Former philosophy student, fashion model, and script-girl, Vera Chytilová became one of Europe's most innovative filmmakers in the 1960s. The Czech director's formally rigorous aesthetic of organized chaos and visual symbolism successfully merged the traditions of narrative cinema with the complex experimentation of the avant-garde. Variously compared by critics to Fellini, the psychedelic Jodorowsky, and New York underground filmmaker Ken Jacobs, she gained fame with the surrealist feminist classic Daisies and the unclassifiable allegory Fruit of Paradise. Labeled “cynical” by the Czechoslovak government, she was forbidden to work for years until finally re-emerging in the late 1970s. Nothing is as it “should be” in a Chytilová film, but then, nothing is as it should be in the world she observes and comments on. Her work, as film historian Yvette Biro wrote, “denies conventional rules. It is a rigorously calculated frenzy...a macabre play, and if it succeeds in surprising the spectator constantly, it is not due to the irrational intrigue, but to its peculiar development from the grotesque into an existential desperateness.”
Exposing the futility of good behavior in a world gone mad, Chytilová assaults given truths, using cinematic abstractions and expressionist collages to unveil meaning. This series stands as a small sampling of Chytilová's career, from her first student film to her sixties masterworks and those made under the disapproving eyes of government censors, and underlines her own motto, “If there's something you don't like, don't keep to the rules-break them.”
Jason Sanders
