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Czech Directors
Jiri MenzelClosely Watched TrainsInterview 1968Interview 1968 EpilogueA Track All Its OwnMenzel and SexualityBohumil Hrabal and MenzelMenzel and the MiracleJerusalem Post ReviewLos Angeles Times ReviewBoston Globe ReviewMilos FormanBlack PeterForman Passer PapousekVera ChytilovaFilmographySomething DifferentDaisiesThrough Womens EyesInterviewWomen in Film21 Deputies Against DaisiesFrom Vera to the PresidentFirst Lady of the New Wave 1First Lady of the New Wave 2Film Analyses and History
Subversion in Eastern EuropeLeft and Revolutionary CinemaWomen Who Make MoviesHistory from Women in FilmNew Cinema in CzechoslovakiaPart 1Part 2The Cinema as Critic
1 Eastern Europe 1955 To 19712 Social Criticism3 Romantic Nationalism4 The Alienation of Youth5 Closely Watched Trains6 The Individual in Czech FilmThe Miracle and the Young Wave
1 Sunshine in a Net2 Preceding Generations3 Jires4 Forman Passer Papousek5 Nemec Juracek Krumbachova6 Through Womens Eyes7 Juracek8 Schorm9 Masa10 Menzel11 Kachyna and Prochazka12 Bocan13 Production Groups and FITES14 Brynych Danek Vlacil15 Good Entertainment16 Slovakia in the SixtiesZBibliography
BibliographyZRelated Links
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| Through Women's Eyes |
| (By Mira & Antonin J. Liehm - 1977) |
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| Another cinematic milestone of Czech film in the sixties was shot from a script by Ester Krumbachova, who also worked on the film as art director. It was "Daisies" ("Sedmikrasky" - 1966), directed by Vera Chytilova, who- as did Milos Forman after "Competition"- abandonned the method of cinema verite after "Something Different". Chytilova, with Jaroslav Kucera at the camera, combined fragments of everyday reality with artistic and motion-picture recollections to create an artificial, stylized reality as a setting for her modern fable. The story deals with the inner void, with boredom, with the destructive impulse that these bring into being; it deals with the indifference of the world, and also with people whose indignation in a world of mass murder and silent inhumanity "is reserved for an overturned bowl of salad." When their real-life Czech counterparts were confronted with the finished work, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would turn that indignation on "Daisies". Mainly because the film spoke in a language that was almost totally incomprehensible to them- for, as they used to say in Prague, isn't "social realism" just a euphemism for "celebrating the Party and the Government in a language that even they can understand?" In 1970, Chytilova, Krumbachova, and Kucera- in a coproduction with Belgium- completed another of their philosophical visions of the contemporary world, an ambitious artistic parable about women in a man's world, "The Fruits of Paradise" ("Ovoce Stromu Rajskych Jime). A symphony of surrealist estheticism, not always molded into comprehensible form; a film for the next decade, as one American reviewer wrote. Ester Krumbachova made her first- and for a long time, her only- independent film, "The Murder of Dr. Lucifer" ("Vrazda Ing. Certa" - 1970), at the moment when it was all coming to an end. A sarcastic tract on the myth of maleness, it is practically the only Brechtian film made in Czechoslovakia during the period. It achieves the necessary 'distances', not through cinematic techniques but through acting and staging. (Copyright - The Regents of the University of California) |
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