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★★★★★ A lapsarian search for truth sits at the heart of Vera Chytilová's avant garde masterpiece Fruit of Paradise (1970), but meaning is itself something that must be discovered by its audience. This was the last film that Chytilová made before she endured a seven year ban from filmmaking imposed by the Soviet government ruling Czechoslovakia at the time. Although her worked remained provocative for decades afterwards, when she returned behind the camera for 1977's The Apple Game her audacious formal experimentation was considerably less evident, making Fruit of Paradise a remarkable departing line in the first act of her career. Not that such narrative conventions were of any interest to her.

★★★★☆ After her staggering visual and philosophical odyssey, The Fruit of Paradise (1970), Vera Chytilová found herself serving a lengthy ban from filmmaking in Czechoslovakia. Shackled by the clamp-downs of the Soviet regime, when she did finally return to feature filmmaking after seven years in the cold, she was forced to reject much of the formal abandon that had characterised her early masterpieces. Despite this, from The Apple Game (1977) onwards she continued to make cinema that challenged and provoked with equal verve. Even as late as the 1990s, the sexagenarian Chytilová continued to play with subversive themes, not least 1998's Traps.

Film director who suffered censorship in her native Czechoslovakia for her 'anti-communist' films

Vera Chytilová, who has died aged 85, was one of the brightest of the new wave of film directors who emerged in Czechoslovakia in the mid-60s. Chytilová, Ivan Passer, Jan Nemec, Jirí Menzel, Ján Kadár and Miloš Forman were all products of Famu, the national film school in Prague. After the Russian invasion in 1968 put an end to the Prague Spring, Passer, Kadár and Forman left for the Us, and Nemec went into exile in western Europe. Menzel, who remained, was restricted despite repudiating his "anti-communist" films in 1974. But Chytilová, whose Daisies (1966) was the most adventurous and anarchic film of the period, was silenced.

Born in Ostrava, now in the Czech Republic, Chytilová had a strict Catholic upbringing. "I left that basic, personified faith," she later said. "It seemed like a crutch to me. I realised it...