The Velvet and the Worms: Ester Krumbachová’s Unsung Legacy

If these wartime films turned historical reality into fable, then Krumbachová’s next film with Němec, A Report on the Party and Guests, was a deliberately abstract, periodless morality play whose relevance to the contemporary realities of Communist Czechoslovakia was all too uncomfortably evident to the country’s rulers. Famously earning a personal ban from the Czechoslovak president himself for its supposed attack on Leninism, it was one of the most explosive and scandalous films of the New Wave. This slow-burn Kafkaesque comic chiller, in which a group of picnickers is cajoled and bullied into joining an outdoor birthday celebration for a tyrannical host, also marked Krumbachová’s decisive emergence as a writer and creative originator, deriving from a story she had tucked away (with some forty or so others) in a drawer.

Though the film’s script was developed together with Němec, Krumbachová seems to have been principally responsible for the absurdity of its dialogue, which is by turns platitudinous and nonsensical, oppressively omnipresent but rarely actually saying anything—at least not directly. The influence of playwright Eugène Ionesco on these exchanges is palpable and was openly acknowledged, but Krumbachová asserted the distinctness of her vision by stating that where Ionesco conceived the world itself “as absurdity,” she wanted to compose a portrait out of “paradoxes and absurdities” whose overall effect was “tragedy.” The film is Krumbachová’s cri de coeur against self-interested or simply indifferent accommodation to tyranny and violence: indifference, she remarked, was something “I cannot forgive.”

Besides story and scripting, Krumbachová contributed vitally to Party’s visual conception. She helped assemble an eclectic iconography of high-art and documentary sources—from Goya and Flemish painting to a photograph of a Hitler rally—to subtly and suggestively ground the film’s imagery, and she designed all the sets and costumes. The latter are as inspired and expressive as always, from the plus fours and black boots of the host’s thugs to the disturbing detail of the complicit female guest who turns up in a hunter’s outfit during the violent pursuit of her own husband. Krumbachová was also behind the decision to cast friends rather than professional actors and made some key casting suggestions—including the clownish, menacing Jan Klusák and the fatefully “Leninesque” Ivan Vyskočil as the sinister host.

In 1969, as the New Wave saw its end coming, Krumbachová finally had the opportunity to put her unadulterated sensibilities on-screen with her first and last feature as director, The Murder of Mr. Devil, developed (with Němec) from her own radio play. Notwithstanding Němec’s hand in the writing, this film was a veritable one-woman show, which Krumbachová not only directed, wrote, and designed, but for which she also (as Martin Šrajer recounts) personally sewed the clothes together, made the actors’ jewelry, and “prepared the fine dishes that form an integral part of the story.”

Those fine dishes certainly are integral, as Krumbachová’s signature concerns, including her food preoccupation, are all served to excess here. Even simpler in premise and smaller in scale than her films with Němec and Chytilová, this is another stylized fable, one that takes the proverb “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” and turns it into an outrageous scenario about an assiduous domestic goddess who endlessly prepares gourmet dishes for the satanic suitor of the title. The domineering, chauvinistic, grotesquely gluttonous Mr. Devil is the ultimate monstrous avatar of a gallery of destructive, greedy, or tyrannical rogues that includes Party’s host, Witchhammer’s inquisitor, and perhaps Daisies’ Maries.

The Murder of Mr. Devil suffered a hostile initial reaction and subsequent neglect. Even Němec later commented that he knew of no “stupider” film. As Petra Hanáková writes, the film was judged by reviewers at the time as “disappointing and escapist,” or merely “cute.” It perhaps required the understanding of a later era, exemplified in appreciative, illuminating feminist readings like Hanáková’s or more recently that of Jesse Jones and Ruth Noack. This is a richly inventive feature, funny and avant-garde at the same time, sustained by brilliant performances from Jiřina Bohdalová and Vladimír Menšík that split the difference between farcical and Brechtian. It is also, indeed, a trenchant, ultimately empowering work of early feminist cinema, even coming on in retrospect as a kind of hyperactive, slapstick Jeanne Dielman. The film has its heroine use the same means—food and the kitchen—to submissively entice her demonic caller and finally destroy and usurp his power, thus both parodying conventional female roles and recuperating what Jones and Noack call the “devalued, ignored” domestic space to which female creativity has traditionally been relegated. The Murder of Mr. Devil is also a self-portrait—more deliberately so than Daisies, with Krumbachová styling Bohdalová to resemble herself. In its near-total confinement to the domestic realm, the film reflects Krumbachová’s own career—which she largely conducted from within the cramped, charmed space of her apartment—while proudly affirming a creative identity unabashedly rooted in such traditionally feminized spheres as costume design.