Living With the Truth: The Films of Věra Chytilová

/ Despite a career spanning five decades and numerous different sociopolitical atmospheres, Věra Chytilova’s films present a remarkably consistent outlook on contemporary life. This paper traces the defining characteristics of Chytilova’s work: her strong moralistic criticisms of contemporary society, her motif of paradise, which establishes a potent symbolic basis for said moral criticisms, and her relentless pursuit of new forms and desire to experiment with film language. This final point is also inextricably linked to her moral stance, as the bulk of her work was produced under the authority of a Communist regime that frowned severely upon work of an avant-garde or experimental nature. Indeed, all three of these aspects are intricately interconnected in Chytilova’s films, serving the director in her pursuit of that rarest of commodities in both communist and capitalist countries: the truth.