V=?UTF-8?Q?=C4=9Bra_Chytilov=C3=A1_?=(1929-2014)

[Jan Culik]

Věra Chytilová made films until an advanced age. For those who may be 
interested, here is some information about some of her post-communist 
films, made in an era when the world has more or less lost interest in 
Czech film making.

Amongst other things, Chytilová had a strong sence of self-irony. At the 
bottom of this article, you can find a Karlovy Vary film festival 
trailer, featuring Chytilová grappling with a broken main prize from the 
festival.

http://kultura.idnes.cz/zemrela-reziserka-vera-chytilova-dl1-/filmvideo.aspx?c=A140312_164750_filmvideo_vha

(Such - ironic-  trailers are a typical feature of the festival, they 
are screened before each film, there are trailers featuring Jude Law, 
Helen Mirren, and many other celebrities who have recently visited the 
festival.)


The information below about some of Chytilová's recent films has been 
taken from this:

http://www.sussex-academic.com/sa/titles/CulturalSocialStudies/culik.htm


Dědictví aneb Kurvahošigutntag (The Inheritance or Fuck Off, Boys,
Guten Tag, 1992)

DIRECTED BY Věra Chytilová

On the DVD of this film, Boleslav Polívka, the script-writer and actor 
playing the main character, explains that he got the idea for Dědictví 
when a drunk man,
whom he knew vaguely, stopped him in a street in Brno and cordially 
invited him for a drink. The man then began to show him various houses, 
hotels and flats in
the area and said emphatically, “Come with me, everything here is mine.” 
When Polívka was reluctant to go with him, the man shouted at him, “I’ll 
find you again, maybe in Paris, and I’ll come in a taxi.” There is a 
similar scene in the film when the main character, Bohumil Stejskal, a 
lazy country bumpkin who suddenly inherits several valuable properties 
thanks to the post-communist restitution laws, invites the pop-singer 
Karel Gott for a drink from a street in Brno. The expression “I’ll find 
you again, maybe in Paris, and I’ll come in a taxi,” says in a nutshell 
what this film is about: it is a study of the childish, yet good-natured 
uncouthness of a loudmouth. At the same time, it is an analysis of human 
beings who cannot come
to terms with their sudden freedom and wealth, which had come upon them 
unexpectedly. Dědictví aneb Kurvahošigutntag deals with a typical 
situation occurring at the beginning of the 1990s, when the Czechoslovak 
government decided to return to the heirs real estate confiscated when 
the communist regime came to
power.4

Stejskal lives in a ramshackle house with an “aunt”, an old woman, a 
friend of his dead mother. They live in a mess, with hens running in and 
out, in proximity
to pigs and a goat (which strangles itself to death at the tree where 
Stejskal has carelessly tied it up). Bohumil does as little work as 
possible. He might help friends cut down trees in the forest, but he 
never looks after his run-down property. It is obvious – and important 
for the film – that he would never have achieved anything by his own 
efforts. One fine day, a lawyer (Miroslav Donutil) from the city seeks
him out and informs him that, according to the law, a large amount of 
property is being restored to him: a brickworks, a piece of land and in 
addition, blocks of flats, hotels and shops in Brno (in an advanced 
capitalist society such property would have been burdened by inheritance 
tax, in which case the story would have been different).

Stejskal’s reaction is that of an uncontrolled child. He celebrates 
extravagantly, running around the fields telling his friends and 
acquaintances about his sudden “good fortune”. When the lawyer takes him 
to the town, Stejskal falls victim to the complex of “the little man” 
who suddenly comes into power. He lords it over the employees in “his” 
brickworks and the shopkeepers in his shops. He provokes an argument 
with a waiter in the first-class hotel he owns, and when he invites his 
village friends to a luxurious restaurant in Brno, they do not know how 
to eat in a civilized manner, and the sumptuous repast ends in a brawl.

However, Stejskal is not merely a cardboard figure – he occasionally 
shows signs of sensible judgment. He does not sell his brickworks to the 
Japanese for an
“enormous sum” because he does not know what would happen to the present 
employees. He asks the lawyer, who tells him he does not need to concern 
himself
about that. Stejskal objects to such a cruel attitude. He is not mean 
with his money; he helps friends and acquaintances – he buys them 
whatever he feels like buying without discrimination, it could even be a 
visit to a brothel. Old Košťál, one of Stejskal’s village cronies, who 
eventually drives his white BMW for him because “Bohouš doesn’t have a 
driving licence”, thanks him for the best present he ever had, three 
rounds with a prostitute “who could be my granddaughter”. Like several 
other post-communist films, this one is a reminder that the fall of 
communism and the general spread of pornography and sex for money has 
made it possible for some men to realize their most chauvinistic ideas 
about using women.

In Kraus’s film Městečko (Small Town, 2003), one old man is also in 
seventh heaven after a visit to a brothel. Stejskal gives the village 
children a roundabout (his village cronies get drunk and ride it for a 
week; this is another sign of the childishness of the characters in this 
film). He pays for gas to be supplied to the whole village and arranges 
plastic surgery for a university-educated friend whom the village laughs 
at because his nose is too small. He brings a girl from a brothel to 
live with him and buys her an ostrich. He very quickly becomes the 
victim of the idea that all of life’s problems can be solved with money. 
He lives with both the prostitute Irena and his original partner Vlasta 
in his dilapidated country shack – the girls put up with it because he 
is a millionaire. No one takes exception to this arrangement – in the 
“new, free” society, the “new” morality reigns, anything goes.

At the end of the film, there is an unexpected turn of events: it 
transpires that Stejskal is his father’s stepson and thus was ineligible 
to receive the large inheritance. He is back to being a “beggar”. Only 
the film has a fairytale ending. Shortly before the end of the story, 
Stejskal meets his guardian angel in the guise of a lawyer “Dr. Strážný” 
(strážný means “guardian” in Czech), who tells him that his real father 
who had died in Argentina has left him an even bigger legacy – twenty 
million dollars. The film ends with Stejskal saying dreamily, “Now, I 
can buy all
of you!”

The film does not analyse all the varied aspects of post-communist 
society which would have begun to play an important part in the village 
layabout’s life if
he had received his sudden inheritance. It concentrates on only one 
theme – the portrayal of Stejskal’s boorishness. However, many viewers 
consider Dědictví
aneb Kurvahošigutntag a successful comedy and many expressions of 
Bohumil Stejskal and his cronies have become popular hlášky, 
“catch-phrases” with Czechs. There is no doubt the film was meant to be 
a critical analysis of society. Nevertheless, the film really only 
highlights Stejskal’s boorish behaviour and bears
witness to the sudden drop in moral values after the fall of communism.5 
It also notes disapprovingly that anything could be bought in the new, 
post-communist
society.

Pasti, pasti, pastičky (Traps, 1998)
DIRECTED BY Věra Chytilová

The central theme of this film is the place of women in aggressive and 
corrupt post-communist society, a society dominated by men who 
ruthlessly go their own
way and stop at nothing to get what they want.9 The powerful oligarch 
Bach purchases hoardings for provocative confectionery advertisements 
that use attractive women and sexual innuendo (“Bach’s balls, best for 
sucking”). Bach bribes the corrupt and incompetent MP Dohnal (Miroslav 
Donutil) to get permission to
build a motorway in a protected area. The arrogant womanizing architect 
Petr (Tomáš Hanák) works for Bach. Women are attracted to him because he is
wealthy.10

Women are considered inferior. When Petr makes love to a young woman, it 
is he who decides when to stop having sex so that she does not become 
pregnant.
When Dohnal and Petr travel through the countryside in Bach’s yellow 
sports car (a symbol of self-assertion and aggression), they are stopped 
by Lenka, a vet,
whose estate car has run out of petrol. They offer to take her to a 
petrol station, but instead they take her into the forest where Dohnal, 
with Petr’s help, rapes her. Neither has the slightest interest in Lenka 
as a person, they speak of her as a “cow”. Dohnal even wonders if they 
should kill her after the rape.11 The behaviour of the other men in the 
film towards women is no different.

When Lenka sees that there is no hope of a trial for the men guilty of 
her rape, she invites them to her chalet – Dohnal is under the blissful 
illusion that she
enjoyed the rape and that there will be more of the same – where she 
drugs them and castrates them while they sleep. Later on, someone 
arrives unexpectedly at
Dohnal’s flat and finds the genitals in a pot in the fridge, then fries 
them with eggs and eats them.

Lenka is considered mad in a society where nepotism, corruption, 
aggression and male chauvinism are prevalent. Everyone leaves her. 
Towards the end of the
film, she arrives at a public hearing about the building of the 
motorway. When Petr and Dohnal turn up, Lenka shouts out that these two 
men had raped her. She is dismissed with a flea in her ear just as she 
had been previously when she told the mothers nearby that she did not 
approve of them beating their little children. In the final scene, Lenka 
is taken away in an ambulance to a lunatic asylum. The ambulance drives 
through Prague’s historical Old Town past the huge hoarding with the 
obscene “Bach’s balls” advertisement dominating so that the silhouette 
of Prague Castle is almost obscured. It is beyond the power of any woman 
to stand up against the values of post-communism.12



Hezké chvilky bez záruky (Pleasant Moments, 2006)

DIRECTED BY Věra Chytilová
  In her latest feature film, Věra Chytilová complains that the 
foundations of contemporary Czech society have been destroyed, possibly 
irreparably. The reason is the deplorable state of human relations. 
People in contemporary Czech society are almost obsessively selfish in 
their behaviour: they indulge their own
interests exclusively, they are incapable of empathy for their neighbour 
and their narcissism prevents them seeing the world normally – they 
often behave like
madmen.44 This is the main message of this frenetic farce. The director 
collaborated with the psychologist Kateřina Irmanovová in writing the 
script.45 The film
is semi-autobiographical. It is a story about a middle-aged psychologist 
who passively records fragments of her own experiences as she meets her 
patients.46

The result is that the film has some humorous scenes making the viewer 
smile, but it is superficial. The cases in the film are made the subject 
of farce, but they are not studied deeply enough for the darkness 
envisaged to be captured. Chytilová does not follow the psychological 
development of the characters. Instead, she photographs them with a 
hysterically shaky camera.47 The psychologist Hana gives her patients 
absolutely no professional help.48 Chytilová is perhaps right to take a 
very critical approach to events in contemporary Czech society. Only 
this is not enough to make a good film. People do behave selfishly 
without explanation or reason. However, this arbitrary statement tells 
us nothing.





  On 03/13/2014 02:10 AM, Mark Nuckols wrote:
> List members may be interested to know that director Věra Chytilová died earlier today. She is best know for her 1966 Czech New Wave film Sedmikrásky (Daisies). She was 85.
>
> http://www.lidovky.cz/zemrela-reziserka-vera-chytilova-bylo-ji-85-let-fqj-/zpravy-domov.aspx?c=A140312_164611_ln_domov_pvr
>
>
> Mark Nuckols 		 	   		
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