„The Flat” and „Fruit of Paradise”

A man is led into an apartment that does not function according to the logic of the reality we know: the faucet spouts a stone instead of water, the spoons are perforated, the mirror shows only the back of his head, and the door closes like a sewn-up body. In Jan Švankmajer’s The Flat, space ceases to be neutral—it becomes a system of matter’s resistance to humanity. The film was made in 1968, at the very end of the Prague Spring, before the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops brought an end to the brief period of political and artistic liberalization.

On the other side of the Prague Spring—after its suppression—lies Věra Chytilová’s Fruit of Paradise. The film begins like a dream of a world before the Fall: Adam and Eve move through a colorful, double-exposed Eden, accompanied by the Genesis choir. But this paradise quickly turns out to be a world of control, suspicion, and violence.

 

Chytilová—one of the most important figures of the Czech New Wave—made this film after the suppression of the Prague Spring, at a time when culture was being subordinated to “normalization.”

 

The surrealist form here is not escapism, but a language of dissent. Together, the two films paint a picture of Czechoslovakia as a space where reality itself begins to falter—first in the materiality of objects, then in the structure of myths.