Vera Chytilova (From 'All the Bright Young Men and Women') - (By Josef Skvorecky - 1971) - Movies - http://maxpages.com/czechcinema/First_Lady_of_the_New_Wave

The first of the two ladies of the New Wave is, in my mind, associated with disaster. It all started somewhat in the manner of my meeting with Milos Forman. The doorbell rang, and at the door stood another beauty - this time another stranger. She stunned me; I didn't stammer as in the case of Jana Brejchova (she wasn't a film star), but instead I completely misjudged her age, and took her for a young unsuspecting kitten. That afternoon, while sitting on the terrace of the Film Club Cafe, I managed to give a sterling performance of the father part from "Peter and Paula". Had Forman seen it, he would have undoubtedly given me the role.
The kitten that sat facing me was thirty-one. By way of introduction she told me that for her admission examination to the Film Academy she wrote a screen play based on my story "The Racial Question". This naturally pleased me, since at that time I was under constant attack in the papers. Then she asked me if I could help her with her thesis film. The script was written by her colleague Pavel Juracek, with whom she supposedly argued because she wanted the film to be more philosophical.
The thing was called "The Ceiling", but I unfortunately liked Vera more than her script, and did not supply any philosophy. It was after all she, not I, who was the philosopher; in the end I had a very courteous argument with her, as I found the screenplay to be a rather tedious moral tale, considerably tributary to socialist-realist 'philosophy', which evaluated human efforts according to the governmental tariff of 'social usefulness'. In the screenplay a pretty medical student takes a part-time job modelling at fashion shows, and gets herself a stylish lover. Then she drops out of medicine and begins to alternate between her lover's bed and the shallow world of the fashion shows. Finally, disgusted by all of it, she boards a train, where she meets simple country people. Cleansed by this Rousseauvian communion, she decides to start a new life by returning to the study of human maladies. The kitsch bore an obvious ideological resemblance to the then fashionable 'return to the people for cathartic purposes', as it was represented for instance in Jiri Fried's celebrated novel "Time Squeeze", which I found particularly repulsive. The whole theme was nothing but a formally sophisticated re-birth of the reactionary baker, Mr. Seagull, under the influence of the miners (in the previously mentioned film "Seagull Is Late", 1950) and this in turn was just a 'progressive' modification of an identical theme which once had been a favourite of some of the worst Catholic writers. Both themes had a villager corrupted by the city, both contained a train ride to some village in the mountains, in both there appeared those full-blooded simple folk, as healing as the spring of life. The only difference was in the reactionary treatment given to the material by the Catholic writers, as exemplified by the introduction of the good parish priest, a character omitted from the 'progressive' version, or replaced by some ponderous village communist.
Notwithstanding all that, I have always had a soft spot for fashion models, and so I refused to belittle her eminently beneficial work. Vera in the end stubbornly made the film, but instead of the interjection of even the wisest philosophy, she did something much more clever. Although the schematic morality remained, the director blunted it by completely shifting the emphasis to form: and very formalistic form at that. It was possibly the first formalistic film of the New Wave, discounting Vlacil's "The Dove" (1960), but that was protected against any criticism by the acceptable peace symbolism. "Ceiling" was a pure succession of beautiful objects - from the actress who played the model to the nature shots, rendered by the precise camera work into a twilight display of light and shadow. Vera later declared that 'beauty is the means and not the end', but she quickly added: 'If we were to forget that, we might say: if formalism, then beautiful.'
The film bore noticable traces of cinema-verite. It did not make much use of a hidden camera, but it utilized a concealed microphone planted in the models' dressing room, where Vera herself would start conversations with the changing girls. The shots of the fashion show were thus accompanied by a phantasmagorial unrehearsed cackle of girlish noises, with the director's characteristic voice, identifiable by her peculiar pronunciation of 'r' sounds, outstanding. She pronounced those sounds as the English do, which to a Czech ear is delightfully comical.
Vera made her second film, also a medium-length feature, "A Bag of Fleas" (1962), in my home town Nachod, which is famous for its role in the Czech labour movement. Some of its numerous cotton-mills still use the English milling machines bought at the turn of the century. The cotton industry always preferred women; after the war the factories built large dormitories and filled them with girls. At one time there were young females living there from all over the world. Besides Czech and Slovak citizens and girls from Poland, which is only three miles away, one could see, promenading on the square, Greek beauties from families that fled their country after the defeat of the Communist guerillas, Korean girls learning the trade, some Chinese and, I believe, even a few curious American students who worked there on summer jobs. The abundance had a shady side to it: the ratio of girls to boys in my home town changed since the days of my youth to 5 to 1 to the advantage (or rather disadvantage) of girls - a situation typical for several Czech textile towns and also, if you recall, the starting point of "Loves of a Blond". "A Bag of Fleas" is about the clash between what the adults call working morale and the natural needs of sixteen-year-old females, needs which are hard to satisfy in a feminized milieu. So the heroine of the film skips work because of her precious boyfriend; she is consequently summoned before the Works Committee, and severly chastised.
The film was staged from beginning to end; but through the improvisation of the given dialogue, particularly in the scenes with the worker-officials, Vera achieved an immediateness resembling Forman's films. The accent of form and the 'l'art pour l'art' beauty temporarily receded; content became prominent - and that is where Vera's disasters started.
As it was, the film employed strictly non-actors - the real foremen and officials of the Nachod cotton-mills. The camera showed them realistically, that is unflatteringly; one of them was even introduced while performing the function of a self-appointed controller of morality at a dance in a local restaurant, where the youth indulged in 'eccentric western dances'. The dance in question was a variant of rock'n'roll, and the interesting point is how peculiar were the ideas about decent dancing, as reflected in the activities of the controller. Dancing with the bodies of the partners not touching, or dancing individually, each on his own, as it was occasionally showed in the newsreel shots from the 'decadent West' was considered immoral. Consequently one could sometimes see voluntary protectors of morality, forcing the bands to play tangos, and making the young couples on the dance floor slither around glued to each other breast to breast and belly to belly. The non-actors, some of whom had political influence, spoke out against the showing of the film, and it took a full year of negotiations before "A Bag of Fleas" reached the cinemas.
Meanwhile Vera worked on a new movie, which proved to be very important in her future development. In the 'verite' style (consequently abandoned by Vera) penetrated the formalistic style of the symbolic, stylized, generalized 'philosophical' statement - and that subsequently led to approaching the work as an independent 'objet d'art' in its own right. The film was called "About Something Else" (1963) and it really consisted of two juxtaposed films, capturing side by side two independent and unrelated lives of two thirty one year old women: A world famous gymnast, and an insignificant housewife. One of them sacrifices everything to a given goal: the Olympic gold medal. She neglects all that a woman, as a woman, should have - children, a happy family life - and ends up in a crisis. The other one sacrifices everything to her family. she neglects everything that a woman should attain as a human being - the desire to become something, to achieve something, to assert oneself in society, not only at home - and also reaches a crisis. Both lives, seeming diametrically opposed, lead towards the bitter feeling of 'vanitas vanitatum - although Vera herself said about the film, that it is 'a drama of the eternal struggle for immortality amidst the finality of human powers'. But after all, Vera is a philosopher.
In "About Something Else", Vera's most prominent artistic trait became evident: her almost militant feminism. Sometimes I feel that Vera is first a woman, and only after that a human being - a characteristic which became clear in "Daisies" (1966).
However, before she started to shoot "Daisies", we met once more for a joint effort which, in the end, again failed. It was at a time when Novotny's cultural department continued its Holy War against jazz and pop music by waging an artful attack against popular singers. A reflection of that war was evident in "A Bag of Fleas", but in real life it was carried much further - all the way to several public trials.
At the first one, a group of 'hooligans' was ceremonially convicted for secretly indulging in the perverse western dance of rock'n'roll in the hall of the Manes Club, which they had properly rented. They each served several months in jail for their anti-socialist activities. The leader of the group, if I remember correctly, was sent up for a year. Within a short time these perverse dances were performed publicly with the Young Communist League organizing the events, but that was all right, because as the Marx-acknowledged Hesiodos says - 'panta rei' - everything develops.
I got involved in the Holy War on the side of the pop musicians with an article, "Who Takes Baths in Champagne?" I gained popularity with the singers, burdened my already overdrawn account at the Cultural Department, and aroused once again Vera's interest. The war culminated in the banning of the three most popular singers from public performance. The three singers, Eva Pilarova, Waldemar Matuska, and Karel Gott, were accused of some rather spectacular infamies: while on a trip in Karlsbad, Eva and Waldemar supposedly urinated from the balcony of the Hotel Pupp on the heads of some workers' delegation, while Karel Gott provided musical accompaniment by singing the favourite melody "The Bubbling Stream". Additional misdeeds were revealed during interrogation: Waldemar, clad only in a pair of socks, was supposed to have directed traffic at an intersection and thus caused a traffic jam, while Eva was seen somewhere playing poker for "Tuzex" coupons: special money obtainable in exchange for dollars, pounds, West German marks, and other hard currency. In special Tuzex stores one can get otherwise inaccessible Western products for the coupons (including Coke and Swedish cars). One can also buy girls with them called in the Prague slang 'Tuzex girls'. It did not help the 'perverts' that Eva had an ironclad alibi for the urinary night (she was not in Karlsbad), and that the poker she was supposed to be playing was the game of "Monopoly", (unknown to the informer) brought by the bass player Ludek Hulan from a trip to Switzerland (and the 'Tuzex coupons' were really the paper money that comes with the game). The Cultural Department outdid Vyshinsky, and didn't even bother extracting a confession from the accused. A similar penalty was handed out to another excellent jazz singer, Eva Olmerova (whose case was worse because in her youth she spent a year in the house of correction); in a state of inebriation she reportedly fell off stage into the audience at the Alhambra night club, probably also onto a delegation - here most likely a foreign one.
At that point I considered writing a novel about all of that. It was to be called "There Must Be Something Wrong", a quotation from "A Minor Bird" from Robert Frost. I saw Vera at a meeting of the Preparatory Committee of the Czechoslovakian Participation at Montreal Expo, where Vera managed to embarrass the well-known minister Kahuda by suggesting that diabolical screaming and grinding of teeth should emanate from the Czechoslovakian Pavilion in order to bring out the contrasting heavenly beauty of the interior. During intermission I told her about the intended novel and recited Frost's poem:

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

Vera evidently liked the poem better than the novel - in it the singer battling the administrative interference was in the end supposedly to really lose her voice after an operation on her vocal cords. A few days later Vera once again knocked on my door - accompanied by the sociologist of the pop-music milieu Milan Schulz - and we started to concoct something according to Frost. One of the two suppressed singers, either Eva Pilarova or Eva Olmerova, was to star in the movie. at the studios they naturally threw out both us and the screen-play. One thing, nevertheless, is worth noticing. Once during a working session I told Vera about the principle of the blues - the three-verse structure, where the second verse is usually a varied repetition of the first; this gives the time to make up the third verse - and Vera, the formalist, became all ears. Under her somewhat autocratic leadership the screenplay took on a tripartite form - the second part being a varied repetition of the first; to one of our meetings Vera dragged the famous modernistic composer of serious music, Jan Klusak, and forced the already overtaxed musician to promise some very special score for our film. Vera, who in the typical philosophical manner goes from the generalized to the specific, described her vision of that musical accompaniment as a 'symphonic blues'. If I understood her correctly, it was supposed to be some kind of a three-part symphony built on the structural principle of the blues verse (not on their harmonic formula), which, I think, Klusak, who does not like jazz, failed to understand. But the script was refused, anyway, so Vera cast Klusak as one of the leads in "Daisies", thus co-discovering for the New Wave a very expressive actor. (He subsequently appeared in Nemec's "The Party and the Guests", "The Martyrs of Love", and many other films.)
The feminist Vera possesses something of a provocative aggressiveness of the suffragettes. Our unsuccessful attempt at the film blues did not diminish her energies; first she pressured into co-operation the absurdist writer, actor and psychologist Ivan Vyskocil (also the co-founder of the "Little Theatres" movement), and when he resisted her too strongly, she found another woman, Ester Krumbachova, who is, I am afraid, as far as feminism is concerned, an exact opposite of Vera. That is how began the fruitful co-operation, which has so far culminated in the movie "We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise" (1970). Around that time Vera married the best Czech cameraman, Jaroslav Kucera, and immediately put him to work. The result was possibly the most brilliant camera achievement in the history of Czech film. The newly wed directress finished the shooting in a considerably advanced state of rotundity, that possibly enhanced the tone of a certain mocking acrimony, with which the film treats the majority of male characters.
According to Vera's words, "Daisies" was supposed to be 'a bizarre comedy with shades of satire and sarcasm oriented towards both the protagonists'. It certainly was a bizarre comedy, but I am not sure whether the satirical quill really aimed at the two impish main characters. Also, I am not sure that the film really is 'a parable on the destructive force of nihilism and senseless provocation', but it certainly is an excellent, rich, boldly and mischieviously made film. It begins with a montage: a nuclear explosion, tanks destroying houses. I suspect that the authoresses added the grandiose introduction (it bears strong resemblances to Jires' theme film "The Hall of Lost Footsteps", which is a short built completely around the contrast of the horrors of war and the beauty of young love) as a counter-measure against probable later criticism (their intuitions were warranted). Then two girls in bathing suits appear, sitting at the side of a swimming pool; they make robot-like motions with their hands (the process of formal stylization advanced a step further). Both have the same name - Marie - and except for appearance, they are totally interchangeable. This is how they speak: 'We know nothing.' 'Nobody understands us.' 'The world ruins everything.' 'If the world ruins everything, let us also ruin everything.' And they do. The subsequent action consists of a chain of scenes; some of them are about elderly gentlemen, who treat the pair in fashionable restaurants and night clubs, expecting rewards for their kindness. Each time, however, the girls only gorge themselves with expensive delicacies, then they take they elderly gentlemen to the station, make them board the train, and run away. One of the two arouses a younger Don Juan by stripping in front of him, and then refuses his advances (the Don Juan was played by Jan Klusak). They cause a disturbance in a night club, by dancing a violent version of the Charleston. They provoke wherever they go by reacting always contrary to what is expected. The spectacle culminates when the girls manage to stuff themselves into a food elevator in a hotel and get into a banquet hall, obviously prepared for some official overindulgence. They begin by eating and end in a cream-cake battle. At this point comes the final joke; it is de facto self-ridicule aimed against the moralistic end of Vera's first film "Ceiling", about the reformed model. In a dream scene, the girls, whose effect is enhanced by decelerated camera action, dressed in clothes made out of newspaper (symbol of 'proper convictions'), sweep up the mess in a deadly tempo, arranging the ruined remnants of the hors d'oeurves and cakes on the soiled tablecloths.
It was an instant catastrophe. A deputy of the National Assembly, a Mr. Pruzinec (the name is a beautiful onomatopoetic nomenomen, and could be translated as Mr. Jack-in-the-Box) rose and protested against the wastage of food, 'at a time when our farmers with great difficulties are trying to overcome the problems of our agricultural production'. Pruzinec ended with a pathetic call to the Minister of Agriculture, and to the Minister of the Interior, to take measures against the film and its directress.
Pruzinec's unbelievable interpellation circulated through Prague in a number of copies, and when it was read from the stage of the Paravan Theatre, the audience took it for a successful skit written by the manager of the Theatre, the satirist J. R. Pick. The film was held and shown for the purposes of damnation to selected 'workers'; but they rather liked it, so it was finally released. The force of public opinion was by that time so strong that not even the President could stop the development, let alone Deputy Pruzinec, who quickly retreated into his box.
(CONTINUED IN PART 2)
(Copyright-Josef Skvorecky)

kbtebo@hotmail.com

Visitors: 03760

Page Updated Sun Oct 3, 1999 12:23am EDT