The Princess Fainted on the Spot: On Ester Krumbachová’s Dark Tales

Edith Jeřábková:

Recent research into the legacy of Ester Krumbachová¹, initiated by the discovery of documents, artworks, writings, photographs, clothes, and other belongings comprising her estate, creates new perspectives on the life, film industry and culture of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in communist Czechoslovakia, the arrival of capitalism, and the swift neoliberal turn. However, it also presents difficulties with political and gender norms, and most significantly Krumbachová’s affiliation with future generations and the topics of our contemporaneity, such as feminism and gender fluidity, sex, food and cooking, care, welfare, plant and animal intelligence, interspecies communication, animism, holism, magic materialism, and object agency.

Ester Krumbachová was a key figure in the Czech New Wave during the 1960s. She was a significant contributor to films such as The Party and the Guests, Daisies, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Witchhammer, and The Murder of Mr Devil as costume and stage designer, screenwriter, author, and director. After the Prague Spring of 1968 and the subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia by the forces of the Warsaw Pact, Krumbachová was one of many Czech artists effectively silenced and banned from Barrandov Film Studios (with a few exceptions) until 1989.

One of her many and entangled art practices was writing. Not only was she the author and co-author of many screenplays, stories, and theoretical and critical texts published in magazines and newspapers, but she also used the epistolary format as a means of practicing art and thinking in a semi-private zone away from government scrutiny. Two years before her death, she published what she called these “unintentionally forgotten and intentionally unsent letters” in her only book, The First Book of Ester (1994, 5). Krumbachová was always interested in mixing the high and the low, codes and experiments, the large scale and details, new and old, public and private. Her fascination with folklore and mythology, offset by her reading of the social and political texts of her time, gave rise to a series of dark modern tales, which are also part of the book. Both the letters and the tales form a unique kind of commentary and therapeutic writing at a time when the author’s freedom was being suppressed. The collection of Krumbachová’s stories was published last year under the title Dark Tales and edited and translated by Francis McKee as an accompanying book to the exhibition A Weakness for Raisins: Films & Archive of Ester Krumbachová at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.

Dark Tales features a brisk style of writing and the same rattling sense of constant change. This transformative power, which in regular fairy tales is saved for quite rare moments of magic, Krumbachová treats as though it were a common occurrence, and squanders the magic in a postmodern manner as in a world in which anything can happen. This trans-power traces its historical roots back to the monumental changes that took place to the political and social environment during her lifetime, changes wrought by the Second World War, the coup d’état of 1948, the Prague Spring of 1968 and socialism with a human face, the normalisation period of the 1970s, the Velvet Revolution of 1989, and the arrival of capitalism and neoliberalism during the 1990s. This stream of magic also addresses gender fluidity, interspecies transformation, and communication as we know it from today’s narratives fighting the binary construction of our world.

Krumbachová did not have children, yet in her library there are many books on fairy tales. When you were translating the tales with the help of two native Czech speakers, Natalie Kollegová and Alena Kottová, you must have noticed how her stories connect up to those of her predecessors, such as the Brothers Grimm and Karel Jaromír Erben; German, Celtic and European fairy tales; pirate tales; tales of Rumcajs the Robber; Lyman Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; Karel Čapek; Jan Karafiát; and Carlo Collodi (just to mention some of the books and authors in her library). Surprisingly there are no books by Božena N...