Jaromil Jireš :: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

The film was never meant to fall to Jaromil Jireš. It belonged to Jan Němec, husband of the woman who designed it, until August 1968 arrived and the tanks of the Warsaw Pact settled the question of who in Czechoslovakia would be permitted to keep making films.

Němec was purged from the Barrandov studio within the year. Jireš inherited the project fresh off the banning of his own previous feature, The Joke, and shot Valerie a týden divů in 1970, a thirteen-year-old girl's single dreaming week stretched across ninety minutes, at the exact moment the Prague Spring was finishing its long exhale. When it appeared, the Party newspaper Rudé právo delivered the verdict that mattered: too arty, it said, demanding instead films for the audience, films for today, films for the socialist person. Within a year or two the doors it condemned would be shut for good. Valerie is usually filed as one film among many in the Czechoslovak New Wave. It might be truer to call it the wave's last exhaled breath, caught on camera by a director who had not even wanted the job.

Call it, first, what it plainly is. A girl named Valerie wakes to her first blood and finds the ordinary furniture of her small town, grandmother, priest, cousin, travelling actors, a pale visitor with a polecat's face, rearranging itself into something closer to liturgy than plot. Faces recur wearing new relations to her. The line between grandfather, father, and demon blurs on purpose, as does the line between the man who might save her and the man circling to devour her. None of it resolves into a story you could summarize twice the same way, and that unsummarizability is the film working exactly as intended.

Ester Krumbachová is credited, when she is credited at all, as the film's costume and production designer, a description about as complete as calling Fišer's score "some music." She co-wrote the screenplay with Jireš and built the whole fairy-tale architecture the camera moves through, the lace, the pale masks, the visual grammar that turns a small Bohemian town into something closer to an altarpiece left out in the weather. She had already done comparable work, uncredited or under-credited, on Daisies and A Report on the Party and Guests, and the critic Jan Žalman called her the first to bring genuine philosophical abstraction and a Kafkaesque grasp of symbol into Czech cinema. History has been content to file her under wardrobe. A magazine with any interest in getting these things right owes her the correction.

The novel underneath the film goes back further still, to 1935, written by Vítězslav Nezval at the height of his involvement with Devětsil and the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group he had helped found the year before. He built it consciously out of older gothic bones, Frankenstein, Lewis's The Monk, the shadow of Murnau's Nosferatu, an inheritance the film keeps entirely legible on screen. What makes the novel's afterlife bitter is that Nezval himself did not stay a surrealist. Within a decade or so he had bent toward Socialist Realism, the very aesthetic doctrine that would later be wielded, almost word for word, against the film his own youthful heresy eventually became. The author's own political turn prefigures the fate of his book with an almost implausible symmetry.

Call the vampire in Valerie by its right name, too, and the film gains a genealogy the word "vampire" alone erases. Central and Eastern Slavic folklore had its own undead centuries before Bram Stoker gave the idea a Transylvanian passport: the upír, first set down in writing in the Primary Chronicle of 1047, nearly nine hundred years ahead of Dracula. The upír's particular cruelty was domestic. It did not stalk strangers on a road. It returned to feed on its own household, spouse, child, sibling, spreading outward through a family the way a fever spreads through a village. That is closer to what happens inside Valerie than any Carpathian count. The threat wears the face of a grandmother bargaining away her granddaughter's blood for her own lost youth, of a priest who is also, somehow, kin. The horror is not an intrusion from outside. It is what the family was already keeping in the house.

The score belongs to Luboš Fišer, gossamer strings and clockwork harpsichord under a boys' choir that sounds, by design, like a liturgy nobody remembers commissioning. It has aged into its own second life. Broadcast lifted its melodic bones for Haha Sound in 2003, and by 2009, working with Julian House of Ghost Box on Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, the debt had become closer to full homage than borrowing. Which puts Valerie, whether it asked for the job or not, at the root of a lineage this magazine has already spent real ink tracing, hauntology's suspicion that the past never quite finishes happening, that a lost future can go on broadcasting long after the transmitter is switched off. Fišer's choir was already singing that broadcast in 1970, in a country about to have its own future confiscated by people who preferred films for the socialist person.

None of this needed to survive. A film orphaned from its intended director, adapted from a surrealist who recanted, scored by a composer whose tapes could easily have rotted in a state archive, released into a country actively narrowing what art was permitted to say: on paper it reads like a list of ways to disappear. Instead the tanks came, the Party wrote its verdict, and Valerie kept dreaming anyway, on a reel of film nobody managed to confiscate in time.