“During the shooting I did not distinguish between documentary and fiction film, they are both adventurous and similar. Any conventional approach irritated me, I wanted to create a work with an authentic statement”, Vera Chytilová remembers her second featurette, set in a girls’ boarding house of a textile factory in eastern Bohemia. The life of 15 to 18 year-old young women, their routine work in the factory, conflicts between the young workers with their educators, are the themes that the young director used for her first professional film, a deliberation on the edge between fiction and documentary film language. The story of young Eva, as she just enters an entirely female community, was shot as a documentary, a sociological probe into a group of apprentice teenagers, for the Stu- dio of popular science film at Krátký film Praha. But Chytilová had a script from the very beginning. Everything was arranged in advance and it is likely that nothing that the girls did actually happened to them. It was all entirely conceivable however, and might have happened to them or young women elsewhere. Amateur actresses improvised off of the scripted dialogue, so the words corresponded to their own beliefs and experience, their own personal expression and ‘inner truth’. Chytilová did not hide her sympathies for one of them who rebelled against the educational system, perceiving it as a struggle for respect, and for the right of privacy in a collective institution. The filmmaker’s approach aroused discussion and controversy over the topic itself prolonged the process of receiving official approval for almost a year.

The critics perceived the film as an example of a new film style, influenced by cinéma vérité. Chytilová’s analytical relation to reality was heightened by the subjective camerawork by Jaromír Šofr. We get to know the boarding house environment through the eyes of the heroine, who we only see at the very end of the film. The ‘staged’ element is present through her voice, an inner monologue in slang commenting on her surroundings. Through Eva’s eyes, we do not experience her own story, but her friend Jana’s, standing out among the female collective thanks to her provocative nature and her need for revolt, a common theme in Chytilová’s work. From a seemingly banal subject on adolescent, helpless and naive youth, the director extracted an authentic image of the battle between imagination of a juve- nile, and an adult world.

Briana Cechová