Czech-Cinema - vo.rs

Daisies: Chytilová's Anarchic Feminist Provocation

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

There is a moment early in Věra Chytilová’s Daisies — Sedmikrásky, 1966 — when the two heroines, both named Marie, sit in a field and conclude that since the world is spoiled, they will be spoiled too. From that childish logic the film launches into seventy-four minutes of pure, gleeful destruction: gorging on stolen food, conning elderly men out of expensive lunches, snipping images and each other into paper collage, and finally demolishing a banquet in the most joyously anarchic food-fight ever committed to celluloid. It is one of the great provocations of the 1960s and one of the foundational works of feminist cinema, and it remains genuinely, dangerously funny.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: The Czech Surrealist Fairy Tale

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Some films resist plot summary the way water resists being held in a fist. Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders — Valerie a týden divů, 1970 — is one of them. You can list what happens in it: a girl of about thirteen loses a pair of magic earrings, meets a vampiric predator who may be her grandfather and her father and a lecherous priest all at once, watches her grandmother strike a monstrous bargain for restored youth, and passes through a week in which every adult around her turns out to want something from her body. But the listing tells you almost nothing, because the film is built to be experienced as a dream that keeps rewriting its own rules while you watch.

Fantastic Planet: The Animated Sci-Fi Fever Dream

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0000

There is a particular kind of animated film that a certain sort of teenager discovers at exactly the wrong hour of the night and never fully recovers from. René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet — La Planète sauvage, 1973 — is the founding text of that category. It is a science-fiction feature made from paper cutouts, scored with some of the funkiest, eeriest music ever attached to a cartoon, and built around an allegory of domination that lands harder the more you know about where and how it was made. Half a century on it still looks like nothing else, because almost nothing else was ever made this way.