That New Weird America: Re-Contextualizing the Cult Czech Film “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders”
Current popular music, like contemporary politics, is some mediation of the local and the global. Individuals act within their imagined communities—which, no longer bound by geography, means both whom you run into at the supermarket and that Facebook friend from Singapore. Musicians, like all of us, respond equally to their next-door neighbors and international partners. Tonight at the Cornell Cinema, a collective of Philadelphia artists will offer an alternative soundtrack to a curious Czech cult film from the 70s, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Ithaca is the most recent stop on this fascinating take on the global village.
Greg Weeks, pivotal figure in the nomenclature-rich genre of “New, Weird American Music” (which has also been called “New Folk,” “Neo Folk,” “Freak Folk,” “Psych Folk” and confusingly, “Anti-Folk”), and the frontman of the Philadelphia collective Espers, has composed an inventive score to the film. Rather than use his own band, Weeks tapped several musicians in his hometown; members of the so-called Valerie Project include Margaret Wienk from Fern Knight, Tara Burke from Fursaxa, and many others—including Greg’s wife Jessica. This group of performers havs traveled the country to play alongside a 16mm print of the film; they have also released The Valerie Project as a soundtrack and document of the endeavor. (Drag City, who distributes both Espers’ work and that of Weeks’ label, Language of Stone, has released the album.)
As a film, Valerie stands as a vital work of art that resonates with contemporary psychedelic artists. Like its British counterpart Wicker Man and Spanish El Topo and Holy Mountain, Jaromil Jires’ film explores the intersection of nature, religion and the occult in a loosely narrative medium. The film focuses on the sexual awakening of a thirteen year-old girl as she confronts her own feelings of mystery, duty and sexuality in the 1800s. A folk tale that is simultaneously surreal and Baroque, Valerie is dreamlike without being off-putting. Its visual and tonal themes include vampires, masks, jewels, sexualized religious figures, incest and witchcraft; it was also mostly unavailable for many years (bootleg DVDs have been circulating for the last three years or so), and has psychedelic written all over it.
The film already has a compelling soundtrack: an eerie and seductive score by contemporary Czech composer Lubos Fiser. But Weeks and his friends were compelled to “re-contextualize” the work for public screening. As Weeks explained last week from his home in Philadelphia, “we were just interested in doing a film score. We figured that if nobody was going to ask us, then we’d do it ourselves.” Weeks’ circle was especially fascinated by Valerie. When Joseph Gervasi, a local promoter and partner in Exhumed Cinema, obtained a print to the film, Weeks gathered a group of local musicians to compose a new score. The project was originally intended for Espers but reconfigured when members of that band were unable to commit.
Weeks explained that the soundtrack was a collaborative endeavor. “The way that it happened was we got about five people in a room and turned on the television. Margaret [Wienk] and I had gotten together to get a few themes together. And once we had the right energy going we just got everyone together and then started playing to the film with the sound turned off.”
The most striking aspect of the Valerie Project is how much darker the new score is. While Fiser’s soundtrack is full of ornate reed instruments, bells and elements common to a Renaissance Fair, the Valerie Project brings a jolt of electricity to the sound of the film. Weeks acknowledged that it’s understandable “if people were slightly—if not offended—then uneasy with the idea of screening a film by a dead filmmaker and a dead composer being shown with a new soundtrack and all of the dialogue of the film turned off because it does re-contextualize the film.”
Asked why he sought to rework Valerie, Weeks said: “We wanted to resurrect a moment in the past that is very relevant today. The film perhaps suggests how we should be living our lives today. It warns against throwing away these pockets of individualized culture—and resists the homogenization of modernization and globalization. We want to be accepting modern advancements for what they are and the good that they are while keeping our cultural identity.”
Weeks explained: “It is part of a continuum and of pushing this into a larger consciousness. We were making music based on what was lacking. Society wasn’t shifting in a way for us, so we decided to create a society that we wanted to hear. And so it was really a means of a musical protest in a way. And I don’t want to make it sound like everyone involved had a desire to change the world or anything like that; I think they just wanted to change their own particular world.”
Jires and Fiser worked within the context of a repressive political regime: that of Cold War Czechoslovakia. The film subtly critiques organized religion (a project acceptable to the Communist Svoboda regime) while questioning political and moral power in general. The most moving scenes in the film occur when Valerie escapes to the countryside, or to the safe caverns of her own imagination. Weeks and the other members of the Valerie Project also work within the context of a repressive regime of sorts—that of the current Bush Administration. They create art within an environment of total access and of common denominators.
Weeks and his fellow musician have no desire to “replicate a specific sound or style from the past.” Weeks continued: “I’m going to make music that I want to hear, and that speaks to the time that I’m in right now. I don’t see the point of making music that replicates—or that is a simulacrum of 1972 or 1963 or even 1828. It just has no real soul to it then. It’s like an android.” Instead, the Valerie Project exists as an organic whole.
Across the nation, an entire generation is discovering a newfound appreciation for the land (through local farmers markets to preserving an ecological identity) and is beginning to question the meaning of freedom in the United States. A revival—not unlike that of the “Old, Weird America” is taking place. But while that movement valued the then-disappearing folk tradition of its own backyard (the old time music of Appalachia), this New, Weird America mines two traditions at once: the local and the global. Watch it thrive tonight.
The Valerie Project performs tonight, April 10th, at Cornell Cinema alongside a 16mm print of “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.” A full trascript of my interview with Greg Weeks may be obtained at www.ithacajournal.com