marriage; Vera has little room to manoeuvre beyond her petty consumer aspirations. The film deploys various ‘alienation effects’, such as incongruous leaps between soundtrack and image, disrupting linear perception, which was exploited to the utmost degree in Daisies.

Despite its striking originality, Daisies didn’t emerge from a vacuum, but was influenced not only by Czechoslovakian artists (such as the surrealist animations of Jan Svankmajer) but Andy Warhol’s pop art – Chytilová and her cinematographer husband, Jaroslav Kučera, travelled to New York in 1968 and visited the Factory, as they were interested in his experimental film. Chytilová employed disruptive techniques, such as collage, photomontage, animation and heightened colour (Kučera admitted that the abrupt colour/black and white contrasts were partly the result of trying out various lenses). The fast edits and surprising juxtapositions, as well as the contrasting, ‘alienating’ use of music, sound and surrealist dialogue, evoke the work of pre-war figures, such as Sergei Eisenstein or Bertholt Brecht’s collaborations with composers Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill.

Daisies was directly inspired by Brecht and Weill’s ‘sung ballet’ Seven Deadly Sins (1933), in which the two sides of one girl – good and evil – described as Anna I and Anna II, go through the seven sinful stages. Daisies is conceived in a similar way, with two teenage girls (called Maria I and Maria II only in the script, as in the film they are called multiple names) escaping their mundane lives on a rampant spree, destroying everything they touch in episodes of pure jouissance. They pick up men and cheat them into a free dinner (in an unfulfilled exchange for their charms); they disrupt a nightclub cabaret with slapstick ragtime, and seduce and abandon men. But most of all they constantly eat, consume and, in equal measure, waste and destroy food. Food in Daisies is always arranged in artistic patterns, and evokes the bodies and lives of women. The girls explore the world by cutting, splashing and burning. They turn their room into a place of fantasy. They go everywhere uninvited, but only when they arrive at an abandoned banquet (with the luxurious food no doubt supplied for Party officials) and embark on a final food and destruction orgy, are they punished. In the final scene they try to mend the wasted food and plates, to be only crushed by a gigantic chandelier.

Daisies is as fast-paced as a slapstick comedy, and the ‘acting’ technique of the two actors recalls marionettes, dolls and the exaggerated movements of Charlie Chaplin. Chytilová uses the avant-garde methods of de-familiarization to create a parable effect. Zdenek Liska’s music contributes to the alienation, providing parodies of war marches as if from a broken wound-up music box. The film was very much a group effort, especially through the input of scriptwriter-director Pavel Juracek and the scriptwriter, set designer and director Ester Krumbachová, whose flat apparently looked exactly like the girls’ constantly changing room, like a dadaist collage from a glossy women’s magazine.

What were the censors supposed to do with such a film? In 1966, the authorities considered it an insult to the hardworking socialist man, and Daisies was held back from release for a year, then shown during the brief attempt at ‘socialism with a human face’ under the Czech leader, Alexander Dubček. After the Prague Spring was crushed in 1968 and Chytilová was banned from film-making, the director wrote a letter to General Secretary, Gustav Husak, explaining how her film wasn’t actually aimed at the undermining of the socialist state, but at anti-capitalist critique and the male chauvinism of film circles. Certainly, initially Daisies was intended as a much more straightforward condemnation of the girls’ mindless consumerism (and in general, the indifference of 1960s youths to politics) and trying to conform to vacuous ideals of beauty. But, in the process, the film became more sympathetic towards them, equipping them with potential tools of defence – their capacity for destruction. The objectification of women is confirmed by the constant doubting by the girls themselves about whether they really exist, something that is confirmed to them only when men see them. Ultimately, whether anything really exists is questioned, as consumerism turns everything into a spectacle.

The slogan that runs over the film’s ending declares that ‘the film is dedicated to all those who cried only about trifle’, alludes to the waste of food, and confirms that Chytilová directed her critique of consumerism at both socialist and capitalist societies, where wastefulness happens daily – and within capitalism is even encouraged – while official morality presents itself as austere. Far greater destruction is suggested by the documentary footage of devastated cities in World War II that bookend the film. Perhaps this was intended to recall the tragic waste and losses of the war in the times of socialist and capitalist amnesia alike.

August 1968 brought an end to Dubcek’s reforms, with ‘normalisation’ imposed by a Soviet-imposed government. Chytilová replied to the crisis with her most bizarre film, Fruit of Paradise (1970). A bold examination of relationships between the sexes, Fruit slows down Daisies’ exuberance and pace for the sake of more oneiric kind of surrealism. The film is ruled by the conventions of a dream, where people appear and things happen with few causal relations. After an introduction in the Garden of Eden, ‘Eve’ and her husband stay in an abandoned spa, which is next to a lake and stony beaches, surrounded by dramatic cliffs. She falls in love with another convalescent, and the three begin a curious game. They’re surrounded by an equally mysterious group of men and women, and the location shifts between the paradisiacal garden and desolate landscapes. The curious, commedia dell’arte acting, choral, dreamy music and psychedelic images make for an intriguing, if confusing, film.

After ‘normalisation’ Chytilová was forced out of work, but refused to emigrate; she was unable to make another film until 1976. The Apple Game was banned from the Berlin Film Festival by the Czech authorities intervention, despite the aforementioned letter to Husak. Her comeback was Panel Story from 1979, which was a commercial hit in Czechoslovakia – an epic, if highly stylized, take on the gigantic socialist prefabricated housing projects. The film is a monumental, mosaic construction à l Balzac, following multiple characters and their expectations, wishes and intrigues, set amongst the half-built infrastructure of the permanent provisional condition of an ‘unfinished socialist revolution’. Chytilová would find work as scarce in the capitalist 1990s as in as the ‘normalisation’ 1970s, but returned in 1998 with Traps, a black comedy focusing on rape and women’s revenge.

In Traps, the main protagonist, Lenka, is kidnapped and raped by two powerful men, including a local MP. As a vet specialising in castrating pigs, she manages to punish her rapists accordingly, who remain shockingly guiltless and now seek their revenge. Chytilová transforms what sounds like a horror story on paper into a dark comedy, critiquing the petty careerism and sexism in the newly capitalist Czech Republic: even Lenka’s boyfriend betrays her. Lenka manages to fulfil her revenge fantasy, but is punished in the end, as nobody believes her claims and she’s placed in a mental institution. Amongst the shallowness of newly regained freedom the last person anyone wants to listen to is a woman claiming her rights. In Traps, Chytilová confirmed that capitalism didn’t blunt her sharp social critique one iota. Even if her last films didn’t match her early innovations, Chytilová remained one of Europe’s most nonconformist, feminist filmmakers, capable of rare complexity. With her death last year at the age of 85, cinema lost one of its most unique and defiant voices.

Traps is available now on DVD, and Fruit of Paradise will be available from 13th April 2015, both from Second Run DVD.