Vera Chytilova. The retrospective program includes not only the well-known misanthropic comedies and surreal experiments, but also the director’s early short films and later documentaries, previously unknown to us.
The sky is slanted, the floor is rearing up, a hand-held camera is feverishly groping for an object in the chaos of a Prague street clogged with cars or in the petty-bourgeois order of a small apartment overflowing with all sorts of goods. Wild characters, desperately floundering in an attempt to find either pleasure or support, destroyed according to Freud, and Fromm, and Yalom. Explicit scenes: rape on a boat in the middle of the Vltava - right under the windows of the presidential palace, a pot-bellied pedophile with a dick at the ready, a tenacious stringer filming dying old people in a hospice. Pleasant Moments (2006), the latest film directed by Vera Chytilova, invites comparison with subversive "new realism" like Trier's The Idiots, if not for a small detail. The mocking, cheerful music on the soundtrack not only deprives the picture of its “dogmatic” virginity, but also immediately transforms the tragedy (and every episode of this combined drama is imbued with existential fear and hopelessness, the main scene of which is the psychotherapist’s office) into a hysterical, misanthropic comedy. A fit of hysterical laughter ends the film's heroine's journey through torment - that of others and her own.
The transformation of a sad life drama into a farce could be explained as a reaction to endless repetition - with the exception of a short period of passion for poetic cinema, Chytilova always filmed about the same thing. Melted dreams, broken connections - social and emotional, war of all against all, stagnation, melancholy, pain for which there is no one to sympathize. But absurdity has always been an important tool for Chytilova. Even in her first feature, the exemplary feminist sketch "About Something Else" from 1963 (a double portrait of two female contemporaries - Czechoslovakian gymnastics star Eva Bosakova and the fictional housewife Vera), hell homework neutralized by peppy music that turned life-trap into an operetta. Sympathy for comrade Vera, imprisoned in the prison of domestic duties, did not prevent Khitilova from portraying her as a character more grotesque in its typicality than tragic. A real, quiet tragedy befell the supposedly emancipated gymnast here - in between the hard work of mastering her body and her fears, Bosakova admits that sports life has made life as such impossible: dreams, leisure, travel, family - all this is brought into sacrifice of gold medals.
But the drama of an accomplished man who consciously made his choice never occupied Chytilova. Her world, so familiar to Soviet cinema of the 70s, is a world without the possibility of movement, creation, or action. Everything is in vain, speech is nothing more than a slogan, and order is synonymous with chaos. In Panel Stories (1980), another filmic panorama of Czech society, Chytilová's main target is not just a small person - but the cardboard historical positivism of the Soviet system. Panel construction, a metaphor for building a bright, fair future, is filmed as a large-scale production of devastation, absurdity and total atomization, in which there is no place for anyone - neither children, nor old people, nor broken-down workers, nor a dude from television, nor young spouses with a good salary.
Even sex, which served as a subversive charge of life in Chytilova’s early surreal films, over time turns into the same instrument of enslavement as a career, work, home and hopes. “A hoof here, a hoof there” (1989), a cruel mockery of the lost generation of the seventies (everything takes place in unexpectedly Trier-esque interiors with dead crows on the chandelier and geraniums in pots) - this is not just satire in the literal sense - the camera here gives the metaphorical hooves of a faun all the heroes constantly trailing behind their skirts - but, it seems, the first film about AIDS in the entire socialist camp. The only thing that allowed the heroes of all Chytilova’s films to somehow resist protocol reality suddenly becomes a weapon of retaliation. Life - meaningless, joyless and vulgar - takes revenge on vitality. Resistance is impossible (as in “Traps, Traps” of 1998, where the young follower Valerie Solanas herself castrates her rapists, but this execution does not in any way affect the social status quo - phallocrats who have already undergone symbolic castration are no longer afraid of anything).
What to do? Like her Soviet colleague (and in a sense double) Kira Muratova, Chytilova chooses hysterical absurdity, an old weapon of the surrealist revolution. But Khitilova’s absurdity is of a different kind: no matter how joyless and meaningless the life of her heroes is, it is nothing more than an itch, a neurosis, an inconvenience, albeit one that causes a burst of rage. This is not pain, not psychosis, not aphasia, not the putrid post-Soviet collapse of the “Asthenic Syndrome”. The human condition for Chytilová, who survived 1968 but fundamentally remained in Czechoslovakia (and even made the film Chytilova vs. Forman about her decision), is nothing more than a bad incident, unworthy of special poetics. The littered horizon, roughly poking, like index finger, zoom - this world deserves only a comic verse.
Shake
Shake verb, nsv., used compare often
Morphology: I I'm shaking, You you're shaking, he/she/it shaking, We shaking, You shaking, They shaking, shake, shake, shaking, was shaking, was shaking, were shaking, shaking, shaking, shaking
1. If anyone shaking, which means he is trembling from fear, illness, etc. I felt that he was shaking, as if in a chill. | He was simply shaking in a fit of silent laughter. Her hands were shaking.
2. If anyone shaking out of fear, which means he is very afraid.
Why are you shaking? It's all over now. | She was always worried about her health.
3. If you shaking on a car, bus, etc., which means they drive unevenly, sway from side to side.
Week after week I was shaking along the country roads in an old car.
Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language by Dmitriev. D. V. Dmitriev. 2003.
See what “shake” is in other dictionaries:
SHAKE, shake, shake, past. vr. shook (shake and shake), shook; shaking (shaking and (colloquial) shaking), imperfect. 1. Frequently move from side to side, hesitate. The trees are shaking from the wind. My head is shaking from old age. "Chekalinsky... ... Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary
The veins are shaking.. Dictionary of Russian synonyms and similar expressions. under. ed. N. Abramova, M.: Russian Dictionaries, 1999. shake, tremble, walk, keep, walk, shake, misses a tooth, be timid, be cowardly, shake like... ... Dictionary of synonyms
SHAKE, sit, sit; shook, shook; shaking; imperfect 1. Hesitate, tremble; shake with your whole body. The truck is shaking. My head is shaking. T. from laughter. T. from fear. 2. Ride whatever. shaking (colloquial). T. in the truck. 3. trans., over whom... ... Ozhegov's Explanatory Dictionary
shake- to be afraid, to be frightened, to be afraid, to be afraid, to be afraid, to drift, to be timid, to tremble, to tremble, to tremble. 0060 Page 0061 Page 0062 Page 0063 Page 0064 Page 0065 Page 0066... New explanatory dictionary of synonyms of the Russian language
shake- SHAKE1, ness. Razg. Move, swaying, bouncing on an uneven road (about means of transportation) or move on what kind of vehicle. a vehicle that causes swaying, tossing, shaking when riding (about a person)