Vera Chytilova (From 'All the Bright Young Men and Women') (Part 2) - (By Josef Skvorecky - 1971) - Movies - http://maxpages.com/czechcinema/First_Lady_of_the_New_Wave

Vera made another short film before "Daisies", "Snack-Bar 'World'", a part of the New Wave's omnibus film "Pearls in the Abyss" (1965). Her feministic hand reached for a story with a bridal motif, and she created, along with Menzel, the most visual part of this five story feature. After "Daisies" she embarked, together with her husband and Ester Krumbachova, on "We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise" (1970).
It was shown, and generally misunderstood (the fashionable appeal of the Czech New Wave having subsided), at the 1970 Cannes Festival, but constitutes, I would say, a Kantian opus in the work of the philosopher, Vera: an extremely complicated work, built around the structure of a crime novel, framed by dramatic quotations from the second chapter of Genesis, about God who dogmatically forbids people to eat from the tree of knowledge and about the Devil who rationally tempts them to do so. The quotations are transformed into cantata, and complex musical as well as colour compositions significantly transcend the whole film. I remembered Jan Klusak, whom she had persuaded once to create a symphonic blues, and also the old experiments with the 'coloured piano' made by the Czech Poetists of the Twenties. In this case the composer Zdenek Liska accommodated Vera: his music structures the parables and underlines each exchange. The film is really an opera, the symbolical plot being facilitated by the colour symbolism (Ester Krumbachova was originally a painter); everything fits into a bizarre and astounding unity, and is miles removed from the early flirtations with the 'cinema verite'. It is an independent 'objet d'art', 'a reality equal to any other created in the world', as it was described by the structuralist Jan Kucera, (not to be confused with Vera's husband Jaroslav). The emphasis is conspicuously on beauty, although the ambitions remain philosophical; and if anything is formalism, then it is this. But, it is as madame directress always required it to be, a beautiful formalism.
The last time I saw Vera, she was very strictly criticizing the formal mistakes of "Crime in the Girl's School", and the director, Jiri Menzel, blushed like an apprehended schoolboy. She had started as a student of architecture (that might be where the architectural qualities of her best films came from), then she worked as a draughtsman (viz. her sense of form), then she turned into a model (emphasis on beauty and feminism), finally she got a small part in "The Emperor's Baker", and the film world swallowed her. First she worked as a clap-stick girl, then as an assistant, and finally she was accepted by the Film Academy. She went on to become one of the leading, and indeed truly revolutionary, personalities of the New Wave. She is the first important Czech directress; of her predecessors, Thea Cervenkova, an early pioneer, never made a film worth mentioning; and Zet Molas, alias Zdena Smolova, shared Vera's avant-garde creed but lacked her talent, and ended as a pro-Nazi informer. In true feminist tradition Vera combined intensive intellectual effort with a feminine feeling for beauty and form. I believe that in her last film she escaped the danger of mere eclecticism, of which she is accused by Vratislav Effenberger. Besides, she has been accused of appropriation and imitation from the very beginning, and not only by orthodox surrealists. 'Of course, if you do things the old way,' vera answered them once, 'no one will accuse you of being an epigon, of copying those who did it that way long before you. But just you dare to try it another way!'
According to newspaper reports, Vera is currently working with the writer Iva Hercikova (script writer for Schorm's "Five Girls to Deal With), on a screen-play about Bozena Nemcova, a classical Czech authoress, who was a contemporary and admirer of Charles Dickens. It is not, as it might seem, an escape into the past, so well known from the recent history of Czech cinema, because it points towards a combination of Vera's traditional feminism with the most sympathetic feature of her philosophical statement: 'The artist may, and indeed must express only what he knows and what concerns him, because he thinks it should be changed. We want to create a new social morality and in the same breath we - artists - lie. Lying in art should be outlawed.... What more could we lose as artists, if we lost the truth?'
Bozena Nemcova was a very lonely nineteenth-century female rebel; despite the Victorian morality of her time, she had several known lovers, and dedicated her life not only to the fight for women's rights, but also the rights of her humiliated country. In an unhappy marriage (which was forced upon her by her parents), exploited by her publisher, she vegetated, surrounded by a hypocritically patriotic society, until she finally died at the age of forty-two of tuberculosis, before she was able to carry out her plan of emigrating to the United States. In the hands of Vera Chytilova, a philosopher and revolutionary of form, it could be a story 'of something else', rather than a depiction of the fate of one unhappy nineteenth-century, woman writer.
(Copyright-Josef Skvorecky)

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