Iluminace 2024, 36(1):71-92 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1771

Critical Inheritance
The Excommunication and Beatification of Věra Chytilová’s First Post-Revolutionary Film

Ondřej Zach

Univerzita Palackého

The article explores the case of the heteronomous critical evaluation of the film The Inheritance or Fuckoffguysgoodday (Věra Chytilová, 1992) in light of the transition of the Czech film industry in the 1990s. The first post-socialist film by Czechoslovak New Wave's emblematic director was at first regarded as a betrayal of the cultural heritage its author has represented. In 2020, though, the same film was marked by Czech critics as the third most important work of the post-velvet era. The text notes that the rhetorical use of the same cultural canon of the Czechoslovak New Wave used in the aesthetic evaluation of the same film at different times by two different evaluation panels resulted in two contradictory aesthetic judgments. From this, it draws the thesis that lying in the core of such heteronomy of the judgment may be the difference in critical discourse resulting from the different "forms of life" of the members of the evaluation panels. It argues that rather than the change in the aesthetic values of the film or in public taste, the changes in the evaluation reveal the performative tendencies (in both Austinian and Butlerian sense) of the film criticism, emerging in this case as the "inheritance" of the processes of the transition of the Czech cinema in the 1990s. Based on that notion, it proposes for the film critique to be understood as a medium of the specific socio-cultural context and for its actual texts to be studied as a socially contingent discursive practice.

Keywords: film criticism, heteronomy, transition, post-socialist cinema, performativity, Věra Chytilová

Received: November 2, 2023; Accepted: March 12, 2024; Published: June 17, 2024  Show citation