Valerie and Her Week of Wonders · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A white daisy with a drop of blood on it. That is where the week starts, and it is the door: Valerie has begun to bleed, and for the next seventy-seven minutes the adults around her refuse to keep their shape. Grandmother becomes a beautiful woman called Elsa, then a rival for the same man. The constable has fangs and the face of a polecat. The missionary who preaches chastity sweats through his black vestments and wants her. Orlík is her brother, then her lover, then her rescuer, then her brother again.

And nowhere in the film does anyone wake up.

That refusal is Jireš's invention, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is a decision made at the cutting bench. Josef Valušiak, who later wrote the standard Czech textbook on editing, builds Valerie out of removals. A glance starts a match cut that lands in an impossible place. An action begun in one costume finishes in another. What is missing is the grammar of dream: no ripple dissolve, no haze announcing 'she is imagining this,' no waking frame to come home to. The wonders are cut with the same matter-of-factness as a meal.

This is where Gilles Deleuze earns his place, and not as decoration. Most fantasy films run on a bargain: strange things may happen provided the film tells you where the strange begins. Deleuze's crystal-image (his word: hyalosign) names what happens when a film tears that bargain up. In the crystal, the actual image and its virtual double — memory, dream, reflection — swap places so fast that neither can be nominated as the real one. The useful thing about the concept is that it stops you asking the wrong question. Not 'was it a dream?' The crystal is the state in which that question has no floor to land on. Valerie is one of the purest crystals in cinema because it never once offers a level from which to sort the others.

Deleuze also had a name for the small thing that starts a crystal growing: the seed. Here it is stupidly literal and unforgettable. A drop of blood, a daisy, a pair of earrings. Menarche is stated in the first minutes and never softened, and everything after grows out of it the way frost grows from a speck on cold glass. Put the earrings on, and the world turns.

Then the falsification. Helena Anýžová plays the grandmother, and Elsa, and the mother. Jiří Prýmek is both the constable and Richard the vampire. Ordinarily doubled casting reads as thrift or as a wink. Valerie uses it for what Deleuze called the powers of the false. Lying still honours truth; it needs a real version to distort. The false as a power is something else: incompatible identities held as equally true, with no adjudication coming. Grandmother trades her body for Elsa's beauty; Elsa is also mother; the man who hunts you is the man who polices you. Adult identity, seen from thirteen, is exactly this unstable, and the film declines to steady it on your behalf.

Space behaves the same way. Jan Čuřík withholds the establishing shot almost entirely, and interiors are never mapped: a cellar leads to a courtyard leads to a bedroom that was somewhere else five shots ago. Deleuze's term is the any-space-whatever in its disconnected form — fragments joined by feeling rather than geometry, no longer a setting for action. The joins are irrational cuts, cuts that bridge a gap instead of stitching two continuous spaces, so the 'and' between two shots matters more than either shot. Thresholds carry the rest. Windows, cellar hatches, the mouth of a well, the lid of a coffin: nearly every passage between registers goes through a hole.

Watch Jaroslava Schallerová, thirteen during the shoot, and notice how little she does. She watches. She is looked at. Now and then she smiles at something we are not shown. Deleuze's word for such a figure is the seer, a character who registers the world rather than acting on it, because no available action would be adequate. Beside it sits a rarer concept, the movement of world: the character goes still and the world does the moving, the way a dance can absorb the dancer. Valerie almost never drives a scene. The carnival arrives, the procession passes, the pyre is built, the bed appears among the trees. She is the fixed point a week revolves around.

It revolves in white. Čuřík lets highlights blow past the shoulder of the negative, shoots into the sun, and uses lace, muslin, curtains, hair and water as diffusers inside the frame, so the softness belongs to the world instead of the lens. Deleuze distinguishes two lighting traditions: expressionism, which charges objects with a non-organic life through a gradient of shadow, and lyrical abstraction, which works light against white and comes out spiritual rather than demonic. Here is a vampire story shot in bloom-white daylight — cream, gold, unripe green, cut by a very few reds. Blood on a daisy, blood on a mouth, a red skirt. The palette is the whole argument.

Under the white is appetite. Slavonice's sgraffito facades and arcaded square hand Jireš an ornamented, orderly, already-finished world for almost no money, and the film treats that surface as skin. Deleuze called this naturalism: a derived milieu revealed as the crust of an originary world of drives, where conduct reads as symptom and objects become fetishes. The aged body wants youth and buys it. The institution that sanctifies predation is the one that denounces its victim as a witch and lights the fire. Krumbachová's material world enforces it — vestments, communion white, veils, dried flowers, bells, liturgy handled as erotic stuff.

The craft debts are specific. Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) supplies the pair of moves that make the house unmappable: Rudolph Maté's gauze stretched in front of the lens to bleach highlights, and the flat refusal of establishing geometry. Un Chien Andalou (1929) supplies the licence for the unmotivated match cut across incompatible spaces. Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946) supplies the rule that the marvellous is a matter of texture and household trickery rather than optical printing — which is why Valerie has no process work of consequence beyond dental prosthetics. Buñuel's Viridiana (1961) put liturgical props into erotic circulation, and Gracián's vestments are the inheritance. Bava's Black Sunday (1960) is the exact apparatus behind grandmother/Elsa: in-frame fog and wind-driven veils, one actress doubled as maiden and crone. And Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) gives two things at once, the child's-eye frontal storybook tableau and hymn-singing folded through the score as commentary.

That last debt is the load-bearing one, because Luboš Fišer's music does the job the editing gave up. Diatonic and hymn-like, children's choir, bells, harpsichord brightness. Where the cutting refuses continuity, the theme returns and insists these fragments are one week. Ambient sound is thin to the edge of abstraction, and the post-synchronised dialogue floats slightly free of the bodies speaking it — standard Czechoslovak practice, converted into an asset, so that everyone sounds recalled rather than heard.

One thing to hold honestly rather than resolve: an adult camera renders a thirteen-year-old's awakening as beauty, and the crystal offers no outside vantage from which to judge what you are watching. The point of view genuinely is hers. She is also repeatedly framed nude and desired. The structure that makes the film extraordinary is the same structure that makes those two facts inseparable.

So what did it do? It proved a fantasy needs no trick technology and no permission slip. Transformation by cloth, cut, makeup and light. It also proved a film can decline to nominate any level as real and still feel continuous, because Valerie is not plotted but cycled: a week used as a ritual container, held together by recurrence instead of causality. Shot between June and November 1969, months after the invasion, released into a country whose cultural apparatus was being dismantled, it is the last major flowering of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and the moment a domestic Surrealist current running back through Nezval and Teige surfaced inside a state studio. Forward, the honest line is thin and strange: Angela Carter is reported to have seen it during its English release, and The Company of Wolves (1984) shares the wolves, grandmothers and blood; Švankmajer's Alice, the menarche-horror of Ginger Snaps and Raw, Strickland, November — affinity, not proven descent. Its most literal afterlife arrived through music, when Finders Keepers issued Fišer's score in December 2006 and a Philadelphia collective toured a new live score for two years. A film re-authored by a music scene.

It closes on a bed in a wood with the whole cast wandering through, the predators disarmed by being included. A comic ending in the oldest structural sense: the form shuts by gathering everyone in, not by settling anything. Watch it again for the thresholds — how often someone comes through a hatch, a window, a coffin lid, the mouth of a well. The film will never tell you which side of them holds the dream. That is the argument, and it is why the images stay.