Czechoslovak filmmakers were sensitive to surrealist cinematography, but the avant-garde blossomed decades later. Among the most striking feature films with a surrealist modus are Something Different (1963), Daisies (1966), and Fruit of Paradise (1970) by Věra Chytilová. Chytilová was a significant and probably the most radical director of the Czechoslovak New Wave. The aesthetics in her films incorporate a variety of visual-artistic practices that evoke purposeful visual disorganization. Daisies follows two city girls (Marie and Marie) who decide that the world is inherently wicked and that this gives them the right to behave destructively, taking every situation as an invitation to play – a cruel game, nevertheless heralding a beginning:
…culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. Even those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs hunting, for instance-tend, in archaic society, to take on the play-form. Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhance its value. It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world. By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and the mood of play. In the twin union of play and culture, play is primary.[1]
The screenplay was written by Chytilová and Ester Krumbachová, and the cinematographer is Jaroslav Kučera. The film is framed by war documentary footage. The visually varied episodes in the film recall not only the aesthetics of the avant-garde but also that of silent cinema e.g. the nightclub episode. The film becomes a sequence of audio-visual combinations – creative-experimental relationships between locations, costumes, cinematography and sound.[2]
Many scenes are shot with a colour filter, the editing is sharp and often disjointed. Such an editing approach creates a collage aesthetic. The techniques used in the film do not illustrate the narrative but rather fragment it. Thus, the multitude of episodes shot with different colour filters narrates the euphoric and chaotic world in which the girls cause damage by playing lightheartedly yet cruelly. Imagery elements remind that despite everything, existence in the physical reality is narrow and limiting. In the scene where the girls use scissors to cut body parts from each other, the severed heads and limbs are arranged in a split screen. The heads floating around the frame still speak completely out of context, much like the magazine and newspaper clippings on the walls. Marie and Marie are playing a barbaric game because they have nothing else, neither past nor future. Absurdist in its content, Daisies neither poses moral questions nor seeks answers. Close-ups are often used as a technique – the girls are looking directly into the camera suggesting a challenge. The victims of this destructive game are middle-aged men, whose hopes of love make them take the girls to fine restaurants where Marie and Marie dine savagely, while their bilious laughter and jokes thwart any romantic impulse.
In Fruit of Paradise Chytilová again worked with Krumbachová and Kučera. The first episode features overlayed images composed of macro photographs of flowers, stones, plants, and moving images of a nude man and woman representation of Adam and Eve. A traditional technique of avant-garde and experimental cinema is used – scratching and painting on the film emulsion. The heterogeneous images in the film resemble pictorial canvases across which the man and woman move. The apple tree is shot by hand – the camera moves chaotically across it, a technique reminiscent of Marie Menken’s film Glimpse of the Garden (1957). The landscape shots are a mythopoetic stage (subsequently a character) – many of the scenes are shot on ridges of beautiful cliffs, among meadows, and on the beach. In the superimposed imagery, the roles of characters and stage are reversed: Bodies become a screen for vegetal veins and textures that are literally ‘lost’ in nature.[3]
Fruit of Paradise is …one of the last cinematic manifestations of the Prague Spring.[4] The film turns out to be Chytilová’s last before a ten-year period in which she did not shoot. In 1976 she returned to the screen with Game of the Apple. Her style was considerably altered, as visual experiments such as those in Daisies and Fruit of Paradise were not favorably received by the government, which described them as degenerate and subversive.[5] In the years following the Prague Spring, innovation in feature-length cinema was impossible, but short and animated films managed to preserve their independence to some extent.
Bibliography:
Hames, Peter. Czech and Slovak cinema: Theme and Tradition (Traditions in World Cinema). Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1980.
[1] Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, p. 46.
[2] Hames, Peter. Czech and Slovak cinema: Theme and Tradition (Traditions in World Cinema). Edinburgh University Press, 2010, р.152.
[3] Ibid. 155.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
