Jires: Valerie a týden divů (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) (1970)

A dark fairy story in the vein of Jan Svankmajer or Tim Burton, this late masterpiece of the Czech New Wave describes a young girl’s coming-of-age through a series of surreal tableaux and set pieces. Caught between childhood and adulthood, and stranded in a small Czech town, 13-year old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerova) spends most of her time in the window seat in her bedroom, gazing out through the glass or in through the gauze of her curtain. On the street below, she watches a variety of traditional pageants passing before her eyes, while her bedroom becomes the stage for a series of increasingly bizarre sensual spectacles. As the film becomes more elliptical and abstract, inside and outside merge into a gauzy, glassy ambience, suffused with the luminous haziness of footage shot in a old mirror. In particular, Jires floods his foregrounds with blurred, translucent ephemera, sending blossoms, cobwebs and tongues of flame across the surface of the screen, subliminal as motes on an eyelid, mere ripples in the camera’s aqeuous humor. Not only does that make the film stock feel as permeable as Valerie’s window seat, a diaphanous membrane between real and spirit worlds, but it restores the original moment of sight as a tactile experience, scattering light across the surface of the eye. And there’s something deeply transformative about Jires’ light – it’s the light feared by vampires, folding the supernatural world into the waking world, just as it sublimates the sensuality of Valerie’s bedroom back into the street below. At little over an hour in length, and scored to the same plaintive musical refrain, it’s an exquisite tone poem, a paean to the strangeness of adolescence that’s only grown stranger over time.