Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Miraculous Virgin!

Me reading my own blôgge posts.

I first saw Czechoslovak kino Panna zázracnica, or The Miraculous Virgin, on YouTube without subtitles. Given that the subject matter orbits the now-obscure nadrealist scene - a Slavic cousin of surrealism - this was an entirely appropriate way to experience it and one I recommend unironically. The Dalí himself was fond of saying that confusion was the best and purest form of communication, to which end he would speak in four different languages, switching abruptly mid-sentence like a Mr Bungle song. Dalí's erstwhile dickriders tried to kick him out of the surrealist mOvEmEnT for the thoughtcrime of preferring Franco over the inarguably far more murderous alternative, to which he replied thus:

Posers eternally, irrevocably stumped, schlonged, rekt, shrekt, BTFO the fuck out and on suicide watch.

Nadrealism likewise did away with much of the prosaic safe-edgy hipster commie baggage that weighed down the less notable pretenders to the surrealist throne in severing the perceived umbilical cord between surreal art and the discredited theories of Marx and Freud, allowing it to easily outshine the more western-based iterations of surrealist schtick, and The Miraculous Virgin is withering in its contempt for the red orthodoxy that had overseen and crassly micromanaged artistic expression in the eastern bloc cinéma prior to the Czechoslovak New Wave. In one scene a pompous party hack lectures a hapless sculptor that his statue of the red tyrant du jour looks too much like a priest and not enough like a secular bureaucrat BUT TOTES AWESOMESAUCE.

The kino is loosely based on a novel but is as close to pure cinéma as it gets in its flights of celluloid fantasy through the world of an art scene neither you nor I (be honest) had remotely heard of prior. The plot, not that it matters, concerns Anabella (Jolanta Umecka), a dream waifu clad in mourning black who becomes archetypal muse to the nadrealist clique as they agonise over their art and the absolute state of society and so forth.

>tfw gf nevermore

In the end the crowd of horny artistes chase Umecka away, to the consternation of Michael Ironside doppelgänger Raven, who peevishly sulks at their behaviour as ungracious. While it's clear that he's supposed to give voice to the auteur's pretentions of sensitivity, this angle has aged poorly and plays into the modish prudism of the soyjak/chudjak Yin-Yang that makes up the currentyear+9 zeitgeist. Better to see the artists' lamentation of their irrepressible libido in the bittersweet terms of myth - for, after all, what makes it sad that they chase her away is precisely that she's a hot goth girl to begin with.

Sure, the right woman brings out the animal in man, but animals are noble and cool.

In this context, they're like Orpheus, doomed to lose his Eurydice by the very love that compelled him to seek her rescue. This isn't even really a stretch, since one of the protagonists is named Tristan, after another famous avatar of tragic male infatuation. Still another clue might lie in the kino's repurposing of Jean Cocteau's famous mirror gag from The Blood of a Poet - the first part of, you guessed it, the Orpheus Trilogy.

This sort of intertextual wiki-walking is what "media literacy" might mean if it hadn't been co-opted to mean licking the boots of didactic H*llywood scolds.

Unsurprisingly, Virgin was banned following the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and remains little-known in the west and the English-speaking world. If you're a fan of Dalí and Cocteau (and if you're not, why are you here?), you owe it to yourself to Czech it out.