Series Site
“If there’s something you don’t like, don’t keep to the rules—break them,” declared Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová, “one of the Czechoslovak New Wave’s most rebellious, irreverent, and boundary-breaking talents” (Sight & Sound). A former fashion model, philosophy student, and film-clapboard operator, Chytilová unleashed some of the most cutting, antiauthoritarian, radically feminist works to ever shove a thumb in the eye of power. This selection of works from the 1960s and 1970s features many of the films that cemented her reputation, including the legendary, surrealist comedy Daisies. A true iconoclast, who grew up in a realm where ideology promised freedom, yet delivered only drudgery and control, Chytilová distrusted all labels or movements; she may never have identified as feminist, but her life—the only female in film school, a woman director among men—and her strong-willed, conflicted, uncontrollable women protagonists spoke volumes. 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.”
Coming of age during the relative openness of the Prague Spring, Chytilová remained in Czechoslovakia after many of her New Wave comrades had immigrated elsewhere; her mid-career work, made under totalitarian control, seethed with anger toward the state and the men who represented it. After the fall of Communism, her films still retained that fire; a new world order of capitalism may have emerged, but the politics of control, whether sexual or otherwise, remained to be critiqued.
—Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer