Vera Chytilová and her Surreal Paradise

Vera Chytilová has the prestige of being the only female director to emerge in the Prague Spring. Moreover, she was one of the best directors of that era, period. Working with her husband, the cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera, and writer-designer Ester Krumbachová, she directed two of the most inventive films of the Czech New Wave. Daisies (1966)was an avant-garde montage of the destructive antics of two female teenagers which demonstrated that such a film could still be funny while The Fruit of Paradise (1969) used allegory to portray male-female relations using imagery of a remarkable aesthetic beauty.

Because of her excessive approach, Chytilová subsequently found it almost impossible to work following the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968. However, she was to remain in Czechoslovakia working on shelved or unreleased projects.

Read more on Vera Chytilová, followed by my interview with her in London in 2002 at the start of her retrospective, by clicking here.