“I’m a monster again!” – Cinefamily and the Silent Movie Theatre

Thank you to Nicholas Klemek for reacquainting me with L.A.’s Silent Movie Theater and for introducing me to Cinefamily which now runs the place. The theater is now a cinematheque and presents movies similar to those at the Egyptian’s American Cinematheque and at The New Beverly revival theater. Great news because in addition it still shows silent movies with organ accompaniment.

My first movie there was Saturday’s Czech film “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders” (1970). It was the last film in the theater’s recent series “Czech Your Head” (which apparently included one of my favorites, the not-available-on-video Dark Ages epic “Marketa Lazarova” [1967, 162 minutes!]). “Valerie” is a surreal, horror-themed fairytale featuring 13-year-old Valerie in a series of inappropriate settings and circumstances:

“…a haunting psychoactive period piece which plunges the beautiful heroine Valerie into a phantasmagorical world of thirsty vampires, the dark arts and dreamy free love -- all set to one of the great film scores of the era, a cocktail of psych-folk and avant-garde classical by the great Luboš Fišer. The film opens with 13-year-old Valerie's first menstruation and subsequent sexual awakening, the unsteady discovery of which lets loose a torrent of quixotic, hallucinatory experiences both terrifying and beautiful; amongst a haze of shifting tones and a flurry of role reversals and Gothic nightmares in broad daylight, Valerie floats along, buoyed by the fears and fantasies that come with nascent sexuality and teenage fantasy...” – Cinefamily.

There’s almost no one I could recommend this one to, but I laughed and laughed.

One of the most prominent characters in the movie is a bald, Nosferatu-like, white-faced vampire monster in possibly multiple roles. He is the Bishop, Grandmother’s boyfriend Richard, and possibly Valerie’s father as well as the father of Valerie’s boyfriend (an adult bespectacled Euro-geek named Eagle). My favorite moment occurs after Valerie attempts to restore the monster to his true self by passing a mouthful of chicken blood into the vampire’s mouth. The vampire transforms into a 1970 Czech-handsome man (wide-set eyes and caterpillar mustaches) and Valerie embraces her “father”. Suddenly he transforms back into the vampire, still embracing the now terrified girl, and informs her with glee, “I’m a monster again!”