Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: Reawakening Czech Cultural Heritage Through the Psychoanalysis of New Wave Surrealism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31273/reinvention.v15i2.905Keywords:
Freud and the Czech New Wave, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Jaromil Jireš and the Czech surrealist movement, Vitezslav Nezval adaptation, Film and psychoanalysisAbstract
By 1960, Freudian psychoanalysis was commonplace across Europe. Central to this were the concepts of the id, ego and superego – forces pertinent at both an individual and societal level. In an unhealthy subject, according to Freud, these three psychological components fall out of an ideal dynamic balance and must be restored by an intervening external agent. Freud’s theories particularly influenced art – especially the surrealism of the Czech New Wave film movement, which sought to restore the ideal psychological balance by stimulating radical reorganisations of society. A prime example of this is Jaromil Jireš’s film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), which aimed to rebalance the unstable Czech social dynamic by provoking the audience to reconnect with their historic cultural values and synthesise these with the goals of Communism. This article analyses three key sequences that exemplify this objective: the first illustrates how Valerie (surrogate for the ego) initially vacillates, but ultimately aligns herself with symbols of Czech heritage (representing the id). The second sequence shows Valerie’s ill-fated appeasement strategy of completely aligning with the film’s antagonist (superego). The final sequence is a culmination of these themes, posing possibilities for a new Czech future created by the now activated viewer.
References
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Toby Phipps
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing through any medium of communication those illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. Authors are also responsible for adding these permissions to the acknowledgement footnote that precedes all other notes or crediting the source and copyright of photographs or figures in the accompanying captions.
The journal's policy is to ask authors to grant us the licence to publish their work, which gives us the exclusive right both to reproduce and/or distribute their article (including the abstract) in printed, electronic or any other medium, and in turn to authorise others (including Reproduction Rights Organisations such as the Copyright Licensing Agency and the Copyright Clearance Center) to do the same. In return the author(s) assert their Moral Right to be identified as the author, and we promise that we will respect their rights as the author(s). That is, we will make sure that their name(s) is/are always clearly associated with the article and, while they do allow us to make necessary editorial changes, we will not make any substantial alteration to their article without consulting them.
Copyright remains with the author(s), however, the author(s) authorise us to act on their behalf to defend their copyright if anyone should infringe it, and to retain half of any damages awarded, after deducting our costs. The author(s) also retain the right to use their own article (provided they acknowledge the published original in standard bibliographic citation form) in the following ways, as long as they do not sell it or give it away in ways which would conflict directly with our interests. The author(s) is/are free to use their article for the internal educational or other purposes of their own institution or company; mounted on their own or their institution’s website; posted to free public servers of preprints and/or articles in their subject area; or in whole or in part, as the basis for their own further publications or spoken presentations.
If you have any queries about copyright please contact reinventionjournal@warwick.ac.uk
