About

Presented in partnership with the Queensland Film Festival and the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia, the Gallery’s Australian Cinémathèque presents selected films by Věra Chytilová, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel.

Dubbed ‘the first lady of Czech film’, the famously combative Věra Chytilová (1929–2014) was a key figure in the Czechoslovak New Wave. The sole woman studying film production at Prague’s legendary film school, FAMU, Chytilová collaborated with fellow pioneers of the New Wave, including cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, writer and visual artist Ester Krumbachová, and editor Miroslav Hájek. Chytilová made waves at home and abroad with films that privileged women’s subjectivity, drew upon her lapsed Catholicism and played with cinematic form with a growing adventurousness, reaching an experimental zenith (and garnering strident official condemnation) with Daisies 1966 and Fruit of Paradise 1970, central films in this season.

Screening alongside Chytilová are the meditative, trance-like films of artists, anthropologists and filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. Hailing from Switzerland and Liverpool, respectively, their films push the boundaries of documentary filmmaking, exploring the aesthetics of the natural and unnatural world. Held in Gallery collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the British Museum, London, their films have screened across festivals worldwide.