Thus "Sunshine in a Net" became the symbol of the upsurge that at that time was ripening on all fronts. Almost simultaneously with the opening of "Sunshine in a Net", a program of films directed by Vera Chytilova finally was distributed, after endless delays. The two medium-length films were shown under the title "There's a Bag of Fleas at the Ceiling" ("U Stropu Je Pytel Blech" - 1962). In the style of cinema verite, and influenced by American underground films, the films were on one hand a personal contemplation of the lot of women- "The Ceiling"- a complete departure from past themes, and on the other hand, a sharply-honed, moralizing, sarcastic tract against the hypocrisy of educators in a girl's apprentice dormitory- "A Bag of Fleas" ("Pytel Blech"). Shortly thereafter, Chytilova concluded work on her first feature film, "Something Different" ("O Necem Jinem" - 1963), one of the best films made in Czechoslovakia in the sixties. In it, she remained true to the cinema verite method, but she introduced a new philosophical note into Czech film by showing the parallelism of success and failure, the relativity of two totally dissimilar "women's destinies"...
...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.
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