Daisies
National Cinemas Post 1945: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia
Introduction to this module note from teacher:
I am excited to share Věra Chytilová's Czech New Wave film Daisies (1966) as this week's screening for Module 8, especially as we have seen some students open their cinematic vistas through the past few weeks and movements around the world. I think some will find this film particularly exciting and/or challenging. From this article Click Here
In Daisies, form underlines content in a radical manner. Random jump-cuts transport the viewer across time and space. There are abrupt switches from colour to black and white, and the oblique dialogue helps make the proceedings narratively unhinged. But this choppy, expressive approach is riveting. It’s a world away from the predictable stylings of mainstream cinema from the era. The two stars, Jitka Cerhova and Ivana Karbanova, were non-professionals, but little else in Daisies could be said to conform to the ‘verite’ approach. It’s too eccentric; a slice of Dadaist insanity dressed up in girly clothes.
As a filmmaker, Chytilova was infamously demanding – she even admitted to physically attacking her cameramen when they got something wrong. But she also had good reason for exactitude in her work. Living under a totalitarian Soviet regime meant making her films with precise, pointed targets and, with each new project, she placed her career on the line.
Daisies was banned for several years after a Soviet clampdown in 1968, and authorities were probably right to be suspicious. The anarchic spirit of the film – particularly its pre-punk middle finger to the establishment – was summed up by the final dedication in the film: ‘Dedicated to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce.’ The response was painful: Chytilova was not permitted to make another film in her native country until 1975.
SECOND INTRODUCTION TO FILM:
Maybe the New Wave’s most anarchic entry, Věra Chytilová’s absurdist farce follows the misadventures of two brash young women. Believing the world to be “spoiled,” they embark on a series of pranks in which nothing—food, clothes, men, war—is taken seriously. Daisies is an aesthetically and politically adventurous film that’s widely considered one of the great works of feminist cinema.
The unconventional Daisies was the product of an unconventional filmmaker. A former philosophy and architecture student, Chytilová enrolled at FAMU in 1957, the only female in her class. There she discovered a love for improvisation, nonprofessional actors, and cinema verité—anything that rejected the idea of film as an exact science. Daisies incorporates all this and more in a wildly experimental narrative that is considered the movement’s singular feminist statement. Although Chytilová has denied that it was her intention to make a feminist film per se, it’s easy to see why decades of scholarship has made this assertion. The two teenage protagonists, Marie I and Marie II (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, neither of whom had any acting experience), refuse to play by the rules of the patriarchal culture around them, spending the film’s seventy-odd (very odd) minutes tearing up the world: exploiting weak-willed older men, consuming enormous amounts of food and drink, wreaking inebriated havoc, and finally descending into pure annihilation. In one of the film’s most famous sequences, they gleefully cut up a succession of phallic objects (bananas, sausages, bread rolls) with scissors. Chytilová ensures that something unexpected occurs in virtually every shot and edit, juxtaposing images with dissonant sounds, abruptly changing color filters within scenes, and fragmenting many sequences through unmotivated montage.
On the surface, Daisies’ assemblage of outlandish scenarios enacted by two ferociously antiestablishment figures would seem to mark it as simple anarchic slapstick, like a New Wave Marx Brothers comedy. But Chytilová has called her film “a philosophical documentary in the form of a farce.” The Maries are not merely railing against a society that views them as little more than objects (in the opening scene, Marie II calls herself a panna, which translates as both “doll” and “virgin” in Czech, and the girls play with, and at one point remove, their limbs as though they were the plastic appendages of mannequins); they are also existentially angry. Early on, they decide the world is meaningless, “spoiled,” which they use as justification to spoil themselves. By refusing to cultivate a psychological connection between audience and character, and by confounding any sense of narrative momentum, Chytilová and her screenwriting partner Ester Krumbachová create protagonists who seem to have no future or past. Blank slates, they have been interpreted over the years variously as embodiments of healthy rebellion and the banality of evil. Either way, they are good representations of Chytilová’s belief that “people are primitives and aesthetes at the same time.”
Though Daisies remains playful to its climactic orgy, it is ultimately a dark, subversive work, aggressively critiquing those who might find it offensive before they even have a chance to complain: its closing dedication is to people who “get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce,” over the sounds of firing artillery.
Unsurprisingly, Daisies was banned (partly on the grounds of food wastage)—the case for many of the era’s most daring works. Chytilová made one more movie in the sixties, The Fruit of Paradise, which was briefly released in 1969, before being pulled from theaters. At this time, the post–Prague Spring authorities were already cracking down on films with even a whiff of subversion. Like many of her fellow directors, Chytilová was blacklisted, and she wasn’t allowed to make another movie until 1976’s The Apple Game. Though she is best remembered for the shock of Daisies, Chytilová has had a long career—as a teacher and as a maker of continually challenging films. In the past decade, her most successful films have included a documentary about the life of her late Daisies collaborator Krumbachová, titled Searching for Ester (2005), and a farcical tale of a psychologist’s daily travails, Pleasant Moments (2006).
- Michael Koresky, Criterion Collection
Class discussion assignment for the film:
Please choose one scene or shot from Daisies and compare its formal style to one of the following cinema movements: Classic Hollywood, neorealism, modernism, or postwar French cinema. Does your chosen clip reflect the style (tone, cinematography, editing, acting, or mise-en-scène) of any of the film movements we have studied so far? Why or why not? You should embed a still or YouTube clip from Daisies in your post.
In addition, please include a screen capture or clip from a representative film from the movement you are comparing Daisies to; show us what is similar or dissimilar between the two films/scenes/shots. The comparison can be with a film we screened in class or something you have found on your own from one of the movements we have studied. Please choose a film/scene that someone from your group has not already discussed.
Here's an article that Johnson provided as an introduction Click Here
A really good explanation of the film Click Here
French era... Notes i made for the essay...but only used one.
the clip clop of heels like tati
the still images cut - like la jetee or marienbad
rougeness of breathless
experimental like Maya dern
Finished essay:
Ida Z. daRoza
National Cinemas Post 1945: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia
This photo collage piece in Daisies (1966) impressed me as the most surreal, interesting film editing technique I’ve ever seen. The actors are cutting playfully with scissors and then they surreally start cutting each other’s heads and limbs and parts of the apartment into a moving collage. The film itself is cut up and the film pieces are floating around the screen. I found this reminiscent of techniques from the French New Wave.
In Daisies the color kept changing from black and white, to color as it did in this scene. The first thing I thought of was the one-color scene in Cleo 5 to 7 (1962) of the tarot cards. It was an artistic surprise introducing one color shot to a black and white film. While Agnes Varda’s had that one-color image, Věra Chytilová’s Daisies explodes into a full kaleidoscope of colors. She uses black and white, color, or a specific color only or sepia throughout the film in beautiful interplay and artistic style.
Daisies uses a technique of photo stills montage. This is also seen in La Jetee (1963) by Left Bank director Chris Marker. In La Jetee still images, not moving images are strung together with narrative in a unique film style. Chris Marker did this again later in his career in Sans Soleil (1983). The film cuts segments of video together in kind of a collage going back and forth to different countries in his documentary while a female narrator speaks. These are new styles of filming not seen in the past.
Another French New Wave film director that plays with time is Alan Resanis in Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Here the overall story is in the present but it keeps jumping back to a story of the previous year in unexpected cut backs. Similarly, in Daisies the main story is of the two Marie’s on a rebellious adventure but the film keeps jumping back to another time and past conversation with the two women sitting at a beach in simple bikinis.
Agnes Varda experiments similarly to Věra Chytilová's Daisies with surreal artistic style. Agnes Varda says in The Beaches of Agnes 2008 that she loves surrealist art and uses it in clever scenes in that film. Both women are icons of film history as the sole female directors of their own countries’ New Wave movement. That takes a woman of confidence with a strong voice.
GRADE 3/3
This was my comment to a student who compared Daisies to Classic Hollywood.
Citlaly's post:
National Cinemas Post 1945: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia
In the following scene from Daisies (1966) by Věra Chytilová, Marie I and Marie II enter a bar where two professional dancers are doing a performance. While the dancers are performing Marie I and Marie II decide to consume quite a lot of alcohol, they also start bothering the sophisticated people who are enjoying the show, and ultimately the two Maries are taking all the attention making the dancers go unnoticed. Comparing the style of the scene to the Classical Hollywood period style conventions, the scene appears quite rebellious. During the Classical Hollywood period in the United States, films were carefully crafted. The editing was precise and thoughtful, the films contained detailed elaborate narratives, the mise-en-scene was unrestrained and almost impeccable, and the actors were well trained. Overall, these films were methodical. However, directors lacked the liberty to express certain sensitive topics.
In the scene from Daisies where the main characters are at the bar, the framing hardly ever changes, and it doesn’t appear to be very meticulous; the scene starts with the original color and then the colors change continually with the use of filters, the women who play the Mares were not professional actors, and there is no dialogue. And as I mentioned before, the characters are acting unrestrained. Comparing it to a scene from the film Casablanca (1942) which belongs to the Classical Hollywood period; the characters are carefully positioned, the composition in the frame often changes to build tension and drama, the setting was carefully arranged, and the camera movements are calculated.
Of course, both the Classical Hollywood period and the Czech New Wave followed different sets of conventions and were from different periods of time. The Czech New Wave finally gave filmmakers the opportunity to experiment, the freedom to express themselves and to make a commentary. Daisies not only achieves this sense of rebellion through its characters and story but also through its style. The cinematography completely breaks any rules established before about filmmaking, and that is what makes it so significant.
Hello Citlaly,
I've again learned a lot from your analysis of film and about Classic Hollywood which I have not yet studied.
This analysis "The editing was precise and thoughtful, the films contained detailed elaborate narratives, the mise-en-scene was unrestrained and almost impeccable, and the actors were well trained." is an excellent insight and the photo of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942) looks very clean and perfect, not a wrinkle in the suit.
I've enjoyed the New Wave breaks with tradition and experimentation and I've thought that they must be superior artistically. I realize now, that there is a lot to appreciate from the old classics in their discipline and talented actors. A different school of filmmaking but still magnificent films.
Citlaly's response to me:
Hello Ida! completely agree with you, I think they both offer very different ideas and perspectives, and we should value that cinema can be so flexible.
This was the exam:
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