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.