<
BACK
A fantastic fairytale
"Maiden, do you know what you are...?"[1]
Jaromil Jireš' Valerie a týden divů (Valerie and Her Week of
Wonders, Czechoslovakia, 1970) is one of those haunting, dream-like
films that once seen is difficult to forget. The sexual awakening of
adolescent Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) provides the major theme,
ornately rendered as a symbol-soaked gothic fairytale. Elements
drawn from the horror genre operate in conjunction with the type of
gentle soft-core art imagery that can be found in other European
sexual initiation films of the 1970s, such as Emmanuelle (1974),
Bilitis (1977) and The Story of O (Histoire d'O, 1975).[2]
This heady generic mixture is well-suited to the film's focus on the
ambiguous status of various thresholds and the mysteriousness of
awakening sensuality, conflicting desires and duplicity. One of the
seductive attractions of Valerie a týden divů is its magical
trance-inducing quality. The carefully-crafted sets, the hypnotic
harpsichord, flute and choir-based music, and the predominance of
thematically significant white in the colour co-ordinated palette
all add to the film's particular audio-visual ambience of artifice.
In addition to the use of elliptical editing, the crystalline
quality of the photography is simply stunning, capturing in some
scenes the beauty of early summer light sparkling on water and
illuminating the pastoral landscape, which is set against dark,
decaying, cobweb-strewn crypts.
The film bears some resemblance in stylistic terms to the East
German fairytale films made by DEFA (such as The Singing Ringing
Tree [Der Singende, klingende Bäumchen, 1957]), sharing the use of
fantastic, almost surrealist imagery. That the film makes the sexual
subtext of many fairytales overt in transgressive terms is perhaps
what attracted UK-based Redemption, a company that specialises in
sexploitation and horror films, to release the film on video in
1994. With its non-linear story structure and characters that
transform in the blink of an eye, Valerie a týden divů twists and
turns much in the irrational manner of a dream. Events unfold from
Valerie's subjective point of view, beginning when her brother (if
he really is her brother) steals the pearl earrings she inherited
from her apparently dead mother. The theft coincides significantly
with the onset of her first period. From then on, Valerie is plunged
into the strange world of adult desire, with its terrible and
intriguing secrets.
Enigma and mutability
"Is there some secret in these earrings?"
Valerie's burgeoning sensuality is established in the opening
credits: the camera lingers with fetishistic fascination on her
mouth, face and hair. Variously, she tastes the bright water
bubbling from a fountain, eats ripe cherries, nestles a dove against
her chest and drinks in the scent of a bunch of small, white, wild
flowers. Everything in Valerie's world becomes full of wonder, which
she experiences in an invigorated and heightened manner. Like the
heroines of pre-sanitised fairytales, she faces all the mysteries
that come her way boldly and with wide-eyed curiosity.
Tailing the opening sequence is Valerie's contemplation of her
bell-like earrings, which carry magical powers. While there are many
enigmas in the film, the earrings seem somehow key to the events
which follow. Their symbolic significance is underlined early on, as
the aural motif that represents them (a series of sing-songy notes
played on the glockenspiel) also accompanies the fall of a few drops
of Valerie's first menstrual blood onto a daisy. The earrings have a
central place in the film's "family romance." Valerie's
white-haired, smooth-faced grandmother tells her to get rid of them,
as they are a danger to her; she claims to have bought them from the
vampire-priest-constable who acts—albeit slightly ambiguously—as the
villain of the film (and who may or may not be Valerie's father).
Yet Valerie's brother (at one point Grandmother calls him an actor)
states that the earrings will protect her from harm and that the
vampire-priest-constable wants them back to sustain his
vampire-life. But the status of the earrings is never made entirely
clear; in keeping with the film's associative poetic structure, they
evade any fixed, one-to-one correspondence of meaning. They do
appear to keep Valerie from harm: protecting her from the sexual
advances of the local priest, bringing her and the priest back to
life, and preventing her from dying when burned at the stake. But,
like almost everything else in Valerie a týden divů, the earrings
have their own obscured and transformational agenda in symbolic and
mythic terms.
Change, artifice and duplicity—nothing here is what it seems—also
finds resonant embodiment early in the film when a carnival comes to
town. Valerie looks out onto the street to see a masked figure
wearing a black cloak; removing his animal mask, the figure reveals
a hideous nosferatu face, grinning with an apparent malevolence that
causes Valerie to gasp and call him a monster. The mask is replaced
and again taken away to uncover the face of a handsome young man. In
this topsy-turvey, artifice-laden world, no one is who they seem to
be; everyone wears different faces, a device that can be said to
express the duplicitous and endlessly deferred nature of desire.
Variously throughout the course of the film, old age turns into
youth, piety turns to lust, evil becomes the object of pity, death
turns to life and back again, fathers turn into monsters, Valerie's
grandmother becomes a wanton vampire, and innocence gives way to
knowledge (it is worth noting that an image of Adam and Eve can be
seen at the beginning and end of the film, that Grandmother's mirror
carries the same image and that Valerie is often shown eating
apples). Angela Carter's phrase, "mutability is having a field day,"
applies so very aptly in relation to this unsettled and unsettling
film.[3]
Family romance
"When you awake, my love, keep your secret safe."
At the source of the film's originality is its imaginative-mythic
construction of the subjective world of a girl on the borders of
becoming woman. Following the breadcrumb path laid down by
surrealism, this rite of passage is inflected by
psychoanalytic-based ideas of the unconscious as a reservoir of
enigmatic overdetermination, dissemblement and creativity. Valerie's
increased awareness, born in part from the tangible materiality of
her body's new rhythm, reveals adult sexuality as an intriguing
masquerade of desire. As with Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves
(1984), Valerie's wondrous world is manufactured as the product of a
self-tailored fairytale that expresses the particularities and
changes in perspective that accompany her burgeoning adolescent
sexuality.
Soon after attending a rather strange, lustful sermon given by the
vampire-priest-constable in the local church to a group of maidens
all dressed in pristine white dresses, Valerie encounters the
vampire-priest-constable in the street. Of her own free will and in
the name of pity, but driven by curiosity, she enters his
"kingdom"—replete with captured songbird and smoking cauldron. He
forces her to look through a hole carved into an engraving of a
demon (shot through a keyhole-shaped mask), and Valerie sees her
formerly pious grandmother in a state of sexual agitation. With a
dress torn to reveal not very grandmotherly breasts, and pleading
with the priest for sexual attention, Grandmother flagellates
herself at his feet.
Rescued from this shocking sight by her brother, Valerie mutters
"I'm asleep and dreaming all this" as he carries her away. This is a
perverse and overdetermined scene, with the putative demon-father
(the vampire-priest-constable) forcing daughter-Valerie to watch her
mother/grandmother (she is positioned in the film as both) indulge
in, from Valerie's perspective, mystifying sexual behaviour with the
missionary priest. While this is not exactly the primal scene, it
nonetheless resonates with psychoanalytic-based ideas of the fantasy
of seeing or overhearing parental sex: a fantasy that relates to the
enigma of origins. The erotic charge of many sex-based films trades
on the promise of seeing the secret sexual life of others: Valerie a
týden divů confronts this secret with knowing and contrived
reflectivity.
As Freud argues in his 1909 essay "Family Romances,"[4] it is common
for children to fantasize about family intrigues and secrets. Jean
Laplanche expands on this idea by suggesting that the coded speech
and actions of family members present enigmas to children that have
their impetus in a drive to knowledge.[5] These putative,
puzzle-laden messages become repressed and thereby structure
unconscious fantasy, only to re-emerge in retrospective form during
adolescence. The sexual dimension of the family romance is given
shape within Valerie a týden divů in fairytale terms, and Valerie's
imaginative relations with her brother and the
vampire-priest-constable touch base with Oedipal and incestuous
desires (and their prohibition).
In accordance with Freud's central notion that fantasy is subject to
the distortions of the primary process, the Oedipal connection
becomes diffuse here, subject to disavowal. It is never clear that
Valerie's brother is indeed her brother, for example, or that the
vampire-priest-constable is her father. They are both objects of
Valerie's desire (as she is the object of their desire), yet to keep
such a pretty game in play, these potential sexual relationships are
invoked only to be deferred. That all the central characters in
Valerie's world do not have definitive, stable identities locates
that world as subjective artifice. Valerie imagines a range of
scenarios in which her family members are endowed with magical
powers, their status inflated to fairytale proportions, all along
the lines of Freud's family romance.
A crucial interaction takes place between Grandmother and the
vampire-priest-constable that reveals another aspect of the Oedipal
family romance around which this feux d'artifice spins. Observed by
the hidden Valerie, Grandmother asks the vampire-priest-constable to
restore her former beauty. He promises to do so only if she gives
back the house he gave her. She claims that this is problematic as
Valerie would be disinherited, but the demonic
vampire-priest-constable exploits the tension between her
conflicting maternal and self-gratificatory desires. After signing a
Faustian pact, Grandmother is restored to beauty as a vampire and
takes on the exact guise of Valerie's mother as shown in a portrait.
At first she dissembles as Valerie's cousin, a guise soon dropped,
and then attempts to seduce her son/grandson.
Fearing that Valerie has usurped her in the affections of both the
Constable and her son (?), she sets out to destroy Valerie and drink
her blood. This (grand)mother-daughter rivalry is much the same as
that found, subtextually, in the Snow White tale (made overt in
Michael Cohn's 1997 film, Snow White: A Tale of Terror). In both
texts, there is a competition of beauty and power that circulates
around the figure(s) of the father. Yet the difference in Valerie a
týden divů is that Grandmother, according to the film's emphasis on
mutability, oscillates between a desire for sexual attention and
power on the one hand and a concern for Valerie on the other.
Moreover, according to the illogical nature of fantasy and the
Freudian "return of the repressed," Grandmother's death is only
temporary.
Like many fairytales, Valerie's wondrous world is rife with the
seductions and aggressions born of family relationships, a factor
that continues to give Jireš' film thematic relevance. Added to this
is the way the film constructs adult sexuality as strange,
mysterious and enigmatic: the people we think we as children know so
well turn out to have dark, bestial desires that undermine our
earlier idealisation of them. Lorna Sage writes that "we're obsessed
with origins and originality, but though the womb in our heads/the
Wunderkammer is indeed full of amazing things, the myths and the
magic are of our own contrivance... Demystify motherhood, and you
abolish the last hiding place for eternity."[6] While Sage is
referring to the work of Angela Carter, her observation applies
equally well here. Within Valerie a týden divů, fantasy maps
childhood monsters onto the sphere of family relationships: the
mother figure is desanctified to the point of transforming into a
green-eyed vampire, made murderous from jealousy. A rare event in
mainstream cinema, she becomes, crucially, a desiring agent in her
own right.
Social context
"Publishing houses and film studios were placed
under new direction. Censorship was strictly imposed, and a campaign
of militant atheism was organized."[7]
It is likely that for most Western viewers the appeal of Valerie a
týden divů lies primarily in its striking visual style and
eroticised family melodrama. The mythic and fairytale aspects of the
film, framed as they are through psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy
and the Oedipal relation, does tend to universalise its major rite
of passage theme in what can appear to be essentialised, gendered
terms. But what of the more localised industrial, cultural and
political context in which the film was produced?
Valerie a týden divů was made during the Soviet occupation of
Czechoslovakia, when the national film industry was heavily censored
in an attempt at minimising widespread burgeoning dissent. While it
is all too easy to oversimplify the relationship between theme and
broader historical events, I would suggest that there are certain
aspects of the film that resonate with the cultural context in which
it was produced.
UK video release of Valerie
During the post-war period, Czechoslovakia became increasingly
industrialised, with a significant decline in agriculture and its
particular organisation of the landscape. The film's bucolic setting
chimes with the somewhat picturesque evocation of sexual innocence.
With its focus on rhythms and cycles that link the body to nature
there is a pagan inflection to Valerie a týden divů, a return to the
myth and romance of a lost agrarian life. Of course this was not a
phenomenon experienced only in Czechoslovakia, but throughout the
industrialised world. As such, a nostalgia for an imagined
authenticity of a back-to-nature lifestyle, laced in local,
idiosyncratic, folk-knowledge, informs many other occult and
fantasy-based films—and other forms of popular culture—made
elsewhere.[8]
Relating more specifically to the context of Soviet domination is
the film's treatment of organised religion, namely Catholicism, the
country's predominant faith. In accordance with Soviet manoeuvres to
enforce atheism, Valerie a týden divů embraces an anti-Catholic
stance, particularly in relation to sexual morality. This factor
enabled the film to tap a wider, "hip" audience in the West that was
inclined towards greater sexual permissiveness and sought liberty
from enforced reverence (something that also informed Surrealism's
mischievous anti-Catholicism).
Throughout the film, each of the characters connected to Catholicism
(the devout grandmother, missionary priest and
vampire-priest-constable) are shown to be playing with double moral
standards. Soon after a speech about saving a "negro" woman from the
sins of the flesh, the vampire-priest-constable enters Valerie's
pristine white room, tearing away his cassock to reveal a necklace
composed of jagged animal teeth, before he tries to rape her. The
message is clear: bestial desire lurks behind pious appearance.
Saved by the earrings, the Priest commits suicide, only later to be
(incidentally) resurrected by Valerie, after which he burns her as a
witch because she "tempted" him. These examples indicate the film's
playful attack of the repressive, distorting and colonising values
of Catholicism. Like Grandmother, the vampire-priest-constable is a
duplicitous hypocrite who preaches one thing yet does another. The
defamation of the priestly father, however, has further resonance
that might be read as a tacit critique of the contemporary regime.
Using tropes derived from the broader, contemporary, pop cultural
fascination with devils, witch burnings, vampires, corrupt priests
and duplicitous parents, Valerie a týden divů seems to carry a
veiled critique of Soviet domination of Czech culture. In 1968, and
under the Warsaw pact, the Soviet authorities took active steps to
stamp out increasing anti-communist activism (Czechoslovakia's
history is full of occupying forces and it had only a short period
of independence between World War I and 1939, until 1991 when Soviet
authority collapsed). Correlations are fuzzy—understandably so given
the monitored context in which Jireš was working—but the allegorical
approach to repression and power struggles in the film resonates
with contemporary struggles between liberal reformism and Soviet
repression. Masquerading as a slightly titillating fairytale of
becoming woman, we might extrapolate from Valerie's fantasy a
metaphoric rendition of willful Czechoslovakia seeking freedom and
difference from the tryanny of several successive monstrous fathers:
Hitler, Stalin, Brezhnev. As Valerie herself says towards the end of
the film: "Would that this witching might end."
Coda
One of my strongest impressions when seeing this
film for the first time was its similarity to The Company of Wolves,
which Jordan directed from a story by Angela Carter. Carter's
revisionary fairy- and folktales collected in The Bloody Chamber and
Other Stories (1979) share with Valerie a týden divů the same heady,
symbol-soaked assemblage of lush sexual imagery, best emblemised by
the shared image of a flower transformed from fresh virginal white
to blood red. Jireš' film was screened at the National Film Theatre
in London soon after it was made, and according to Roz Kaveney,
Carter was present and impressed with it.[9] Jireš' and Carter each
make the rite of passage into sexuality the very centre of their
tales. Both have heroines who "run with the tigers"[10] (or wolves;
in the case of Valerie—the weasel), rather than becoming their
sacrificial victims. Valerie is the putative origin of events, so
not only does she run, in her fantasy, with the tiger: she is the
diegetic author of this running.
In its baroque allegory of transformations and mutability, Valerie a
týden divů provides a precursor to more recent horror-fairytale
combination films that focus on females. Riffing as they do on the
becoming-woman, rite of passage-into-sexuality theme, Snow White: A
Tale of Terror and Ginger Snaps (2000) are perhaps the most obvious
examples here. Reading back and forth, Jireš' film is an important,
and critically neglected, precursor to recent developments in the
horror genre, particularly with the dominance of the "final girl"
character and the active targeting of horror to female audiences
through witchcraft and fairytales, as indicated, for instance, by
The Craft (1996), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Practical
Magic (1998).[11]
Footnotes
1. Not being a Czech speaker, I am reliant on the
English translation provided by the subtitles to Redemption's UK
release of the film.
2. All of these sexual initiation films use elements of fairytale,
and through soft-focus photography create a dreamlike aura—many of
the same devices to be found in Valerie a týden divů, which is
earlier in date, rather less explicit and more inclined towards
horror and surrealism.
3. Angela Carter, "Notes For a Theory of Sixties Style" (1967), rpt
in Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (London: Virago, 1982), 86-87.
4. Sigmund Freud, "Family Romances," in On Sexuality: Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, trans James Strachey, ed
Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 218-25.
5. Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989): 104-139.
6. Lorna Sage, "Introduction," Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the
Art of Angela Carter, ed Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 18.
7. American Memory website (accessed April 2003).
8. As I have discussed at length in A Skin For Dancing In:
Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in film (London: Flicks Books,
2000), Chapter Three "Hymns to Pan: Sacrifice, Witch Cults and
Paganism," 72-116.
9. Roz Kaveney was a friend of Carter. Personal Communication.
October 2002 (UEA: Buffy conference). Another stylistic similarity
is found in the uncannily similar colour palette, in which white
predominates with red and black accents, also used by Derek Jarman
in the set design for Ken Russell's The Devils (1971, UK).
10. Angela Carter "The Tiger's Bride," in The Bloody Chamber
(London: Vintage,1995), 64.
11. For more on the figure of the "final girl" in horror cinema, see
Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror
Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); for more on
female horror audiences, see Brigid Cherry, "Refusing to Refuse to
Look: Female viewers of the horror film," in Identifying Hollywood
Audiences, ed Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: BFI
Publishing, 1999).