By Dennis Harvey

IT WAS ONE of the more felicitous perversities of cold war Communist nations that many frequently "banned" filmmakers nonetheless managed to compile fairly substantial filmographies. And it is ironic, if not exactly perverse, that few of them can now get movies made in the free-expression-but-no-free-lunch arena of market capitalism. Meet the new boss.

Among those who've experienced the negatives on both sides and lived to tell is Czech director Vera Chytilová. By all accounts she's not shy about telling, either: offscreen, she has attracted such terms as "abrasive," "crazy," "arrogant," "impossible," "rude," and that sexist golden oldie, "aggressive" as inexorably as a refrigerator attracts decorative magnets. (My favorite interview exchange: Asked by a female London Guardian journalist if she considers herself a feminist, and if so, how does this affect her filmmaking, she replied, "Is your newspaper a serious one? You ask pointless and primitive questions.") She purportedly has admitted to beating up inflexible cameramen; one can only imagine the abuse her actors endure. Then again, these things need to be taken with a grain of salt – after all, male directors' egomaniacal behavior gets noticed only when they're sadistic, or downright certifiable. Female directors get it when they're guilty of being no more than "bossy" and persnickety, like Barbra Streisand.

But even if she's indeed "clearly bonkers," as next-generation Czech director Alice Nellis (Eeny Meeny) has opined, Chytilová has the excuse – or saving grace – of some genius. A slightly winnowed version of a touring retrospective of her work is stopping at the Pacific Film Archive for two weekends. Constituting four features and a featurette, "Vera Chytilová: Break the Rules" is just the kickoff summer calls for: a bonfire, barely controlled, occasionally eyebrow-singeing.

Still active and enervated at age 74, Chytilová started out studying architecture and philosophy and worked as a fashion model (a profession dissected in the early featurette, Ceiling) and in more proletariat capacities before becoming interested in cinema. Her first real feature, 1963's Something Different, remains obscure – but the title was as portentous as they come. Three years later she made her most enduring impression with Daisies, a "surreallist comedy" that instantly put her on par with all of the other stars of Czechoslovakia's unparalleled new wave, which already included Jiri Menzel, Ivan Passer, and Milos Forman.

A truer peer in terms of anarchic sensibility, however, was the Yugoslav Dusan Makavejev (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Sweet Movie). Very different in other ways, they shared a joyous approach toward tearing social constructs to shreds. Unlike most other extreme flights of cinematic '60s psychedelic (or even Prague Spring) fancy, Daisies hasn't faded into modish nostalgia. It's still jolting, hilarious, endlessly inventive, a delight to the eye and mind. I've seen it many times and still laugh out loud. It remains an art-school feminist favorite, appealing in the same way more commercial expressions of rampaging grrrlhood as Times Square or even Freaky Friday are. (It's not a lesbian movie, but some of its best friends are.)

This barely describable prank chronicles the adventures of Maries I and II (Jitka Cerhova and Ivaná Karbanová, respectively), dubious "sisters" and definite flatmates who "decide to be spoiled." They subsequently wreak havoc on the bourgeoisie and pitiful grunt worker alike: abandoning date-baiting sugar daddies after consuming copious quantities of expensive restaurant delicacies, howling at the plaints of poetically tormented boyfriends, drunkenly disrupting entire nightclubs, and recklessly redecorating their own digs (love that grass bedspread), when not setting fire to it. Silent comedy, fast 'n' slo-mo, solarized images, and stylistic whatnot garnish the display of world-class brattiness that's metaphorically too nihilistic, too anti-erotically daft to be pinned as simple anti-Western consumerism. No wonder it was condemned at home as frivolous, cynical formalism incompatible with socialist ideology – even as it made Chytilová's name at festivals worldwide.

Her hiccupping career path again won international kudos with 1969's Fruit of Paradise, another ripe hybridizing of experimental technique and allegorical storytelling. This time Adam and Eve were dropped into a Czech health spa. But the politburo were seriously unamused by now; long gaps appeared between projects. Prefab Story, made in 1979, was produced (were the authorities asleep on the job?) then suppressed for a decade. It's farce again, but this time the absurdism is deadpan realist. As Chaplin did in Modern Times and Tati in Playtime, Chytilová here satirizes faceless modernity itself, or rather the disastrously all-controlling state's version. Her residents of a massive, in-progress Prague high-rise development are rats abandoned to the maze of hapless organizational, construction, and human-relationship ineptitude. "Mind your own business" is the general mantra. But no business gets done here. Chaos is bitterly, hilariously rampant.