So we survived the first week of online classes and it is time to write another blog post.

Before I dive into our screening/readings this week, I’d like to take the time to quickly shout-out Kelsie, Patrick, Spencer, Averi and Chris! I think they did an awesome job leading the discussion and doing their presentations this week considering this is new territory for us all and they were sort of the guinea pigs for that. Great job guys! Also I know this maybe sappy but I am very appreciative of Dr. S this week, as he somehow made this week feel (almost) like a normal class so thank you for that!

Ok enough with the sap lets talk about the film we all saw this week, Jaromil Jireš’ Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. How odd was this film!?! Am I right!?!?! I don’t know about you guys but I was kind of grateful for this new online format and having to watch this film on my own, just for the the fact that I was able to pause and rewind certain parts and process what I was watching exactly. This film was visually and audibly beautiful with its soft colors and haunting church music. Though, I don’t think I am alone when I say that I was confused for an hour and twenty-four of this hour and twenty-five minute long film. Everything seemed a little clearer in the last minute of the film though when Valerie seemed to wake up in a bed in the middle of a field and everything I had just witnessed was a dream??

Watching this film felt similar to the first time I watched Alejandro Jodorowky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain, and even Terry Gilliam’s 2009 film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. You’re going to have to bear with me as I try to describe to you this feeling as it is hard to put into words. With all three films it felt as if as I watched them I could not only physically feel my movie knowledge and credibility as a movie buff/nerd expanding but, also as if I had just fallen head-first into a new weird world that I was excited, scared, and confused by but still never wanted to leave.

I think that’s kind of what Valerie felt like in her world too, excited and scared. Excited by the ideas of growing up and the new sexual world around her, as men make love to women on fallen trees and drops of menstrual blood fall gracefully on flowers but never on nice white sheets, or nice white floors, or nice white dresses. (As a woman I had a hard time ignoring the logic on that one.) While she was also scared by fact that she is no longer living in the naive fantasy world of a child and she is learning that the people who are suppose to protect her and she is suppose to be able to trust can be evil and predatory vampires, or rodents disguised as vampires????

I think Patrick was right to point out the quote in Jana Prikryl’s article Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: Grandmother What Big Fangs You Have!, that describes the story as ‘concretely irrational psychic collage freely borrowing from the genre of so-called pulp literature everything belonging to the nethermost regions of our unconscious.’ as that perfectly describes the film I just watched and the world I just entered.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I am going to go watch it/enter that world again.