Movie: Fruit of Paradise - Ovoce stromu rajskych jime (Vera Chytilova, 1970)
Vera Chytilova plays it fair, immediately letting you know what you are in for with an almost 10-minute prologue about the Fall of The Garden of Eden, It tells the familiar story, but entirely with abstract close-ups of barely recognisable plants and flowers, and faded out desaturated images of a naked man and woman moving around. The quick hard cuts make it even harder to distinguish what's actually on screen, while the score consists of agressively progressive rock melodies, chirping birds, quaking frogs, choir singing and banging drums. When the snake appears that combination of incongruent sounds somehow gets unified into a single noise that seems to be coming out of a radio cassette that is being played backwards while breaking down. When the movie proper finally starts, you think you can settle down, but soon you realise that you will pine for the comprehensibilty of that opening montage.
The story tells of a woman named Eva who is supposedly married to Josef with whom she lives in what could either be a spa, a mental institution or a hippie commune. Soon Eva gets obsessed by the devlishly mysterious Robert, hoping that he will either love or kill her, with the possibility that killing her may in fact be the greatest expression of his love for her. All of this mostly serves to give Chytilova the opportunity to be genuinely experimental, which demands a lot of her actors, in particular of Jitka Novakova. She plays Eva, and is asked to perform a lot of recognisably human activities in a way that no other human has ever done them. Meanwhile, Chytolova's aesthetic choices serve mostly to find out how connecting certain images to certain sounds would feel, and even scenes that seem to build to some sort of idea are abruptly cut off before you are allowed to get the sense that there is a larger point to them. You can't exactly say that it doesn't work - every scene gets at something that you have never experienced in a film, and never even expected to.
Every scene also at some point starts feeling like a complete waste of time, and I can't say that I plan to revisit this film anytime soon. But (and it is a big but) Fruit of Paradise let to the Czechoslovak government banning Chytiolva from filmmaking, which brings me to Never Look Away, a German film that got great reviews and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2019. In my view it is one of the most misguided and hypocritical movies of recent times. It's not a straight biography, but the life story it depicts closely resembles that of the painter Gerhard Richter, who struggled with his art first in Nazi Germany and then in Communist East Germany. In the opening scene, the film shows the famous Nazi exhibition of degenerate art, with a Nazi guide criticizing Malevich. Once the war is over it rails against the social realist art of the DDR, exemplified by an art professor scolding Picasso. These are the right targets for scorn, but the ethos and artistic sensibility of the film is ultimately much closer to Nazi-approved art and social realism than to Malevich and Picasso. Never Look Away is a state-funded epic prestige picture that's completely beholden to confirming its state's most mainstream ideas about politics, art, and the relationship between the two, doing this through a story, filled with 'teachable moments' at right places that make sure that the audience will always get the exact message it seeks to convey. Whatever else you may think of Fruit of Paradise, it is purposefully alienating and an honest expression of its contempt of, and rebellion against, social realism.
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