Věra Chytilová

 

Věra Chytilová is a film director, Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts graduate and exceptional pioneer of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Originally she studied architecture in Brno but did not finish it. She began her career in film industry in Barrandov Studios as a clapper girl, later she started working as an assistant director. She started studying in 1957 and in 1962 graduated as a director underneath Otakar Vávra with a short film about model’s life called The ceiling, for which she achieved the FICC award in Oberhausen in 1963. She was mostly influenced by a documentary director Dziga Vertov and the cinéma vérité method during her commencing period as a director. As one of the leaders of the Czechoslovak New Wave she was drawn to symbolic expression in the way of eccentric stylization of moralities and philosophical allegories. She provoked using sharpened ethical dilemmas and demolishing structured formal clichés.