Nitzan: Hi, I’m Nitzan.
Adam: And I’m Adam, and this is Stories From The Eastern West.
Nitzan: Today’s episode is about a landmark 1960s film little-known outside of film festivals and its native Czech Republic. And the life of its pioneering director. The film is called Daisies and the director is Vera Chytilová .
Adam: In the 1960s, Chytilová quickly established herself as one of the leading cinematic voices of the Czechoslovak New Wave that emerged out of the FAMU film school, alongside Miloś Forman and Jan Němec. Its sole female voice, she was known for her tough persona and provocative approach to filmmaking.
Nitzan: The decade’s end brought the 1968 Soviet invasion, a violent attempt to maintain communist control in Czechoslovakia. It put an end to both the Prague Spring, and the Czechoslovak New Wave artistic movement. Her colleagues Forman and Němec emigrated to the West, but Chytilová refused to do the same, despite the huge professional and personal cost.
Adam: Eventually she did find a way back to doing what was most important to her - making films on her own terms.
Nitzan: We sent our producer Piotr to Prague to bring you her story.
Adam: Coming up on Stories From the Eastern West.
Tereza Kučerova: This could end up being a many-hour-long interview about the history of this country. There was such a release of culture in the 1960s and no one knew what was going to happen. My parents didn't know either. This house was built with the money they won at film festivals back then.
Nitzan: This is Tereza Kučerova, Visual Artist and Set Designer. Piotr met with her at the modernist villa in Prague's leafy Troja district, built by her parents Vera Chytilová and cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera.
Tereza Kučerova: When you're a child, you naturally live in the way that your family lives, so you don't find it abnormal that your parents are filmmakers. Their work is just part of their lives.
Adam: Věra Chytilová was born in Ostrava in the Moravian region of Czechoslovakia in 1929. After high school, she began studying to become an architect, but she quit after a year to move to the capital
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Tereza Kučerova: And she started to work as a laboratory assistant. She didn't have much money, so she started to earn some extra money as a model. A model scout approached her on the street.
Nitzan: Then, by chance, Chytilová landed a small role in the period film The Emperor's Baker as a lady of the court.
Tereza Kučerova: First was this one, this. So it was, and it's funny that this film, always on Christmas time, or some celebration is… we can see it on TV, so we are watching her.
As she always said, that was when she realised that this is what she wanted to do.
But, she didn't know how to get into this business.
Adam: She managed to get a job as a clapper at the state-run Barrandov Studios, the place where most films in Czechoslovakia were produced.
Tereza Kučerova: Over time, she found that this way it would take an awfully long time before she could make her own movies. So she mustered up the courage to try to enroll at film school. She had a friend who encouraged her. He told her: go to film school, don't be afraid of it, try it!
Tereza Kučerova: Then, when she got to FAMU, at the film directing department, she told us that she felt somewhat old. She was 27, and the other students were around 20. Plus, she was the only girl among many boys.
Jindřiška Bláhová: She was accepted because Otakar Vavra, the director, was looking for more mature students.
Nitzan: That was Dr. Jindřiška Bláhová, from the Film Studies Department at Charles University in Prague.
Jindřiška Bláhová: She established herself... in the early 60s, when she was basically drawing on… cinema-verite, creating these sorts of sociological films, these kinds of pseudo documentaries. She already had ideas or topics that were starting to emerge - the meaning of life - or rather the meaningless of life.
Adam: The directors of the Czechoslovak New Wave were inspired by French Cinéma vérité and independent American directors like John Cassavetes. They wanted to more intimately capture everyday life under the Socialist system, rebelling against the official socialist realism that had dominated for decades.
Jan Bernard: I would say that her breakthrough film was her short graduation film, "The Ceiling", from 1962,
Adam: This is professor Jan Bernard. He was the dean of FAMU - officially the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, when Chytilová taught there decades later in the 1990s.
Jan Bernard: "The Ceiling" was actually largely autobiographical, it referred to her career as a model for example, and it very evocatively captured the atmosphere of the night time Prague, of the bars and clubs, but also the squares and streets. And it was actually quite unique in how she used subtitles, more like graphics.
Nitzan: But it was Chytilová's 1966 film, "Daisies", that would put her at the forefront of the Czechoslovak New Wave. The film was both provocative and visually experimental, and completely different than anything that had come before it.
Michal Bregant: "Daisies" is still considered one of the most iconic films of modernist cinema of 20th century.
Adam: That was Dr. Michal Bregant, Director of the National Film Archive, and former dean of the film school.
Michal Bregant: When the film was screened a few years ago, somewhere in the US, there were people in the audience dressed like daisies. It's something that has to be experienced on the big screen.
Nitzan: Very briefly, the film tells the story of two young women named Marie I and Marie II, who come to the conclusion that the world has gone bad, and that therefore they should be bad too.
Adam: They embark on a path of humorous destruction through this surrealist art-pop collage reality, envisioned by Chytilová and her collaborators, Art Director Ester Krumbachová, and Chytilová's husband at the time, cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera.
Jan Bernard: They wanted to portray both personal and social destruction,
so the characters not only destroy their clothes, but also the actual image of the film.
Jindřiška Bláhová: I do love the scene when the suitor calls to the girls in the apartment from outside. And this man, this kind of buffoon tries to sweet-talk them into a relationship, and they are obviously laughing at him and all of a sudden their world disrupts into collage, and their heads leave their bodies, and everything is sort of meshed together in this collage.
Michal Bregant: There’s this sequence in this very opulent room, with opulent food, prepared for a big dinner party. And they start tasting bits and pieces of the food.
And suddenly, when one of the protagonists breaks a glass on the table, everything changes… and it immediately switches into… a fight with cream cakes, and they drastically start destroying the food. They destroy everything including the furniture, and in the end they make some sort of fashion show, using curtains from the windows, on the table full of broken food.
Jindřiška Bláhová: And it's just fantastic as a… as a piece of what cinema can do. You know, and it becomes timeless. Because it's experimental, yet it wants to be beautiful. And it wants to be smart - and it's all those things together. And that's why it doesn't age, because there's no proper narrative, it's just this beautiful package of possibility.
Nitzan: The film was screened at 1967 Festival of New Czechoslovak cinema in New York, and Chytilová was celebrated for her achievement. But back home, the ruling communist party was definitely not celebrating, especially about the infamous banquet destruction scene.
Michal Bregant: Obviously the authorities were strongly provoked by this sort of scene. It was kind of a symbol for bourgeois decadent art, which they hated from the bottom of their hearts. There was a member of parliament who officially protested, not only against Daisies, but against other films by Jan Nemec, Miloś Forman, and others, claiming that these films are against the needs of working class people.
Jan Bernard: Audiences had few opportunities to watch this movie, because it was mostly forbidden. The film was only allowed to be played in special cinemas, in the movie clubs, but not in Prague. People traveled to Brno and Plzeň, for instance, to watch it. The film could not go into normal distribution until after the political changes in the spring of 1968.
Adam: In early 1968, it really did seem as if change was in the air in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. What is known as the Prague Spring was a wave of liberalisation in which the new President Alexander Dubček promised to introduce "Socialism with a Human Face".
Nitzan: The ruling party's tight grip on culture and society was relaxed, and previously banned films could suddenly be shown openly. But as you may have guessed, this really didn't go down well with the Soviet leadership in Moscow, and very soon this human face was being trampled by thousands of Soviet boots.
Adam: On the 20th of August 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, crushing the democratic hopes of the Prague Spring.
Nitzan: Tereza Kučerová still has vivid memories of the invasion.
Tereza Kučerova: In 1968 I was 4 years old and I remember it as a child… My brother was born in July of that year, so he was a little baby when the Soviets came. We were told that the tanks are here, and nobody knows what’s going to happen.
Mum said that people were afraid they would be taken, and relocated somewhere in Russia. We went to our cottage with my grandparents, and the adults were constantly listening to Radio Free Europe.And it’s hard to imagine, but everything suddenly stopped and the so-called "Normalisation" came. People who used to work, who had had opportunities, they suddenly found themselves under the supervision of political apparatchiks. A whole generation of people came to a standstill. They had been in full creative flight, and, suddenly they had to have their films approved, screenplays approved by people whose only purpose was to serve the system. It wasn't just about film, it was about all culture... theatres, and fine art. And they called it "Normalisation".
Michal Bregant: Her films disappeared from distribution - all circles, all channels - she was… it was not only her future career, but her past career, which was erased, and the films were put on the shelf - and never, never shown again. So after such an extremely successful career in her young age, in the second half of the 1960s, suddenly there was a, kind of abyss in which she kind of found herself.
Tereza Kučerova: This period for her, the 1970s, was full of constant struggles. No one told her in advance ‘Yes, so now you are not going to make any films, not until 1977.’
Michal Bregant: It was a very long long 7 years for her, when she was blacklisted and she wasn't even allowed to enter the film studio in Prague. She was in a very difficult situation personally, because her kids were small – she was in the middle of the construction of their house. And also on a personal level, it was very hard times for her. But she stayed here, she decided not to leave Czechoslovakia, because she felt her roots were here, in this culture. And she was very very stubborn.
Jakub Felcman: She was the only one who didn't do a compromise…
Nitzan: That was scriptwriter and filmmaker Jakub Felcman, who studied under Vera Chytilová at FAMU in the early 2010s.
Jakub Felcman: Other filmmakers, had to make at least one film that is like ‘for the party’, like complete collaboration. She never did this. She's the only one – the others emigrated, or stopped working. It must have hurt her, but it's…. At the same time I think her children and grandchildren, and people around, and students like us, we are grateful, because it's a role model. She's a moral figure (you, know for us).
Jindřiška Bláhová: Instead of shooting something in '73 like Menzel did, she didn't shoot her next film until 1976. Then power changed within the film industry, and she was basically allowed, through the backdoor, through Kratki Film, short cinema, a short film production unit, to make a movie.
Adam: In 1976, Chytilova returned to filmmaking with the Apple Game, a comedy about a womanising gynecologist whose girlfriends finally turn on him.
Jindřiška Bláhová: In the 70s… you can again see a change. More conventional narratives, but the topics are more pronounced. Gender equality, chauvinism, the meaning of life, morals, the immorality of Czechoslovak society, corrupted society, the corrupted system, laziness of thinking, destruction.
Nitzan: In 1983, she once again collaborated with her friend Ester Krumbachová, with whom she had made Daisies and Fruit of Paradise.
Adam: Tereza Kučerová (who was 19 at the time) remembers the two women working together on the script for what would become The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun, a comedy about a man who becomes a playboy in his old age.
Tereza Kučerova: It was over the summer, and they were working upstairs. You could hear volleys of laughter. They laughed awfully hard at it. And because I was there when they were writing the script, they came up with the idea that I should do the costumes. And my mum said: ‘I know how I want this guy called Faun to look. He's really old, and will wear this kind of suit.’
Nitzan: Tereza would go on to have a successful career as a costume designer and visual artist, but at that time she had only just started art college. She also had a small acting role in the film.
Tereza Kučerova: Sometimes it happens that when you're young you don't really know what you're getting yourself into, but you have a kind of audacity or desire to try it. So I went for it.
Nitzan: Although Chytilová's films were definitely not appreciated by the majority of the ruling communist party, they were happy to take the foreign currency her films brought home from overseas.
Adam: Much like in other Central and Eastern European countries in the Eastern Bloc, the economic situation in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s was becoming pretty dire. Starting with Poland in June 1989, the Soviet-backed regimes began to topple.
Nitzan: What you're hearing is Vaclav Havel, making a speech during the mass protests of the Velvet Revolution. The revolution finally brought an end to 41 years of single-party rule.
Adam: A dissident playwright and national hero, Havel became the first president of the newly democratic Czechoslovakia, though the Czechs and Slovaks soon amicably split into two separate countries.
Nitzan: But in the meantime, it seemed that the promise of the Prague Spring, some 20 years earlier, had finally been fulfilled.
Tereza Kučerova: The revolution in 1989 was a huge turning point for all of us. Mum told us at the time: ‘This is great, you have your whole lives ahead of you.’ And now finally, it would be possible for everyone to work freely and film whatever they want, but on the other hand, the 1990s were a bit wild in our country. There was the whole privatisation process. It was a total economic transformation.
Jan Bernard: Věra Chytilová of course, wanted the state film production system to be maintained, because she felt that she could best realise her projects with state money. She didn’t think she could get money from a privatised system for the kind of experimental films she made.
Michal Bregant: She was super critical during the privatisation of Barrandov film studios in Prague, and the privatisation of the whole Czechoslovak film industry, right in 1990-91. She was one of those who was used to making films within the state-monopolised film industry. So it was very demanding for her to find her own way in the new conditions. However, she managed it. But she was not only fighting for herself. She really had the whole film culture, film tradition, and also the future energy of the film industry of Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic in her mind.
Jan Bernard: That said, she was the first to adapt to the commercial system, and she made the film The Inheritance, based on a screenplay by Boleslav Polívka. But it was not an experimental movie, which is what most people expected her to make, but a standard comedy. This led to great disappointment and all the critics reacted very negatively, although the film had a great response from audiences.
Jindřiška Bláhová: I think her post-1989 films, are undervalued, in the sense that they are consistently measured against these gems of experimental cinema - like "Daisies" and "Fruit of Paradise". To be honest, I think Inheritance is my… most favorite film she ever made, I think it's absolutely fantastic. It was criticised horrendously. You know everyone expected some great moral comments from Chytilová, and all of a sudden she made a comedy. A comedy about a guy who inherits money and goes on to live lavishly in this village and is the village idiot, and loses the money, and then he gains the money back again.
Michal Bregant: But when you look at the film today, 25 years after the production it's fascinating how she was able to really touch upon the most sensitive issues in society. In the genre of comedy, she was able to offer a testimony about the transformation of Czech society.
Jindřiška Bláhová: She's basically criticising post-totalitarian or post-communist society, and people - post-communist people that are absolutely incapable of living in the newly-regained freedom. She felt that movies can cause change, or can influence people and can change, can do something good in society.
Nitzan: But as well as being an important moral figure and filmmaker, Chytilová was also known for sometimes being difficult to work with.
Adam: Michal Bregant first met Chytilová while working as an assistant at the Czech National Film Archives at the end of the 1980s, when she was working on a documentary about the first president of Czechoslovakia.
Michal Bregant: Chytilová at that time, she was legendary for being… well, everybody would say hysterical. I have to say it's not true by any means, she was just demanding. She wanted everyone to be inventive, to be creative.
Tereza Kučerova: How can I describe it... She was so absorbed in the work that other things did not exist for her. And she demanded the same from others. She didn't even realise that someone else might not approach things in the same way.
Michal Bregant: So sometimes she would make us wait for her for like two hours in cold weather, but she was not a Prima donna. She was always working for the audience, for the public, so she wanted the film to be the best possible result.
Jindřiška Bláhová: We have to realise that she was the only woman of the Czechoslovak New Wave… She worked within a men-controlled, men-operated film industry. So maybe her role of rebellious, harsh, tough woman provocateur, also stemmed from this necessity to survive something that was pretty tough as an environment.
Nitzan: Chytilová continued making thought provoking films into her late 70s. She died in March 2014 at the age of 85. But not before leaving her mark on a new generation of young filmmakers at FAMU, her old school.
Michal Bregant: At the beginning when she started teaching for FAMU, she was considered a very very tough professor. She was always very straightforward, so she was able to tell all kinds of uncomfortable truths and ideas to her students. But later on she was more and more a loving grandmother, not only to her family, but also to her students. So that was an interesting kind of change in the last years of her life.
Jakub Felcman: She was like an... an… ultimate moral figure. If you have a teacher, that is a mentor – somebody who you respect – and you don't even know why or how this comes about. And it didn't come from that she made famous films. You listen to her, you have to confront her questions, have to have an answer for something, defend yourself – and that already is a lecture. There are moments when you say - so what should I do, should I back up, or should I go for it? And then you ask, OK, what would she do? And then you see right away… because she would never back up.
Nitzan: This episode of Stories From The Eastern West was brought to you by Culture.pl, the flagship brand of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. It was hosted by Adam Zulawski and me, Nitzan Reisner.
Adam: It was reported, and written by Piotr Wołodźko, and scored by Wojtek Oleksiak. Piotr would like to thank Tereza Kučerova and Anička Hanáková, Professor Jan Bernard, Dr. Jindřiška Bláhová, Dr. Michal Bregant and Jakub Felcman for taking the time to talk to him.
Nitzan: And if you want to learn anything else about Chytilová and her films, the show notes have lots of links for you and can be found in your podcast app or on the Stories From The Eastern West website at sftew.com
Adam: Next month we’re taking you back to the 16th century to a Polish seaside town called Frombork. There a church administrator and astronomer was about to turn the entire model of the universe upside down.
Nitzan: See you next month!
Adam: Bye!
END
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