Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
1970 · Jaromil Jireš · Valerie and Her Week of Wonders on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice that no dissolve or fade ever marks a dream starting. (cutting)
Valušiak cuts every transformation with the same plainness as an ordinary action, no haze, no waking frame, no signal that anything strange just happened.
Payoff: You are never told which parts are real, because the film refuses to mark the difference at all.
Notice that a cellar, a courtyard, and a bedroom never quite connect. (camera)
Čuřík withholds establishing shots throughout, so a space glimpsed in one scene can reappear somewhere else entirely a few shots later.
Payoff: You never get a stable floor plan to stand on, only rooms that keep arriving.
Watch for lace and curtains softening the light inside the shot. (light)
Čuřík shoots into the sun and lets whites bloom out, using gauze, hair, and water as diffusers built into the world rather than the lens.
Payoff: The softness feels like a property of this world, not a camera trick laid over it.
Listen for the same choir-and-bell melody returning again and again. (sound)
Fišer's hymn-like music, with children's choir, bells, and harpsichord, keeps recurring across scenes that otherwise share nothing else.
Payoff: The score is what tells you these fragments belong to one single week.
Notice the earrings, the daisy, and the well recurring across the week. (setting)
The same handful of objects keep reappearing, not as props that advance a plot but as rhymes the film returns to.
Payoff: The objects hold the film together in place of a story with cause and effect. In the reading: Crystal-seed (formation). Deleuze calls a small object that starts a whole altered world growing a seed; the blood and the earrings are exactly that.
Once you have seen it
Watch which actors play more than one role across the film. (performance)
The same actress plays grandmother, Elsa, and the mother; the same actor plays the constable and the vampire, and the film never adjudicates between their identities.
Payoff: Incompatible versions of the same person are held as equally true, with no version chosen as the real one. In the reading: Powers of the false. Deleuze calls this the powers of the false: identities that stay incompatible on purpose instead of resolving into one true self.
Watch how little Valerie actually does compared to what happens around her. (structure)
The carnival arrives, the procession passes, the pyre is built around her, and she mostly watches and is watched rather than driving any of it.
Payoff: She functions as the still point the whole week revolves around, not its engine.
Watch who shows up together in the final scene in the wood. (structure)
The whole cast, threats included, gathers around a bed in the forest, and the film closes by including everyone rather than punishing or explaining anyone.
Payoff: It ends like a festival, not a verdict, which is what separates this from the horror films it resembles.
Carry this in: Watch the thresholds. Someone passes through a window, a well, or a coffin lid in nearly every scene.