This week was a bit rocky, considering everything that’s currently happening on campus and in the world, but we somehow managed to make it work. Our screening this week, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), was by far the highlight of my week, a sort of escapism that I didn’t know I needed.

The entire film felt like a trip–unearthly from start to finish. I would like to start off by speaking about the mise-en-scène of the film. Perhaps it’s the fact that it was impossible to follow the plot, but the entire film had a very heavy mannerist feel to it all, full of hyper-idealization, distorted human forms and ambiguous spaces. I had no idea where the film was set (or when) and Jana Prikryl’s “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: Grandmother, What Big Fangs You Have!” explains the reason behind this beautifully, staying:

“Aside from the folkloric nub of the story—in which a thirteen-year-old girl is initiated into the perilous world of adult desire—little about this fantasia reflects its time and place. Maybe that’s why, over the last forty-five years, it has peeled off from its historical moment and been embraced by foreign audiences, who have kept it in circulation because of how irresistibly it combines some very soft-core delights with the trappings of horror. “

Jana Prikryl

More so, I was totally enamored by the set designs, especially Valerie’s white room:

Something that was incredibly interesting to me, was the intersection of so many different genres–fantasy, horror and soft-core (everything you need for a bomb coming-of-age film). In the late ’60s, other directors were starting to play around with the intersection of horror and sex, like in Roman Polanski’s ‘delightfully sardonic’ The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).

I loved Valerie and Her Week of Wonders because it felt incredibly nostalgic to me. For some weird reason–weird because before this week, I had never watched Valerie and Her Week of Wonders–it transported me back to the really intense Sunday-blues I would get in high-school, which I would cope with by watching weird films in bed all day. A lot of the time, I associate nostalgia with surrealism and dreamlike memories, which is perhaps why Valerie and Her Week of Wonders felt so familiar. I found a quote about this film (more specifically, the surrealism in this film) which, hopefully, helps to explain what I’m trying to say:

By their very nature, surrealistic or phantasmagorical films offer little to those who fail to connect with a specific, bizarre juxtaposition of images and ideas, aimed directly at the viewer’s central nervous system. There’s not much in the way of a middle ground when it comes to such works—one is either delighted and transfixed or bored to tears. 

Mike D’Angelo

While this has not been my favorite screening of the semester, this film was by far one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. The whole film looked like a dream.