Contextual Essay - Progress:

For my contextual studies essay, I will be exploring Czechoslovakian new wave cinema and the obscure ways in which the texts are constructed while reflecting the society of the time. Through my research, I will also be looking at the impact that the society and political state had on the movement and Czechoslovakian cinema in general.

The three Czechoslovakian new wave texts that I have chosen to focus on particularly are: Dasies (1966), The Firemen's Ball (1967) and Valerie and her Week of Wonders (1970). I have chosen these texts because I think that they are some of the most interesting and obscure texts of the Czech new wave movement.

Czechoslovakia in the 1940s was suffering the impact and aftermath of the second world war, meaning that there was a sudden influx in films being produced - although the control of the Soviet Union over the Czech government meant that all media content had to through public censorship checks before they could be fully released. During this time the Czech approach to society and creativity was forced to disappear and was replaced by the soviet cultural policies of the SU, however, in the following years Czechoslovak started to gain recognition and the Czech film industry was given its first Academy Award (for A Shop on Main Street (1965) directed by Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos). (HAMES, 2005)

Surrealism was a great influence to how the Czech film makers encoded, directed and produced their texts. (OWENS, 2011)

The 1966 new wave film Dasies, directed by Vera Chytilova, is a very obscure and controversial text in its portrayal of women who seemingly have no purpose to their lives and export the manners and kindness/love and admiration so that they can eat or dine and continue to live their care free lives. This text is known to be a strong example of surrealist cinema and coming from a director who's won awards and respect for producing feminist works its a very strange and confusing text. 

The narrative of the text has been encoded with various creative and almost hypnotic or confusing types of editing, including overlaying black and white clips of film with reds, blues and occasionally even a rainbow assortment of colour over top. These outcomes were often due to the experimentation that the films editor did on the reels of footage, occasionally the colours and effects weren't intended but they decided to keep them in the finished text as they ended up looking creative and interesting when spliced together during production.