Dok Night / SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXICINEMA / PANEL STORY (1980) Directed by Vera Chytilová
Every Thursday there’s a Vegan Dinner accompanying an exhibition opening/closing, a live performance, live music, movie screening or … Come meet other people interested in art and activism, good food and great prices. Bring your favourite game and your friends. Or meet new people at the bar.
PANEL STORY 1980 (Panelstory aneb Jak se rodí sídliste)Directed by Vera Chytilová96 minutes In Czech with English subtitles
The bold films of Czechoslovakian director Vera Chytilová (Daisies) are still largely deleted from film history at this moment. Women are generally marginalized if not downright ignored from the official film history books. Like female directors Lina Wertmüller, Liliana Cavani and Agnes Varda, Chytilová’s career shows an incredible wealth—her films are visionary and uncompromising. Her name is finally getting on the map a bit after all these years, but whenever a Chytilová film is shown today it’s still always the same one, over and over. Crazy. This flick is a black comedy that was banned for years, and still has never really been given a chance.
Vera Chytilová was a rebel who reflected the surreal changes that Czechoslovakia was going through in the 60s and 70s. Panel Story is an incredible encapsulation of the attempted modernist project taking place in the suburbs outside of Prague in the 70s… a creation that was actually a destruction… a dream that was a nightmare. The flats were conceived of as bright and modern solutions to a housing crisis, ready to be equipped with all the latest domestic appliances – but the result was a domestic hell promoting mind-numbing standardization. The mass-produced housing estates of efficient prefabricated high-rises were both a striving for paradise, and an expulsion from paradise at the same time.
This film probably only rivals Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her in its abrasive criticism of our Brave New World. This is real psycho-filmmaking, with deliberately chaotic editing, an atonal music score and sudden frantic camera movements that feel like the cameraman was a rat being flushed down a toilet. Chytilová’s use of space is compressed and claustrophobic, and the structure of the film is a rapid-fire flipping through the tenant’s households, almost as if we are jumping through channels on a television with a remote control. The images are taut and overbearing, the sound-design is compressed and autistic. Throughout the mess we do manage to follow the paths of several people’s lives… in a fragmented, scattered way.
Incendiary cinema, created by a brave soul… one of Czechoslovakia’s greatest…
SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXICINEMAPresented by Jeffrey Badcock A series of socially engaged movies, screened once a month on Thursdays. Touching on such hot topics as immigration, homelessness, racism, education, radical gender propositions, the pandemic and gentrification, these films not only explore visionary politics, but are also chosen to stir our imagination and creativity. The essence of cinema is the collective experience, and these screenings are aimed at creating intimate communities again in an increasingly hectic and fragmented world.Free screeningDinners are available from 19:00