Title: Fruit of Paradise AKA: We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise Year: 1970 Original title: Ovoce stromu rajských jíme Runtime: 1 hour 35 minutes Country: Czechoslovakia |Belgium Language: Czech Subtitles: English | Spanish (.srt)
Director: Vera Chytilová
Cast
Jitka Novákova ... Eva Karel Novak ... Josef Jan Schmid ... Robert
Plot / Synopsis
The story is an allegory of Adam and Eve, in a modern(made in 60's) Health Retreat. The action involves our heroin wandering the grounds where she becomes obsessed with a mysterious man in red, who may or may not be a killer. What follows is a fragmented story of awakening, it's pains and pleasures, but don't look more literally than that, like Lynch's Inland Empire, it's best to view this film topologically(on the surface), as an aesthetic object like a painting, rather than a cinematic tool for conveying a "message". Not that you cant or shouldn't get anything more out of this film, than a lesson in the expansive possibilities of film-making itself, but you get out of it, what you put into it. If you want to just watch the pretty colors, it's got that, if you want to argue about "ontological freedom and meaning", you could use this film as a trampoline, but that role rests here on the viewer.
Chytilova's film's however cannot be accurately described by text, they have to be viewed, listened to puzzled over, drank with(a glass or two of wine), and then viewed again. If your looking for a novel experience in a sea of modern cinematic redundancy, the Fruit Of Paradise, is the food for you.
Vera Chytilova's Fruit Of Paradise, is a lost masterpiece of a film. Lost because Chytilova was not permitted to make any films for decades, after her first film Daisies(another gem), was censored and banned by the Soviet/Czech government. These films show us a new language in cinema, that never got to develop. Her use of sound alone in this film puts her on par with Godard and Leone, her use of color is unlike anything I have ever seen (the first 10 minutes in Eden are a luminous collage of images, patterns, and live actors), and her sense of story(arguably her least accessible trait) is like Bunuel or Svankmajor(her fellow Czech), albeit with a distinctly feminist, whimsicle, slapstick bent.
Screenshots:
Technical Specs
Source: Internet / DVDrip Group/Ripper: Unknown Video Format: AVI / XviD ISO MPEG-4 Video Bitrate: 1885 Kbps Frame Rate: 25.000 fps Aspect Ratio: 4:3 Resolution: 576 x 432 Bits/(Pixel*Frame): 0.303 Audio Format: MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio Bitrate: 162 Kbps Sampling rate: 48000 Hz
I think this looks interesting since it's by Vera Chytilova (whom I became acquainted with through the Eclipse Pearls Of The Czech New Wave) but could someone tell me if the version here is as dark as the Youtube preview please? It's very hard to see the Youtube version clearly, and if the film torrent is the same, I probably will pass...Thanks
Fruit of Paradise (1970) Ovoce stromu rajskych jime
