Seven Close Encounters 2016 / O něčem jiném / Czechoslovakia 1963
Helena Třeštíková presents
The film alternates between the daily lives of its two heroines; one is Czech Olympic gymnast Eva Bosáková and the other is a housewife. Chytilová always countered attempts to view her feature-film debut as a mere confrontation between two different attitudes to life.
“At the start of her film career Věra Chytilová wrote the following: ‘Film should reflect the truth, it should have aesthetic appeal, wisdom, emotion and faith, because film should be truthful, exciting, necessary, beautiful and full of hope. That’s the kind of film I’d like to make. But I’m afraid I’ll never be up to the task’. Chytilová made the greatest impact on my life and work. She was always seeking, always questioning, she never made compromises, she never became set in her ways. That’s what I admired in her. I saw her film Another Way of Life when I was fourteen and it was like being struck by lightning. After the screening I wrote in my diary that I wanted to make movies. It was an absurd idea at the time and I didn’t tell anyone about it because everyone would have laughed at me. But I can say without a doubt: that day, Věra changed my life.” – Helena Třeštíková. This authentic look at the daily lives of two young women really was “another way” of looking at things. Dramatic action was superseded by attention to ordinary details, the aim being to incite viewers to reflect on what they saw and thereby reassess their own moral standpoint.
Zdena Škapová
82 min / Black & white, DCP
Director Věra Chytilová
/ Screenplay Věra Chytilová
/ Dir. of Photography Jan Čuřík
/ Music Jiří Šlitr
/ Editor Miroslav Hájek
/ Art Director Vladimír Labský
/ Producer Jiří Pokorný
/ Production Filmové studio Barrandov
/ Cast Eva Bosáková, Věra Uzelacová, Josef Langmiler, Luboš Ogoun, Jiří Kodet
/ Sales Národní filmový archiv
Věra Chytilová (1929, Ostrava – 2014, Prague) was a key player in the Czechoslovak New Wave movement, which began to emerge while she was a student of FAMU (she graduated in 1962). From the outset she showed an interest in the experiences of the modern woman and her lot, while she avoided the downsides of both sentiment and dogmatic feminism. She was sharply critical of all superficiality and fraudulence in those who ostensibly sought moral values and truth in life, and, indeed, these were crucial beliefs in her own work. Her filmography reflects shifts through various stylistic periods: after a documentary approach early on (A Bag of Fleas, Another Way of Life) came intense stylisation and a move towards abstract meaning (Daisies, Fruit of Paradise), followed by work employing satire and parable (The Apple Game, Prefab Story, The Jester and the Queen, Pleasant Moments).
Národní filmový archiv
Závišova 5, 140 00, Praha 4
Czech Republic
E-mail: [email protected]
Tomáš Žůrek
Distributor, Sales Agent
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