Film director who suffered censorship in her native Czechoslovakia for her 'anti-communist' films
Vera Chytilová, who has died aged 85, was one of the brightest of the new wave of film directors who emerged in Czechoslovakia in the mid-60s. Chytilová, Ivan Passer, Jan Nemec, Jirí Menzel, Ján Kadár and Miloš Forman were all products of Famu, the national film school in Prague. After the Russian invasion in 1968 put an end to the Prague Spring, Passer, Kadár and Forman left for the US, and Nemec went into exile in western Europe. Menzel, who remained, was restricted despite repudiating his "anti-communist" films in 1974. But Chytilová, whose Daisies (1966) was the most adventurous and anarchic film of the period, was silenced.
Born in Ostrava, now in the Czech Republic, Chytilová had a strict Catholic upbringing. "I left that basic, personified faith," she later said. "It seemed like a crutch to me. I realised it wasn't true – but those moral codes are inside me." In fact, most of her films could be described as morality comedies.
She studied philosophy and architecture, but abandoned them to earn money as a fashion model and as a clapper girl at the Barrandov film studios in Prague. She then sought a recommendation from the studios to study film production, but was denied. In 1957, however, at the age of 28, she was accepted as a student at Famu, the film and TV school of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she studied mainly under the renowned director Otakar Vávra.
Her graduate film, which drew on her experience as a model, was The Ceiling (1962), a proto-feminist meditation on the fashion industry, which recounted the story of a model's encounters with exploitation and empty materialism. According to the exiled Czech critic Antonín Liehm, after The Ceiling was screened in France during the mid-1960s one audience member stood up and proclaimed: "They shouldn't make that kind of film. It undermines people's faith in socialism. If that is the way it really is, then none of it is worth it at all."
This was the unspoken argument underpinning the actions of those in the government who would censor Chytilová. Also in 1962, she made A Bag of Fleas, a satire on the way girls were educated in Czechoslovakia, with improvisations by non-actors. Both medium-length films were influenced by the cinéma vérité style of the American underground.
In 1964, Chytilová made her first feature, Something Different, which contrasted an anonymous housewife and a famous gymnast, each looking for the solution to their lives of self-doubt. Chytilová used parallel narratives and boldly combined documentary and fiction. With four former Famu students, she also contributed an episode to Pearls of the Deep (1966), a series of short films based on the writings of the absurdist Czech author Bohumil Hrabal. Her sequence, the most avant-garde, was set in a dreadful all-night cafe, where a wedding reception is interrupted by the discovery of a dead body.
Then came Daisies, which shocked government officials so much that they withheld its release for a year. The film, which the director called a "philosophical documentary in the form of a farce", focuses on a brunette, Marie 1, and a blonde, Marie 2, two bored young women who decide to respond to the consumer-oriented society by playing a number of outrageous pranks on its adherents and by destroying its material symbols. It was Chytilová's second collaboration (after Pearls of the Deep) with her cinematographer husband, Jaroslav Kucera, and her first with the leading screenwriter Ester Krumbachová, who also designed the film. Its bold use of colour and range of visual effects perfectly underlines the sardonic comedy, which ends in a slapstick orgy of destruction at a banquet. In fact, part of the reason Daisies was initially banned was because so much food – "the fruit of the work of our toiling farmers", as it was described in parliament – is destroyed in the film.
Her next work, Fruit of Paradise (1969), which she co-scripted with Krumbachová, was a modern, highly stylised retelling of the Adam and Eve story. The plot, such as there is, concerns Eva, her husband Josefa, and a serpent-like figure, Robert, who may be a serial killer. Using shock cuts, tinting and visual distortion, it was too formalistic for the Czech authorities to tolerate, and Chytilová was prevented from making another feature for eight years.
In 1976, she was invited to a women's film festival in the US to present Daisies as its opening film. She informed the festival that her government would not allow her to attend, nor was it allowing her to direct films. International pressure was put on the Czechoslovakian government, and after her personal appeal to the president, Gustáv Husák, she was given the green light to make The Apple Game (1977). A feminist comedy, it follows a country girl, working as a midwife at a maternity clinic, who becomes pregnant by one of the doctors (played by fellow director Jirí Menzel). After almost a decade away from films, Chytilová picked up the same anarchic vein she had followed before, with striking images, many of babies, and a jokey, jazzy, jumpy style.
In her later films, she shifted towards realism. Chytilová used a handheld camera for Prefab Story (1979), a social satire delving into the chaotic lives of the inhabitants of a characteristically dull and grey unfinished communist-bloc housing estate. Shot in a real housing project, the film somehow managed to get past the censors, as did Calamity (1982), another ironic attack on bureaucracy. Yet, without government approval, the two films had a limited circulation, a fate Chytilová's films often suffered.
Nevertheless, she only minimally toned down her more iconoclastic tendencies and stylistic excesses. The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun (1983), another collaborative effort with Krumbachová and a variation on the Don Juan theme, was about an ageing lecher who enjoys the pursuit of women more than any real sexual satisfaction. The Jester and the Queen (1987), based on a Pirandellian comic play by Bolislav Polívka, who also stars as a man who imagines himself as a jester at a medieval court, employed dizzying camera movements and rapid editing, as well as continuing Chytilová's exploration of power and gender roles.
Tainted Horseplay (1989), one of the first films about Aids, portrayed a group of fun-loving, promiscuous actors who learn that one of them has the disease. It was released just before the Velvet Revolution. Stifled for 20 years, Chytilová now had the opportunity to work in a freer political climate. Unfortunately, her post-communist work was greeted with little enthusiasm. "The Czech Republic has lost a film-maker and gained a skilled artisan," wrote the critic Ondrej Zach of The Inheritance (1992).
She was a fierce campaigner for a state subsidy for the Czech film industry. Although she gained a large following from a new generation of Czechs and Slovaks who responded to her feminist comedies, her later films were not widely distributed outside her country.
Chytilová is survived by her daughter, Tereza Kucerová, an actor and costume designer, and her son, Stepán Kucera, a cinematographer.
• Vera Chytilová, film director, born 2 February 1929; died 12 March 2014 Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.
Vera Chytilová, who has died aged 85, was one of the brightest of the new wave of film directors who emerged in Czechoslovakia in the mid-60s. Chytilová, Ivan Passer, Jan Nemec, Jirí Menzel, Ján Kadár and Miloš Forman were all products of Famu, the national film school in Prague. After the Russian invasion in 1968 put an end to the Prague Spring, Passer, Kadár and Forman left for the US, and Nemec went into exile in western Europe. Menzel, who remained, was restricted despite repudiating his "anti-communist" films in 1974. But Chytilová, whose Daisies (1966) was the most adventurous and anarchic film of the period, was silenced.
Born in Ostrava, now in the Czech Republic, Chytilová had a strict Catholic upbringing. "I left that basic, personified faith," she later said. "It seemed like a crutch to me. I realised it wasn't true – but those moral codes are inside me." In fact, most of her films could be described as morality comedies.
She studied philosophy and architecture, but abandoned them to earn money as a fashion model and as a clapper girl at the Barrandov film studios in Prague. She then sought a recommendation from the studios to study film production, but was denied. In 1957, however, at the age of 28, she was accepted as a student at Famu, the film and TV school of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she studied mainly under the renowned director Otakar Vávra.
Her graduate film, which drew on her experience as a model, was The Ceiling (1962), a proto-feminist meditation on the fashion industry, which recounted the story of a model's encounters with exploitation and empty materialism. According to the exiled Czech critic Antonín Liehm, after The Ceiling was screened in France during the mid-1960s one audience member stood up and proclaimed: "They shouldn't make that kind of film. It undermines people's faith in socialism. If that is the way it really is, then none of it is worth it at all."
This was the unspoken argument underpinning the actions of those in the government who would censor Chytilová. Also in 1962, she made A Bag of Fleas, a satire on the way girls were educated in Czechoslovakia, with improvisations by non-actors. Both medium-length films were influenced by the cinéma vérité style of the American underground.
In 1964, Chytilová made her first feature, Something Different, which contrasted an anonymous housewife and a famous gymnast, each looking for the solution to their lives of self-doubt. Chytilová used parallel narratives and boldly combined documentary and fiction. With four former Famu students, she also contributed an episode to Pearls of the Deep (1966), a series of short films based on the writings of the absurdist Czech author Bohumil Hrabal. Her sequence, the most avant-garde, was set in a dreadful all-night cafe, where a wedding reception is interrupted by the discovery of a dead body.
Then came Daisies, which shocked government officials so much that they withheld its release for a year. The film, which the director called a "philosophical documentary in the form of a farce", focuses on a brunette, Marie 1, and a blonde, Marie 2, two bored young women who decide to respond to the consumer-oriented society by playing a number of outrageous pranks on its adherents and by destroying its material symbols. It was Chytilová's second collaboration (after Pearls of the Deep) with her cinematographer husband, Jaroslav Kucera, and her first with the leading screenwriter Ester Krumbachová, who also designed the film. Its bold use of colour and range of visual effects perfectly underlines the sardonic comedy, which ends in a slapstick orgy of destruction at a banquet. In fact, part of the reason Daisies was initially banned was because so much food – "the fruit of the work of our toiling farmers", as it was described in parliament – is destroyed in the film.
Her next work, Fruit of Paradise (1969), which she co-scripted with Krumbachová, was a modern, highly stylised retelling of the Adam and Eve story. The plot, such as there is, concerns Eva, her husband Josefa, and a serpent-like figure, Robert, who may be a serial killer. Using shock cuts, tinting and visual distortion, it was too formalistic for the Czech authorities to tolerate, and Chytilová was prevented from making another feature for eight years.
In 1976, she was invited to a women's film festival in the US to present Daisies as its opening film. She informed the festival that her government would not allow her to attend, nor was it allowing her to direct films. International pressure was put on the Czechoslovakian government, and after her personal appeal to the president, Gustáv Husák, she was given the green light to make The Apple Game (1977). A feminist comedy, it follows a country girl, working as a midwife at a maternity clinic, who becomes pregnant by one of the doctors (played by fellow director Jirí Menzel). After almost a decade away from films, Chytilová picked up the same anarchic vein she had followed before, with striking images, many of babies, and a jokey, jazzy, jumpy style.
In her later films, she shifted towards realism. Chytilová used a handheld camera for Prefab Story (1979), a social satire delving into the chaotic lives of the inhabitants of a characteristically dull and grey unfinished communist-bloc housing estate. Shot in a real housing project, the film somehow managed to get past the censors, as did Calamity (1982), another ironic attack on bureaucracy. Yet, without government approval, the two films had a limited circulation, a fate Chytilová's films often suffered.
Nevertheless, she only minimally toned down her more iconoclastic tendencies and stylistic excesses. The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun (1983), another collaborative effort with Krumbachová and a variation on the Don Juan theme, was about an ageing lecher who enjoys the pursuit of women more than any real sexual satisfaction. The Jester and the Queen (1987), based on a Pirandellian comic play by Bolislav Polívka, who also stars as a man who imagines himself as a jester at a medieval court, employed dizzying camera movements and rapid editing, as well as continuing Chytilová's exploration of power and gender roles.
Tainted Horseplay (1989), one of the first films about Aids, portrayed a group of fun-loving, promiscuous actors who learn that one of them has the disease. It was released just before the Velvet Revolution. Stifled for 20 years, Chytilová now had the opportunity to work in a freer political climate. Unfortunately, her post-communist work was greeted with little enthusiasm. "The Czech Republic has lost a film-maker and gained a skilled artisan," wrote the critic Ondrej Zach of The Inheritance (1992).
She was a fierce campaigner for a state subsidy for the Czech film industry. Although she gained a large following from a new generation of Czechs and Slovaks who responded to her feminist comedies, her later films were not widely distributed outside her country.
Chytilová is survived by her daughter, Tereza Kucerová, an actor and costume designer, and her son, Stepán Kucera, a cinematographer.
• Vera Chytilová, film director, born 2 February 1929; died 12 March 2014 Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.