PANELSTORY AND DE/CONSTRUCTING INTIMATE CULTURES OF REVOLT.
Vera Chytilova left a legacy of realist and surrealist film in the narrative of late soviet reflection of the Czechoslovakian film industry. A feminist cultural icon, an honest contributer and a teacher to many, her better internationally known works are colourful dances upon the screens that interplay romance, politic and perception. Not unlike those, Panelstory is a briccollage of reality, cultural criticism and fancy storytelling, set in the emerging utopia of the Czech Panelak housing community projects.
This paper was written for courses regarding the Communist film industry as well as Psychoanalysis in Cultural Studies. It reflects between the film and the writing of Julia Kristeva as a framework of deconstruction.
Julia Kristeva describes a ‘normalising and pervitable’ order in which it is justifiable that the power of the self is emancipated through personal liberation but not as a resistance of ideology. Under ideologies of homogenised power in the messages from media and effects of post-industrial consumption as emphasised as emancipator, the self is seen as the ultimate controller, but also the passive subject to ideology and social conformance. It is a paradox of impossibilities Kristeva describes that any communality could ever be felt within whats called a liberal society (2000, p.5). Through consumption or production of entertainment, the subjective voice becomes singled out, silenced as trivial in interpretation until ego is asserted. The essential part of cultural revolt within art is able to be identified through Vera Chytilová’s descriptions of intimate relationships as personal resistances to the dominant norms, a means through the field of entertainment to undermine the generalised discourse in the normalisation era. A film such as Panelstory is interesting to view through this lens of enquiry as it was produced during the Cold War period of Czechoslovakian normalisation, almost immediately prohibited from viewing, and only distributed for release within the new context of spectacle and mass consumption in liberal capitalism of the 90s. It is possible then, that this film has never been considered outside of that context, although it was produced within and for it. It’s particularity of time and depictions of relationships that are still relevant to the localised nature of small revolutions in the every day can only be suggested to be implied in Kristeva’s work as possible, but less apparent of contemporarily described in the new forms of entertainment.
Through this mechanism, Chytilová is a revolutionary as a producer of media, though perhaps a lone rebel in either post/cold war eras, she describes what she saw as real and astonishing and possible to her hopes, and what could be managed as resistance in survival. This essay will attempt to use Kristeva’s analysis of intimate revolt through the work of Vera Chytilová, with the film Panelstory as a primary text of example.
“I am here seeking experiences in which this work of revolt, which opens psychical life to infinite re-creation, continues and recurs, even at the price of errors and impasses. Because we can’t fool ourselves: it is not enough to revive the permanence of revolt, which technology may have blocked, in order to recapture happiness or some sort of serene stability of being.” – Kristeva 2006, p.5
Narratives which attend to the subjectivity of drama as intimate conflict that do not conform within the ideological paradigms determined by standards and norms of a greater discourse may be perceived as trivial in the contemporary context of liberal capitalism. But these experiences which were silenced voices by writers and film makers during totalitarian regimes still reflect the fragmented nature of the selves in unique rebellious spirit to a culture which nullifies identification despite its paradoxical emphasis of the individual. In Panelstory (Prefab Story, 1979), Chytilová observes an inward looking group of individuals living amongst a communal system as being contemporary and modern, only concerned with themselves. In contrast, the panelaky consider be socially concerned of the other is an old-fashioned ideal of a bourgeois past, and yet it is one no longer attributed to the capitalist present (White 2004, p.18). This film is part of Chytilová’s life work through filmmaking of depicting the personal and ideological constructions and deconstruction of ‘paradise’ during and outside of a totalitarian regime that placed very particular constraints on her ability to create these texts. She describes realities of moments and struggles between the ordinary and generalised acceptance of the circumstances as both creation and destruction, a metaphor represented by the ongoing development and disrepair in housing for all people of the Panelaky site documented. The construction of the panelaky is a visual metaphor of the anarchy of self-representation and reinterpretation of norms, exposure, and resourcefulness of life under a totalitarian ideology (Kristeva 2006, p.5). In such a discourse it seems obvious to be able to make such observations, but when viewing the film is only made possible in post-cold war eras, the audience is able to reflect onto the uncanny semblance of familiarity the relations may take into the moral priorities of the late capitalist liberal lifestyle.
“What I wanted to say was that man creates something with one breath and with the second breath destroys it. I wanted the audience to be aware of how the behaviour of man is contradictory. It’s not a critical reaction to the regime; it’s more actually a view of human moral behaviour. I think every form of behaviour has a moral aspect to it.” – Chytilová, 2001, (in Horton, 2001).
Vera Chytilová’s depictions of relations within the blocks of flats at the centre of Panelstory can be understood as artefacts of Cultural Revolt.Within in organised social hegemony, it is shown through the conversations and interactions how the ideals of the panelaks – of commonality and community are contradictory in practice and against the organic social behaviour of the inhabitants. Likewise, the contrary nature of the ideological experiment of social housing in this design creates and magnifies contradictory relations between the inhabitants as they choose to resist and conform to their surroundings. As Jiri, the actor reflects to his lover, “Man mirrors his surroundings” and thus, Chytilová’s Panelstory can be viewed with subjective interpretation by a viewer as a part of cultural revolt to the current political in which it is allowed to be viewed. Chytilová employs methods of vaudeville and the absurd in reality to connote the ridiculous nature of the every day and entice subjective enquiry of norms and transgressions. This can be seen in the constant conflict and contradictions between action and speech, a mother who tells her daughter she must assert her independence if only to gain the security of men in the future, for example. Julia Kristeva’s understanding of the etymological revolt is one that contains plasticity and enveloping of contrariness in this way, to create conflict and struggle to react and grow from (Sunderland 2010, p.25). In consumption and engagement of culture, product is interpreted to become known by the receiver for what it was needed for. To involve the conceptual breath of Slavoj Zizek on this aspect, cultural products of film, art and literature are creations from which the user and producer complete their reality (Zizek, 2012). Such that Chytilová may describe the apathy of ideological conformance of projected progress when this is simply not the case, the absurdity in relations in her films are her small protests within production to describe what is true and a hope of what should question to change. The complex nature of authenticity, absurd and perceptions of culture are represented in the symbolic metaphor of de-construction in panelaks and consistency in contradiction within Panelstory. Reality in revolt is thus, created by the people in and outside of the film who have the privilege to know it, in Chytilová’s work. It is an inversion of the socialist realism trope of redemption through return to the people by creating intellectual work for the consumers if they take it upon themselves (Owen 2012, p.196). An audience interprets and interrogated meanings of their realities with the knowledge gained from the spectacle in their environments, and appropriately responds with conformance or revolt.
To read and interpret text is a resistance of media and dominant ideologies, a private form of revolt that contains a natural dispersion in social and philosophical transference. It is perhaps the kind of interpretative reading that interrogated and becomes aroused to hunt and initiate new forms in revolt that provoked resistance in the form of censorship bodies banning films such as Vera Chytilová’s depiction of the absurd in documentary style telling of prefabricated housing communities, Panelstory. To read any text embodies reaction to the greater context and is the subjects choice to accept or deny a story or subtext of story being told (Zizek 2012, p.129). Consequentially how we respond to film and cultures that revolt in their envelopments of the dominant norms and presentations of the everyday surrealism may also be threatening towards an attempt of regulating what is presented (White 2004, p.29). So the censors’ reaction to control audience of this film is also a form of revolt in context of Czechoslovak communist ideal culture that is gendered, stable, and egalitarian throughout diversity. Panelstory represents and re-presents this ideal, as a contradictory and non-static in the Era. As She seems herself idealistic of the communist hopes as she presents problematics as blunt resistance forward towards possible utopias in the state, without the neurotic and self consumed liberalisation in the post-cold war era. This is epitomised by the closing line she gives between the feature couple of the panelaky’s narrative, he asks “Wouldn’t you rather fly to the Moon?” to which she responds “Like hell, I’m not budging from here” (Panelstory, 1979). By interrogating the original concept of creating a levelling and diversifying housing community by showing the reality of how the plan it becomes enacted, Chytilová shows how she sees her role as a producer of affect in discourse to create change by staying in Czechoslovakia and commenting on it as a part of her context, through a form that can be applied universally onto the social form.
Universality of a cultural revolt through documentation and depiction of an absurd reality creates the subject of the art, the panelak; the community, to be attacked and analysed by the consumer. Panelstory’s telling of intimate and relational revolts as evolving and organic are understandable and as contemporaneous to the audience that watches it so long as matters of expectation, gender and surveillance in how to understand each other remain issues. For this reason, it is of no circumstance if the viewer has no understanding of the censoring limits placed on Chytilová to create work, or the context from which it came. This is because the film provokes as a real ongoing human commentary of how to change and rearrange order, in spite or despite of the greater order. As the store person comments with regard to “palming off” his work of recycling paper to a child who is playing in the garbage, what may be seen as laziness of him he displays as training of the youth though not in hopefulness nor ideological conformance, but in preparation for possibility of worst to come “God knows what’s in store for him”. Throughout such representations they thus become speculations and revelations of resistance of the real. In contemporary western conditions, technological primacy of image and stress induce a reduction of space and sense of open-ness to the curiosity of others and how representation allows one to know another (Kristeva 2006, p.10). Absurdist and resistant social realities such as experienced in a totalitarian regime and put into practice in a panelak community may have a defensive resistance to any proposed front that reveals a mirror to itself its truth. The role of modern art and culture, and psychoanalysis in its own way, is to create notice of the paradoxical logics understood as stable rather, in order to create an unraveling or new re-evolving of the context (Kristeva 2006, p.11). If art, culture, and psychoanalysis are provocations from what is apparent, then interrelation is the dispersal of revolt in the intimate to create change and transference of signs throughout time. In Vera Chytilová’s film, she documents a moment that is a revelation and provocation of the contrarian systems that were in practice through Communism. This moment in documentation was an ideological attempt to liberate and equalise all subjects through maintaining hegemonic control, by exposing the disorganisation, natural anarchy of social relativity and reactions, Chytilová has created a statement of cultural revolt that is with the same ideals but without the dominant and stoicism of being static in a particular era.The ongoing metaphor of the building site reflects on how it is possible to make sense of the nonsense, as all structures contain disorder and must be pulled apart to become what is most needed. To view this film through the Kristevan psychoanalytical lens of resistance it is not difficult to understand how Panelstory is a provocation of the inconsistencies all relationships contain to maintain and recreate systems in Chytilová’s format of resistance.
“Wouldn’t you rather fly to the moon?”
“Like Hell. I’m not budging from here.”
REFERENCES
HORTON, A. 2001, “Against destruction Věra Chytilová’s Panelstory (Prefab Story, 1979)”, Kinoeye, taken from http://www.kinoeye.org/02/08/horton08.php
KRISTEVA, J. 2006, Intimate Revolt- The Future of the Culture of Revolt. Vol. 1, Columbia. New York.
KRISTEVA, J. 2000, ‘What Revolt Today’, in Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1, Columbia, New York. Pp1-31.
OWEN, J. 2012, ‘Heroes of the Working Class? Work in Czechoslovak Films of the New- Wave and Postcommunist Years’. Framework: the Journal of Cinema and Media, 53: 1, Wayne State University Press. pp.190-206 DOI: 10.1353/frm.2012.0008
SUNDERLAND, L. 2010. ‘The Art of Revolt: Rebellion in the work of Bertran de Born and
Julia Kristeva’. Comparative Literature, 62:1. University of Oregon, DOI 10.1215/00104124-2009- 030
WHITE, E. 2004. ‘Living With the Truth: The films of Vera Chytilová’, ISP Collection, via http://digitalcollection.sit.edu/isp_collection/515
ZIZEK, S and GUNJEVIC, B. 2012. God In Pain: Inversions of the Apocalypse. Seven Stories Press, New York.
may you live an interesting life. 