EsterKrumbachová:
TheLadyand
herWunderkammer
“Ester made me do an analysis
of what we actually wanted
to do […] in order to specify
its meaning and purpose.”
“She had that sense for
c o n s t r u c t i n g
a  situation, which was of
course connected to her
substantial inventiveness
a s     a     d e s i g n e r . ”
“For me, she uncovered the wor-
ld  of  props, the contextual world
of costumes,  how costumes
c o u l d
r e a l l y     b e     a     d r a m a t i c
e l e m e n t
in a work.”
“Ester Krumbachová
was  a  renaissance  woman.”
“It would surely be worth
considering whether such
ability to inspire other people
isn’t in many cases
greater than the actual direction
of a film project.”
“A big surprise and a big
d i s a p p o i n t m e n t     t o
everyone, because she
was expected to do more.”
“There’s no dumber film than
The Murder of Mr. Devil.”
Grażyna Świętochowska
A selection of quotes from Ivan Vyskočil, Jiří Svoboda, Otakar
Vávra, Věra Chytilová, and Jan Němec, Searching for Ester.
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1	 Petra Hanáková, “Voices from Another World: Feminine
Space and Masculine Intrusion in Sedmikrásky and Vražda Ing. Čerta”,
in East and Central European Cinema, ed. Anikó Imre (London: Routledge,
2005), 181.
2	 Ester’s third husband during the period 1963 – 1968
and, above all, her artistic partner.
3	 Pátrání po Ester, directed by Věra Chytilová, 2005.
4	 Ibid. In reality, Jan Nĕmec was not only the co-author
of the screenplay for Ester’s film, but also appears as an actor in one
of its brief roles.
This handful of quotes about Ester Krumbachová (1923 – 1996)
contains a broad continuum of respect and rejection spanning
over almost the entire decade of the nineteen-sixties. A graduate
of painting and graphic arts at the Arts and Crafts High School
in Brno, she became known in her professional life as a costume
designer, set designer, scriptwriter, author and finally a director.
However, she was often pushed to the margins of authorship,
labelled “an inspiration and just a muse”.1
In the statements
recorded in the biographical film essay Searching for Ester (Pátrání
po Ester,2002) her crucial aspect is her role as a mentor, a coach,
maybe even a therapist, whose competence is realized only in
connection to others. It seems like Krumbachová existed mainly
in relation to other leading names of the Czechoslovak New
Wave — not only directors like Jan Němec,2
Otakar Vávra, Jaromil
Jireš and Vojtěch Jasný, but above all as a director and friend of
Věra Chytilová. SearchingforEster, a film realized by the latter, is as
much about Krumbachová as it is about the director herself, most
famous as the director of Daisies (Sedmikrásky, 1966). It is Chytilová
who visibly interferes with the collection of photographs seen on
screen, selects them, arranges them on the timeline. She is the one
who connects different environments and various biographical
episodes from Krumbachová’s life, she moves smoothly from
conversations with professionals, film people, to the denizens of
the Green Fox Pub, where Krumbachová spent her time making
new friends in the last period of her life. Chytilová is heard from
behind the camera as she supplies the leads and asks questions.
On rare moments, she stands by. She encourages her interlocutors,
she imposes subject matter on them, she even places them
in the role of adversaries to her theses. Her conversation with
Jan Němec goes the same way. Discussing his collaboration with
Ester Krumbachová on Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, 1964),
he confesses that “during the work it occurred to me […] thatshe
was, I’d say the spiritual guru of the project”,3
which quickly turns
into one of the harshest critiques of the only film Krumbachová
directed:
Jan Němec: 	 “I’mveryashamedtohavebeentheco-writer[…]”
Věra Chytilová: 	 “But I heard that you were there, on the set,
at the filming.”
JN: 		 “I was, ’cause I was paid for a small part. So
I sat there and got 200 crowns for it.”
VC:		 “So you prostituted yourself for something
more stupid than the stupidest thing.”
JN: 		 “Yeah.”
VC: 		 “Yeah? And couldn’t you see it? Didn’t you
understand it?”
JN: 		 “I knew the whole thing was nonsense.”
VC: 		 “And why didn’t you give her any suggestions?”
JN: 		 “But I did! […] The idea was that she had a
radio play, there was a lack of screenplays and we had a good
name, so why not? So, in three days we turned the radio play into
a screenplay, we got paid for it, and I said, Ester, that’s it, it’s
total nonsense, there’s nothing there, this tale, and with Menšík
and Bohdalová, and she said no, if you’re not going to direct it
I’ll do it myself. I said sure, who am I to stop her?”
VC: 		 “But she, a scriptwriter, and you, such a thinker,
both of you, such analyzers, how come you weren’t able to do
better than The Murder of Mr. Devil?”4
Two subplots are actually intertwined here: the indisputable,
arbitrarily low artistic quality of Krumbachová’s
directorial debut and its commercial aspect as an excuse and
justification for participating in the project. At the same time, we
see the expectation of a high level of artistic cinema, as well as
a disinclination to accept the features of an individual, authorial
language. The conversation is even more significant because of
the personal relations connecting Krumbachová with Chytilová
and Nĕmec and the inevitable absence of the main character.
The only film directed by Ester Krumbachová provoked and still
provokes extreme emotions.
I would like to repeat Petra Hanáková’s use of a common
and, as it were, ambiguous term positioning Krumbachová
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5	 Hanáková, “Voices from Another World”, 180–181.
6	 This definition is referenced by, among others, Charles
Eames in Design Q & A (dir. Charles and Ray Eames, 1972).
7	 Joanna Hübner-Wojciechowska, Lata60.XXwieku:Sztuka
użytkowa: Przewodnik dla kolekcjonerów (Warsaw: Arkady, 2014), 7.
8	 David Sorfa, “Ester Krumbachová”, in Women Screenwriters:
An International Guide, eds. Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 254.
9	 Herbert Bayer, “Aspects of Design of Exhibitions and
Museums”, Curator: The Museum Journal 4, no. 3 (1961): 257.
10	 Edith Jeřábková, preface to GreenFoxStreet by Jan Kolský
(Prague: AAAD Publishing House, 2018), 2.
11	 Krumbachová continued her collaboration with Kachyňa
on the set of The Ear (Ucho, 1970), but only in the role of designing
visuals and costumes.
12	 After she was blacklisted, Krumbachová also worked on
Chytilová’s next film, TheVeryLateAfternoonofaFaun (Faunovovelmipozdní
odpoledne, 1983), as well as Strata (dir. Geoff Steven, 1983), whose
screenplay she wrote in collaboration with Michael Havas, one of
her life partners.
roads, paths and bridges. If we were to observe chronological
order, she entered Czechoslovakian cinematography through the
theatre and experiences in set design. She began her work as
a set designer and costume designer in theatre in České Budějovice
(1954 – 5), then moved to Prague together with the principal
stage director, actor and company leader there, Miroslav
Macháček. In the capital she worked in the Prague City Theatres
and the National Theatre. She first worked on film in 1961, entering
the cinema through genre films by co-designing the costumes
for two science-fiction films, Man in Outer Space (Muž z prvního století,
dir. Oldřich Lipský, 1961) andIkarieXB-1(dir. Jindřich Polák, 1963).
Her path then led to films more or less closely related to the Holocaust:
Transport from Paradise (Transport z ráje, dir. Zbyněk Brynych,
1962), DiamondsoftheNight, …andtheFifthHorsemanIsFear(Apátýjezdec
jeStrach, dir. Zbyněk Brynych, 1964). She subsequently worked on
costume design for three films directed by Karel Kachyňa: Long
Live the Republic! (Ať žije republika, 1965), Carriage to Vienna (Kočár do
Vídně, 1966), and The Nun’s Night (Noc nevěsty, 1967)11
as well as a
film important for Czech identity, Vojtěch Jasný’s story about a
Moravian village, All My Good Countrymen (Všichni dobří rodáci, 1968).
Thanks to her collaboration with Věra Chytilová, Krumbachová
began to get close to feminist experimental cinema, to which
she also consciously contributes. By collaborating with the biggest
names, she attracts all the more criticism when she directs
her only film.
What is so interesting in the evolution of Ester Krumbachová’s
artistic practice is the transition period from visual
communication — under which I include costumes, props and
locations demarcating various aspects of the work of set designers
and costume designers — to co-responsibility for screenplays,
whose medium is language. This period lasts from 1964 to 1970.12
Of course, this is not to say that, over the course of a dozen
years,13
her work underwent a complete separation from her first
medium of expression. Krumbachová’s work in costume design,
set design, and screenwriting should be considered as parts of
in the Czechoslovak film community (“the queen of Czech film
design”),5
and take it, perhaps against the author’s intentions, at
face value. I wish to treat Ester Krumbachová as a designer, a
producer of certain ideas successfully introduced into film. One
of the primary definitions of design lists three of its core characteristics,
which come down to control over structure, material and
purpose.6
Others make reference to the “complex consideration
of groups of objects in the context of the function and the role
they fulfil in our life”.7
I wish to emphasize the relevance of this
profession in the context of Krumbachová’s multimedia interests
and activities. In trying to define Ester Krumbachová’s competencies,
David Sorfa emphasizes above all the social character of
her nature and her exceptional ability to work in a group or to
cooperate in general.8
These traits are closely related to the work
of a designer. Famous Austrian-born American designer Herbert
Bayer, in the context of organizing exhibitions, wrote that his
main role is that of improving and intensifying communication.9
It
is equally important to make the invisible visible.
There are at least a few basic themes that organize
specific aspects of Krumbachová’s artistic discourse. There are
the costumes and props for which she was responsible: hats,
shawls, black umbrellas, silk shirts, camp coats or overalls made
out of newspaper and twine. But the whole galaxy of food, meal
preparation, feeding and gluttony demands description. This constellation
forms the material from which the films Krumbachová
was involved in, as a writer or director, are woven. The details of
the interior, often adjacent to a “metaphorical and mental”10
map
of the artist’s apartment, becomes an important background for
the platform of culinary images. The records of her expression
seem to speak of food and clothes, typically female areas of
interest and activity. The main aim of this article will be to treat
them as semantically important mechanisms of communication,
mostly visual and non-verbal.
In Krumbachová’s case, it is difficult to isolate one
single path that led her to cinema. There are rather multiple
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Jan Němec’s 1960s films”, https://www.pecina.cz/files/www.ce-review.
org/01/17/kinoeye17_hames.html.
17	 Sorfa, “Ester Krumbachová”.
13	 Ester Krumbachová worked as a costume and production
designer in the following years: 1961 – 72, 1983, 1991, 1992,
1996. It is likely that not all cases of collaboration have been recorded
in present databases. Ester Krumbachová was never officially allowed
to return to work at the Barrandov Film Studios. Years after her ban,
when she was permitted to submit a portfolio, she was met with
a rejection that emphasized insufficient experience. See Searching
for Ester. 
14	 An adaptation of Vítězslav Nezval’s 1935 novel of the
same name.
15	 Otakar Vávra discusses Ester’s contribution to the final
version of the film in Searching for Ester .
16	 By comparison, Nĕmec himself specifies that Goya’s
paintings and the works of photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson,
among others, were the inspiration for the visual aspect of The Party
and the Guests. Peter Hames, “Enfant Terrible of the Czech New Wave:
massage his body. Before the very eyes of the viewer, a libidinal
theatre unfolds: the relocation of causes and effects, the backstage
behind the inhuman repressions undertaken during the
day. The foot massage in the scene is a specific physical action
that determines the words and behaviours of the characters; the
touch that soothes, relaxes, even gives bliss mercilessly reveals
the sadistic satisfaction inextricably connected to the public performance
of inquisition, in which the roles of the guilty parties are
predetermined and hopeless from the start. Francisco Goya’s The
SleepofReasonProducesMonsters, the most famous aquatint from his
Los Caprichos cycle, does not just serve as the background for the
film’s opening – it seems to have inspired certain shots as well.16
The idea of staging is crucial in the scene described. It is both
purposeful and dramaturgically useful in playing out different
senses, and the composition also introduces, within the image,
a division of the screen (in other words, a “split screen”): the
inquisitor, lying down, and his servant are separated by a curtain.
There is no division into good and evil, but here Boblig hesitates
for the first and only time. Intimidated by the beauty of Zuzana,
one of the accused women, here on this bed, during a massage, at
times growing in strength and intensity, he combines the domain
of his duties with sexual desire; an ecclesiastical, well-paid ministry,
with carnal perversion. The mechanism, the tactile-verbal
dynamic, reaches far beyond the choice of locations, interiors and
costumes. Its effect lies in the original manner of seeing the role
of an actor’s body and its relation to its immediate surroundings,
both human and not. According to Vávra, Krumbachová was
also responsible for choosing and writing original lyrics for the
soldiers’ song accompanying the opening credits, an adaptation
of “Der Tod in Flandern”.
Krumbachová’s contribution to the films on which she
worked as a screenwriter has been characterized by David Sorfa
as a foundation built on two pillars, aesthetics and humour, both
with a subversive power capable of shaking up the political and
patriarchal arrangement.17
I consider the following commentary
a continuum. On films in which she was in charge of costumes
and set design, her competence as an advisor and her ingenuity
were acknowledged precisely by assigning her more visible and
responsible functions. It was then that she became the co-author
of two scripts for Jan Němec’s feature films, ThePartyandtheGuests
(Oslavnostiahostech, 1966) and MartyrsofLove (Mučednícilásky, 1967),
and one short film by the same director, MotherandSon (Matkaa syn,
1967). After that came literary film adaptations: Valerie and Her
Week of Wonders (Valerie a týden divů, dir. Jaromil Jireš, 1970)14
and
Witchhammer (Kladivo na čarodějnice, dir. Otakar Vávra, 1970).
One scene from the last of these films can help us understand
the nature of seeing Ester Krumbachová’s film images.15
In this story of slowly escalating church trials, which takes a close
look at people who have been falsely slandered and are subject
to interrogation procedures founded on tools of oppression,
the director emphasized an Aesopian language. The fabricated
evidence, the coerced confessions, and the stakes at which the
alleged witches were burnt are a reference to the Stalinist show
trials of the fifties. Boblig of Edelstadt, a forgotten inquisitor,
and his servant Ignác are given a second chance to demonstrate
their knowledge of church trials and ability to take charge of
a spectacular judicial project. Krumbachová’s responsibilities
included managing the set design team, collaborating on the
adaptation of Václav Kaplický’s novel into the screenplay and
making decisions concerning the mise-en-scène. For an emblematic
example of the last of these duties, let us consider a dialogue
between the two characters mentioned above. The key element
is the physical relationship between the two interlocutors, which
introduces an obvious hierarchy and interdependency thanks to
the fact that one of the characters is constantly moving his hands
and the other is resting his body in a horizontal position. This also
places a strong emphasis on the haptic sphere, a synaesthesia
of the senses. While Boblig, never stopping his speech, lets himself
rest as he constantly interrogates and makes judgments on
the lives of others as a clerical official, he allows his servant to
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word […] including of the cinematic image itself. We were bored of the
form of existing films and we wanted to go against the current. […] It
was there that Jaroslav Kučera’s touches really helped us. He, Ester,
and I were in perfect harmony in the protest against the destruction
happening all around us. This film was, for us, the philosophical record
of the time.”
21	 Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary
Food Consumption”, in FoodandCulture:AReader, eds. Carole
Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (London: Routledge, 2013), 14.
18	 Antonín J. Liehm, Closely Watched Films: The Czechoslovak
Experience (White Plains: International Arts and Science Press, 1974),
278–280.
19	 Ibid., 281–282.
20	 David Sorfa emphasizes the process by which the
screenplay for Daisies was created. The first draft was written by
Věra Chytilová together with Pavel Juráček, the “main screenwriter”
of the Czechoslovak New Wave. She was dissatisfied with the results
and invited Ester Krumbachová to collaborate. Chytilová describes
this process in her documentary Searching for Ester. The film, originally
inspired by dormitory life, transformed into “a grotesque documentary”
about destruction thanks entirely to Ester, who inspired the director
of Something Different (O něčem jiném, 1963) to specify the subject of her
film. “Ester made me do an analysis of what we actually wanted to
do […] When we specified its meaning and purpose, we decided in
favour of stylization. That involved destruction in every sense of the
Watched Films. The act of simultaneous, “invisible” cooking could
be viewed on the plane of physiology and communication as an
instinctive concern and a need to feed others — as a layer which
makes it possible for additional layers to start working and from
which they can draw. It is, at the same time, a visually attractive
model, entering into a circulation of haptic objects.
The interview repeatedly emphasized the convergence
of this “private” image of Krumbachová with the only film she
directed independently, the reception to which I presented previously.
However, images of food and practices related to it have
an important place in two earlier films on which Krumbachová
worked as main screenwriter: Daisies20
and The Party and the Guests.
In describing the functions and roles to which these culinary
tropes were delegated, I make use of concepts introduced by
Roland Barthes. The author of Mythologies understood food not
only as a collection of products which could be utilized in statistical
research, but also, indeed, as “a system of communication,
a body of images, a protocol of uses, situations and behavior.”21
This definition was based mainly on a collection of American
and western European customs, not just of the consumption of
meals, but also of organizing work and leisure time. One of the
points of access was visual culture. In Czechoslovak society, there
was a tension — existent throughout the world, but intensified
in socialist countries — resulting from a lack of food, its disproportionately
fast consumption and the surplus of it reserved
for privileged groups. An interpellation presented before the
National Assembly on 17th
of May 1967 by Jaroslav Pružinec and
signed by at least twenty other MPs provides an example of a
local political criticism which remains significant to this day. This
interesting example of a dissent against experiments in Czechoslovak
cinematography explicitly addressed the two directors
most closely collaborating with Ester Krumbachová, stating: “We
ask the directors Němec and Chytilová: what kind of lessons in
labour, politics or entertainment will these titles bring to working
people in the factories, in the fields, on construction sites and in
from Krumbachová to be complementary to this analysis;
­although it references the basic idea of The Party and the Guests,
it goes into her approach more holistically:
“[T]he large army of
people who contribute to
a film remains more or
l e s s     a n o n y m o u s .     [ … ]
Anonymitysuitsmequitewell.[…]
In ThePartyandtheGuests, the main creative element was distorted
dialogue. I tried to create conversation in which the characters
said nothing meaningful about themselves. […] It was my intention
to demonstrate that people generally talk only in terms of
disconnected ideas, even when it appears that they are communicating
with one another. […] Not a single word in the film was
intended as a secret code; the dialogues were not intended to
conceal anything but to reveal the nonsense we hear around us
every day […]”.18
PRIVATE  /  PUBLIC: EATING, OR PROTOCOLS OF USE
IN A SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENT
“In the course of the interview, which lasted several hours, she
manages to prepare a meal that would put a first-class restaurant
to shame”.19
The sentence with which I initiate the section
of the essay dedicated to the function of food in Krumbachová’s
private and artistic microcosm is taken from an interview conducted
in fall 1966 by Czech film critic and historian Antonín
Liehm. This seemingly neutral commentary locates his interlocutor
in the domestic sphere, which is traditionally assigned to
a woman, usually unpaid and unseen. What is also important is
that it reconstructs an invisible layer of the conversation that has
just ended, during which Krumbachová’s body was in constant
motion, her hands working independently of reason, as evidenced
by a record of the conversation published in the collection Closely
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acinematičnosti”, Iluminace 30, no. 1 (2018): 29–44, which appears
in this book in reworked form.
25	 Cf. Zofia Tarajło-Lipowska, Historialiteraturyczeskiej:Zarys
(Wrocław: Ossolineum, 2010).
22	 Two other films came under attack: Hotel for Strangers
(Hotelprocizince, dir. Antonín Máša, 1967) and SignoftheCancer(Znamení
Raka, dir. Juraj Herz, 1967). Cf. Jan Lukeš’s statement in the documentary
cycle 25zešedesátýchanebČeskoslovenskánovávlna,directed by Martin
Šulík, 2011.
23	 Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology”, 23.
24	 The choice of a devilish character is also a direct
reference to the title of Antonín Dvořák’s comic opera The Devil and
Kate (Čert a Káča), which tells the story of a village girl who loves
to dance and is prepared to frolic with the devil himself. However,
the majority of Ester Krumbachová’s collaborators emphasized
the spontaneity, or even affective dimension, of the ideas implemented
in the film, and in accordance with this interpretation, this
historical context would ultimately be qualified as accidental. The
“devilish” contexts are also the subject of Libuše Heczková and
Kateřina Svatoňová, “Esteřiny vraždy: Zabíjení filmovosti a zrod
a ritualized environment of culinary procedures, the originality
of the selected menu and the etiquette of serving food. The key
element for the rickety plot is the fact that She nourishes — merely
tasting and seasoning the food — and He devours. Right up until
the moment when he is vanquished by his own mortal weakness:
raisins. Food here is connected not only to the ritual of preparation,
but also to the sin of gluttony. The process of consumption
is twofold: restrained and barely initiated by the phantasm of
the ideal female hostess, and ostentatiously voracious in her
male counterpart.
What is significant is the balance of genre from nearly
the first scene towards the fairy tale (pohádka), which has always
been important in Czech culture.25
The poster for the film, created
by Eva Galová-Vodrázková, also suggests the potential for a
fairy tale. Thanks to the use of collage, elements of disparate
origin — a dessert cup placed in the middle, and the mysteriously
smiling female face just behind it — are presented on the same
stage. It is simultaneously a temptation and a threat of poisoning.
The film’s poster, in using two typefaces in the title of the film, one
a serif font and the other mimicking handwriting, references the
poetics of a poster advertising an upcoming event. It can be seen
as an invitation for a new circus act or magician’s performance — 
according to this formula, the body of Vladimír Menšík levitates
upside-down and the letter “Č” seems to hypnotize. A man’s
outstretched hand is reaching for the dessert just as much as the
woman. In addition to the fairy tale, the poster also introduces
the contexts of culinary and crime films.
The fairy tale framework includes space for a fantastical
world. As early as in the first scene of the film, the telephone is
visibly fetishized; it seems to have eyes, an ominous countenance;
its image is surprisingly close to Švankmajer’s surrealist objects,
inanimate things transformed into animals. Traces of interference
are visible in singular graphic swirls of the image, more mannerist
impressions than expert special effects. More literal signs of havoc
are left after the Devil’s subsequent visits: his teeth have their
other occupations? We ask those workers of culture: how long
will they poison the lives of honest working people, how long will
they tread upon socialist achievements, how long will they get on
labourers’ and farmers’ nerves?”22
One of the objections raised
was to wasting food in the film Daisies. Whether one wants it or
not, this reaction unconsciously references Barthes’s definition
of food as an institution employing sets of ready-made images,
dreams, tastes, choices and values connected to them.23
Krumbachová’s
own film was created two years after the interpellation,
riding the wave of recognition of her name at Barrandov and
just before the implementation of restrictions connected to the
beginning of the normalization era. The history of the film’s origin
dates back to a short story published in the fall of 1968 in the
magazine Plamen and continues as a multi-part radio drama. The
film version premiered on September 18, 1970. Similar to Daisies,
for which Krumbachová was the screenwriter, The Murder of Mr.
Devil (Vražda Ing. Čerta, 1970) focused on the compulsive nature of
eating, albeit in an obstinately dissimilar way.
TheMurderofMr.Devil is a culinary comedy-drama, at the
base of which smoulders a fantasy of the erotic reanimation of
a past relationship. The film formula presented to the audience
is a constant stream of performative cooking and consumption
on screen with short breaks for alienated interjections delivered
by a nameless female character. This character, played by
Jiřina Bohdalová, distances herself from the developments by
appearing several times throughout the film in a portrait position
distinctly associated with the tradition of European painting. She
appears in frames — of a mirror or a painting — and impersonates
a hypothetical ancestor, but also takes on the role of a reflection.
The film begins with the character reading, or rather
studying in depth, some housekeeping guides. The landscape
of focus is broken by the ringing of a telephone. A childhood
friend, Bohouš Čert (the titular Devil, the meaning of his last
name in Czech),24
is calling to announce that he will be coming
for a visit. The initial meeting, as well as subsequent ones, initiate
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26	 Cf. Maria Poprzęcka, Uczta bogiń: Kobiety, sztuka i życie
(Warsaw: Agora, 2012), 137–139.
They are a necessary prop, which facilitates the resolution of an
identity hitherto focused on biting and chewing. Any compliance
with a carnivalesque interpretation is incomplete, given that,
besides the mouth devouring meals and pieces of furniture, no
other orifices connected to the logic of physiological processes
are emphasized. Beneath the cover of a jute bag, a single body is
transformed into small, wrinkly fruits.
We cannot know whether the woman just wanted to
frighten Mr. Devil — due to the transformation, she loses him
irreversibly. And yet, she does not grieve; instead, in a victorious
gesture, she — perhaps a temptress and poisoner after all — settles
on the bag and smokes a cigar, choosing a typically male pose
and attribute. The smoke wafting from the bag, a gust of wind and,
finally, a male voice give the film yet more devilish attributes. The
woman keeps the fruit, which now has a distinct power. After she
eats one, she experiences a vision. She realizes that, by selling the
rest, she may become rich and independent. The final sequence,
determined by an oneiric, imaginative style, is quite sparse: the
short alternates between shots of the heroine wearing a wedding
dress surrounded by not one but several men and photos of a
framed empty composition, up until the “entrance” — the camera
becomes immersed in the image, which seems three-dimensional
thanks to an optical illusion. This manifests the woman’s earlier
repressed desire, now that she is freed from the duty of satiating
the hunger of a man, of anyone but herself. Her appearance in the
frame with a champagne flute has the same undertone. A song
by Marta Kubišová, which accompanies this scene and is also
present in the opening of the film, helps to create a thought-out
manifesto of female freedom to do what is not socially acceptable,
outside of the rules. Through the elaborate culinary creations
deposited at the altar of men’s expectations, the film reaches the
story of the woman’s untamed hunger, which is represented by
a fantastic (but also comical) figure, a mythical, animal-human
Yeti from the soundtrack. The picture frame plays a significant role
here: it is a measure of meeting oneself, “liberation from man”,
way with table legs and other furniture. It is a rather disturbed
fairy tale, infiltrated by surrealist influences: the heroine tries to
fulfil an impossible mission of getting a man. She gets closer to
her goal through subsequent culinary challenges. Her need to
focus on her own desire and her own body becomes visible during
one of her phone conversations, as she involuntarily caresses
soup vegetables hanging off of a cupboard, a phallic carrot and
celery. On another occasion, while showing the ever-hungry Devil
the contents of her fridge, she arches her body, including it in
the edible products on offer. At this point, Ester Krumbachová’s
imagination approaches Meret Oppenheim’s famous Spring Banquet
(also called Cannibal Feast), during which, in the middle of a
cloth-covered table, surrounded by candles, china and silverware,
the body of a girl lay decorated with food. The sophisticated
menu — appetizers, steak, mushrooms, desserts — was picked up
using lips directly from the naked body.26
All the dishes prepared
by the heroine of TheMurderofMr.Devil are served as a replacement
for herself. The woman’s body is merely metonymy for a landscape
of various forms of food, though it does introduce the hypothesis
of a radical manner of delivering polysensory pleasure. The
centrality of the body and food acts as a challenge to the habit
of isolating sensory stimuli — a challenge ostentatiously not accepted
by the Devil. The woman, strengthened by an awareness
of her own needs, resolves to frighten the tireless consumer.
She prepares a trap which the Devil will not be able to resist:
a bag of raisins, a magical, fairy-tale object. The Devil’s body did
not undergo any grand changes during earlier strategic binges,
but the category of the grotesque body described by Bakhtin
becomes realized in the moment when the Devil “dives” into the
bag full of raisins. In that very moment the insatiable corpus, still
hungering after more food, stops being a self-contained form and
transcends its own boundaries. The world, in the form of raisins
given to the Devil, consumes him, pulls him inside, strips him of his
substance. He is no longer an entity; he is an object of meta-consumption.
The raisins are simultaneously magical and comical.
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34	 Piotr Zawojski, Sztuka obrazu i obrazowania w epoce nowych
mediów (Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2012).
27	 Sorfa, “Ester Krumbachová”, 261.
28	 Petra Hanáková, “The Feminist Style in Czechoslovak
Cinema: The Feminine Imprint in the Films of Věra Chytilová and Ester
Krumbachová”, in The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An
ExpropriatedVoice, eds. Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová
(New York: Routledge, 2014), 211–233.
29	 András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art
Cinema, 1950 – 1980 (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press,
2007), 140–167.
30	 Heczková and Svatoňová, “Esteřiny vraždy”, 40.
31	 Ibid., 41.
32	 Ágnes Pethő, “Intermediality in Film: A Historiography
of Methodologies”, ActaUniversitatisSapientiae, Film and Media Studies
2, no. 2 (2010): 51.
33	 Małgorzata Komza, Żywe obrazy: Między sceną, obrazem
i książką (Wrocław: University of Wrocław Press, 1995), 6.
­Svatoňová, it is the tableauvivant formula that unites such different
areas as jewellery, theatre, costume design and drawing — all important
for Krumbachová herself.31
Thanks to this initial attention
to detail, we also come into contact with the form of the cabinet
of curiosities.
According to Ágnes Pethő, this practice can be referred
to simply as the embodiment of a painting.32
There is artificiality
and stylization. The woman in frame is always more lofty,
restrained, anachronistically distinguished, referring to some
code of femininity connected with a prop room composed of
furry wraps, gloves and pearls. The golden frame of the mirror
emphasizes this ostentatious formal display.
Tableaux vivants have been called the art of reconstruc-
tion33
since their beginnings in the 15th
century. The original definition
referred to the para-theatrical re-interpretation of paintings
or sculptures, created with the participation of people, depicting
a scene with its attitude, clothing and facial expressions. Living
images combining painting, sculpture and theatre are imperfect
already at the level of definition: the medium’s lack of purity is
inscribed in its character. This lack of purity has been, in later
years, willingly adapted and treated as a field for experiments
by new media artists.34
There is one scene in Krumbachová’s film
that can be combined with new media: the previously mentioned
effect of three-dimensionality, or an optical illusion identical to
it. This becomes visible in one of the sequences introducing an
additional internal frame. Each time this is a new form of visual
attraction, “an image inside an image”.
Instead of a well-plotted film, we get cooking on screen,
feeding and consuming, which only increases the appetite. We
witness the tasting, seasoning and directing of the aesthetic
system. Just as in Daisies, the form is eaten. The central theme
of Chytilová’s earlier film, which preceded The Murder — its sophisticated
visuality, supported by various formal tricks — is a
wide range of eating and consumption. As Katarina Soukup has
previously noted, eating is a way to assimilate into the world:
the end of culinary and sexual affect. Raisins — like pills of happiness
and forgetfulness or drugs representing the liberated (or
perhaps only feigning freedom) sixties — bring inner peace and
reconciliation with oneself.
Thus, the culinary process ultimately turns out to be an
intermediate act on the way to becoming the largest consumer in
the food chain. Using above all the tool of irony, the film hinders
the consistent and exclusive use of a psychoanalytical apparatus
that would provide undue rigour to female play by giving it a form
and burdening it with male expectations. These are seemingly
satisfied at the level of things offered for consumption in the
film, but at the same time frustrated at the level of its logical
and bounded structure. Krumbachová mocks the viewer who
has come to consume a finished product. Instead, she offers a
heterogeneous story of a woman who slips into the frame of a
mirror every now and then. This treatment brings the protagonist’s
statements into the domain of a timeless monologue of
female needs — a completely different language from the one
she uses in her conversations with the Devil. From the level of
her own infantilism and coarse male phrases, she ventures into
literary language. David Sorfa emphasizes the rhythms of such a
solution,27
while Petra Hanáková writes about the use of visual
semantic clichés, which Krumbachová brought to an extreme.28
INTERMEDIALITY
Libuše Heczková and Kateřina Svatoňová redirect the conclusions
from this observation of the film’s visual language — not
towards the modernist theatrical style distinguished in cinema,29
but towards the tradition of tableauxvivants.30
This formula includes
the opening of the film. When looking at the opening credits,
one finds that they are themselves designed to be both spatial
and immovable. Their components are actually miniature props:
the fonts are composed of knick-knacks, colourful stones and
beads. This foreshadows the jewellery that Krumbachová went
on to design outside of her film work. According to Heczková and
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Czechosłowacka nowa fala i kultura czasu wolnego”, Kwartalnik
filmowy 39, no. 100 (2017): 109–125.
40	 Cf. Nĕmec’s statement in the film Searching for Ester.
41	 I purposefully use the term introduced by Jan Švankmajer
to his own artistic practice. The proper Czech term is kunstkomora
(art chamber).
35	 Katarina Soukup, “Banquet of Profanities: Food and
Subversion in Vera Chytilová’s Daisies”, Tessera 24 (1998), https://tessera.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/tessera/article/view/25123:
38–52.
36	 Herbert Eagle writes about “spoiled action” Jonathan
Owen, about “spoiled aesthetics”. This, beyond all else, is the result
of words overused by the two Maries, the protagonists of Daisies: “we
are spoiled”. Herbert Eagle, “Dada and Structuralism in Chytilova’s
Daisies”, CrossCurrents10 (1991): 242; Jonathan Owen, Avant-gardetoNew
Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2013), 9.
37	 For those writing about the film, this mechanism was
from the start more similar to begging.
38	 Elisabetta Girelli, “Subverting Space: Private, Public and
Power in Three Czechoslovak Films from the 1960s and ‘70s”, Studies
in Eastern European Cinema 2, no. 1 (2011): 49–59.
39	 Grażyna Świętochowska, “O uroczystości i gościach:
forest setting.38
The filming techniques signal the arrival of something
unexpected and dangerous. The narrow, crowded frames
even set off at a distance the language used by the participants
of the picnic, even though, in the declarations of the creators, they
were supposed to indicate imprisonment in clichés and empty
words. After a ten-minute sequence paraphrasing The Luncheon
on the Grass, the film turns into a proper parable as suggested by
the title, depicting guests brought by force and with little information
to the reception of some self-proclaimed Host.39
Food is
the background for the advancement from physiology to culture,
associated with a surplus of props and performance rather than
“food content”. As Němec said, the film was made as a result of
taking Ester Krumbachová’s philosophical essay and turning it
into a film in which “everyone wanted to sit at this table, from
which some were thrown into prison and others could be promoted
to the position of ambassador. The table was a metonymy for
participation in power”.40
In fact, there is an intriguing separation
here, a dissociation of conventions around food from the essence
of the food itself. The space, furnished with tables topped with
branching candelabra and chairs with embroidered upholstery,
is a façade for the mechanism of oppression and violence that
hides beneath it.
	
CABINETS OF CURIOSITIES OR WUNDERKAMMERN
In The Murder, other elements of interior design are as important
as the food and tables themselves. Three tables of different sizes
(and a book levelling out the height of the tabletops) in the
guest room are an example of a creative patchwork, patching
up the shortcomings and deficits. The process of preparing the
meal involves not only cooking, but also building a landscape
of consumption. The picture is framed by a branching potted
plant spread over an ottoman. Half-exhibits, museum objects
are created, and they have an original aesthetic quality even
before human actors appear in them. The kitchen environment
resembles a Wunderkammer41
, a private study focused on cooking,
devouring the world prevents one from being eaten.35
Daisies, even
in its intentionally imperfect form, can be considered an effect
of “being eaten”. The surrealistic game played at one point by
the protagonists where they cut and quarter their own bodies
shifts the boundaries of corporeal unity to the level of aesthetic
spectacle, but it is also visible proof of how the narrative is cannibalized,
torn and eaten. The fragmentation of the female body
in Daisies does not just take on a completely different dimension
than in Hollywood cinema. The “spoiled” narration36
of Daisies or
their “narrative restraint” goes hand in hand with the disappearance
of the expectation that the title “anti-heroes” will provide
visual pleasure. The chaotic organization of the narrative form is
proportional to their gluttony.
While the paradoxical culinary hyperactivity of TheMurder’s
protagonist does not allow for bodily consumption, stops
its potential course, the direction of the activities of the girls in
Daisies can be viewed as a constant escape from being the main
course. The girls wander from restaurant to restaurant, leading
subsequent old men to be “eaten”. Although they outdo each
other in wastefulness and destruction, they specialize primarily
in eating at someone’s expense — they pick up older men for this
purpose. Consumption is therefore closely linked to the hunting
ritual,37
although the prey and the hunter are interchangeable.
The culmination of the effort is the meal eaten at a restaurant
table. The culinary feast is separated from its uniqueness, fingers
and hands are often used instead of cutlery. The moment of
promised male consumption is postponed indefinitely and never
reaches the level of sexual satisfaction. Despite different vectors
of movement in the two films, the effect is identical.
While the protagonist of The Murder compulsively creates
sublime culinary performances in order to realize her own
desire, in the film co-created with Nĕmec, The Party and the Guests,
the ritual of the meal is only a mouth-gagging disciplinary technique.
As noted by Elizabeth Girelli, from the very first scenes, the
viewer is burdened with a tight framing method used in an idyllic
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45	 Josef Škvorecký, Všichni ti bystří mladí muži a ženy: Osobní
historie českého filmu (Prague: Horizont, 1991).
46	 Heczková and Svatoňová, “Esteřiny vraždy”.
47	 František Dryje, “Jan Švankmajer, Surrealist”, in Švankmajer,
Dimensions of Dialogue, 172.
48	Švankmajer, Dimensions of Dialogue, 185.
49	 According to Ivo Purš, the collection is not open to general
public; during one of its exhibitions, just a fraction of the collection
was showcased, and the exhibits were not signed. Švankmajer believes
that they do not fulfil a didactic function, and that their purpose is to
stimulate creative thinking.
50	 Lucie Česálková and Kateřina Svatoňová, Diktátor času:
(De)kontextualizacefenoménuLaternymagiky (Prague: Národní filmový archiv,
Faculty of Arts Press, 2019).
42	 Olga Topol, “Deliss: Płaszczyzny percepcji”, in: Muzeum
sztuki:Antologia,ed.MariaPopczyk (Krakow: Universitas, 2005), 401–410.
43	 Kristoffer Noheden, Surrealism, Cinema and the Search for a
New Myth (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 95.
44	 The Group of Czechoslovak Surrealists was led by
Vratislav Effenberger. Andre Breton and Paul Éluard visited Prague
in March 1935, and Breton, gave a lecture at the Mánes Gallery titled
TheSurrealistSituationoftheObject. Derek Sayer, Prague,CapitaloftheTwentieth
Century:ASurrealistHistory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013),
4. The meeting was initiated by the founder of the Czech Surrealist
Group, poet Vítězslav Nezval. It is worth adding that Švankmajer
began to call his films surrealistic in 1968, and in this context, one
should consider works like his short film from that year mixing animation
and live action, TheFlat (Byt). See Jan Švankmajer, Dimensionsof
Dialogue / Between Film and Fine Art, eds. Bertrand Schmitt and František
Dryje (Řevnice: Arbor Vitae, 2012), 88.
turning for the first time to quotations from Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s
painting practices. Even Josef Škvorecký, in his early
critical commentary on Krumbachová’s film — which he allegedly
did not see, but merely read its script — wrote about the touch
of surrealism, a sentimental, campy kitsch.45
Heczková and Svatoňová
reference this criticism and find an, in a way, automatic
elaboration of it: it is no accident that Krumbachová’s film resembles
Švankmajerian animations of inorganic and inanimate matter
exposed to biting, chewing and swallowing.46
Švankmajer’s
imagination goes much further by working on the key themes
that drive his art: biology (or, more broadly, science), astrology,
alchemy, psychoanalysis, genes and childhood.47
In 1972, he and
his wife Eva began working on a fake encyclopedia, Švank-meyers
Bilderlexikon (1972 –), creating various assemblages of stuffed
animal parts, found objects and everyday accessories that combine
minerals, vegetables and post-animal and human objects.48
Later in life, he came to house this microcosm of objects in his
own home49
 — transforming it almost entirely into a Wunderkammer.
Fantastic inanimate creatures and tactile objects become the
material basis for subsequent personal film scripts.
In Švankmajer’s work, food is also closely linked to the
position of power. To eat is to consume the world, but also to be
afraid that this position cannot be kept forever. There is a clear
fixation on the very act of eating and on food, which becomes
fetishized. Švankmajer’s “food performances”, like Meret Oppenheim’s
trailblazing project, blur the distinctions between the
senses of touch, taste and sight. Krumbachová and Švankmajer’s
creative paths only officially crossed once, at Prague’s Laterna
Magika theatre in 1975.50
However, their private paths crossed
more frequently, and they developed a friendship and saw one
another on numerous occasions.
PRIVATE / PUBLIC: THE APARTMENT
One more detail is important at Krumbachová’s Wunderkammer:the
presence of her own private objects in the film’s set design: mirror
curiosities and a library of specialist volumes. Bordered by larger
and smaller shelves, the kitchen has room for cans, containers,
ladles, individual dishes, porcelain tableware, spice containers,
dried herbs, garlic braids and bunches of fresh soup vegetables.
The accumulation of all these objects in one space refers to the
concept of the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities:
“these Wunderkammern had
p r a c t i c a l l y
e v e r y t h i n g .
The cabinet was to be a
m i c r o c o s m ,
a     t h e a t r u m     m u n d i ,
and its content reflected
i t s     ow n e r ’s     i nt e re st s . ” 4 2
A certain form of revival of this tradition can be seen in the
context of “classical” surrealism — one image corresponding
to the collection of culinary objects might be André Breton’s
room-chapel at 42 Rue Fontaine in Paris,43
nowadays residing in
the permanent exhibition of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The
accumulation of objects, inclined towards equipment adjacent to
the traditional female sphere, raises questions about the limits
of Krumbachová’s conscious parodying of male cabinets of curiosities.
This becomes even more interesting if the figure of the
Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer, with his private mythology, is
placed in her immediate vicinity. Here the context of French surrealism
intertwines with its Czech derivative.44
The artistic and
film work of the director of Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu,
1983) contains not only many Wunderkammern,but also, similar to
Krumbachová’s work, original forms of food in abundance.
In 1967, Švankmajer realized the nine-minute Historia
Naturae (Suita), creating an audiovisual tribute to the collector’s
practices of ordering, segregating, separating and naming, and
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out on the floor and regularly changed every year, while the
remaining rooms had a carpet. On the wallpaper there was an
inscription written in Krumbachová’s hand, a Latin sentence: “Hic
Sunt Leones” (literally, “Here be lions”) in a thick font, used on
antique maps to mark undiscovered areas, unknown countries.
In Krumbachová’s view, this was primarily a tribute to her cats.
But in her environment, she also maintained relations with other
animals: she had a parrot and turtles. Chytilová’s film Searching
for Ester also has a very clear thread of ravens, to which Krumbachová,
its designer, attributed the traces of an autonomous, independent
existence. In these gestures, Krumbachová resembles
the stereotyped image of a sorceress, a witch, but she also moves
in the direction of today’s post-humanistic sensitivity.
Krumbachová’s urban apartment, bustling with social
life, is also a tangible proof of the shift in the centre of Czech life
during the normalization era. Descriptions of the characteristic
leisure practices distinguishing the residents of the Czechoslovakia
highlight notions like tramping, cabins (chaty) and cottaging
(chalupaření), but the most important factor, which thus remains
completely unspoken, is the characteristic of everyday life at
the time, in which people commonly maintained their privacy by
withdrawing from social life and limiting their interests to their
circle of closest family and friends.56
This “silent life” was primarily
realized inside one’s own apartment, one’s “four walls”. These
are the roots of Charter 77 (Olga and Václav Havel’s apartment)
and the centre of life of the Czech Surrealist Group (Eva and Jan
Švankmajer’s apartment). They are also common to Krumbachová’s
living environment, where her professional projects were
mistaken for private entertainment projects, extended at most
to the Green Fox Pub (Na Zelené lišce) operating in her apartment
building. Having no official commissions at Barrandov, she helped
others by hosting. Without going out into the world, she made
the world come to her.
51	Kolský, Green Fox Street, 4.
52	Ibid.
53	 One conversation from 2016 was also included.
54	 With the exception of Ester’s last partner, whose
answers have also been interwoven into the text of the book.
55	Kolský, Green Fox Street, 4.
56	Świętochowska, “O uroczystości i gościach”.
frame, potted plants, tables. This can be seen as smuggling in, or
perhaps quoting, her own private life. Indeed, the whole layout
of her apartment was transferred to her only directed film. “You
entered the apartment as if you were entering the interior of
one of her works, her project, and at the same time her private
sphere.”51
Krumbachová’s old friends also emphasize the way
Krumbachová treated works of art. She never approached them
with reverence and adoration. She used them, made them part
of her everyday life. When they were in her apartment, they were
often impractical objects, obstacles dethroning the functionality
of the interior, but not its aesthetic arrangement.
The fact that the centre of Krumbachová’s world was
her apartment is mentioned in Jan Kolský’s artistic project Green
Fox Street (2018),52
the title of which refers to the street on which
Krumbachová lived. The book weaves a detailed topography,
nowadays understood as a metaphorical and mental place, from
the memories of living friends. New networks of connections
are created through the creative editing of individual interviews
between June and December 201753
accompanied by sketches of
Krumbachová’s apartment plan. Elements from various sources
have been once again re-organized into a whole, into the physical
space of a fantastic meeting. Distances and spatial relations are
based solely on subjective feelings from many years prior.54
In the stories of people who knew Krumbachová, emphasis
is placed on the direction of movement, the need to climb
stairs or ride up in the elevator. In both cases, this has a psychoanalytic
overtone: a rising tunnel leading to Krumbachová’s
apartment.55
One had to go through the kitchen to get to the
balcony. The kitchen was the site of preparation not just for
dishes, but also elements used for making jewellery (amulets).
The space’s connectedness, openness, and ability for multitasking,
despite its modest size, seem to be a distinctive marker, so
characteristic of Krumbachová’s own “cooperative” personality
structure. There was no door between the main room and the
kitchen, at most a curtain. In the hallway, wallpaper was laid
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