Daisies (1966)

Daisies 

"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."


"Daisies (Czech: Sedmikrásky) is a 1966 Czechoslovak comedy-drama film written and directed by Věra Chytilová considered a milestone of the Nová Vlna movement. Made with the support of the state-sponsored film studio, it follows two teenage girls, both named Marie, played by Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, who engage in strange pranks.

Innovatively filmed, and released two years before the Prague Spring, the film was labeled as "depicting the wanton" by the Czech authorities and banned. Director Chytilová was forbidden to work in her homeland until 1975. The film received the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association."

‘Daisies,’ From the Czech Director Vera Chytilova, at BAM

"THE Czech New Wave is perhaps best known for wry, poignant tales like Milos Forman’s “Loves of a Blonde” and Jiri Menzel’s “Closely Watched Trains.” Accompanying the thaw in Czechoslovakia’s political climate during the early to mid-1960s, these and films by Jaromil Jires, Ivan Passer and Jan Nemec demonstrated new creative freedom, stylistic panache and the possibility of social critique. International acclaim followed, including two Oscar victories.

But the extraordinary 1966 film “Daisies,” which begins a weeklong run at BAMcinématek on Friday, represents an exhilarating, lesser-known strain of the Czech New Wave. This radically mischievous work was the second feature of the wave’s sole female director, Vera Chytilova. In her visually arresting, capricious film — full of colorful experiments, dazzling collage effects and surrealist antics — two dangerously bored young women have anarchic fun in a series of loosely connected episodes.

This was apparently too much for the Communist government. One petition from a member of the country’s National Assembly read, “We ask these cultural workers: How long will they poison the life of working people?” “Daisies” was banned from theaters and export, along with Mr. Nemec’s Kafka-esque “Report on the Party and Guests.”"

In a phone interview from Prague, Mr. Nemec, 75, said of “Daisies,” “They didn’t understand what the whole movie was about, but they had a feeling that its celebration of anarchism or revelry was dangerous.” (Ms. Chytilova, 83, declined through a family member to be interviewed.)

Both movies resurfaced during the Prague Spring of 1968, but the Soviet invasion that August stymied the country’s political and cultural change. Ms. Chytilova was able to shoot another film, “The Fruit of Paradise” (1970), but was otherwise refused permission to make movies at the Barrandov Studios in Prague.

After a few minutes of the film’s free, unpredictable energy you see what made people nervous. The two young women turn a food-filled banquet table into a catwalk, prank older male suitors on humiliating dates, and get drunk at a nightclub and upstage its performers. They lounge half-dressed in their green-accented flat, the walls covered with phone numbers and flower engravings, munching on pickles and sparring playfully in singsong tones.

Their creativity and destructiveness are “two sides of the same coin,” Ms. Chytilova said in an interview during the 2002 Prague on Film Festival in London. The twinned heroines — one blonde and laureled like a nymph, the other a taller brunette — act like dolls run amok, but they’re also impish adolescents tweaking society through their experiments in self-definition. “We can try anything once,” they exclaim in their existential repartee.

But especially amid the flux of 1960s Czechoslovakia their free-spirited activity was open to unsettling interpretations. Do their games represent the dangers of idleness and ideological shapelessness, or do the women personify a punklike liberation? And what to make of the archival war footage that opens and closes the film?

“It’s very ambiguous!” Michal Bregant, director of the National Film Archive in Prague, wrote in an e-mail. “It looks like an anarchist statement, but the director wanted to warn what might be the consequences of irresponsible human behavior.”

For Ms. Chytilova the attraction of filmmaking had been anything but ambiguous. Born in Ostrava, she studied philosophy and architecture in Brno for two years and had stints as a draftswoman, photograph retoucher and model. But she found her calling at FAMU, the estimable Prague film school. “I became like a hunter focused on his goal,” she says in a 2004 documentary. But as in other precincts of international cinema Ms. Chytilova found herself in the minority.

“She was the first female director in our country, and it was not so easy,” said Mr. Nemec, who noted her dominating character. (Years later Mr. Nemec and Ms. Chytilova would teach in the directing department of FAMU: “Now at this late age, she is my boss. It’s very funny!”)

After making a thesis film in 1961 — evocatively titled “The Ceiling” — Ms. Chytilova was not eager to become someone else’s assistant at Barrandov Studios. It was directing or nothing. “I said, forget it. I don’t want to be alive,” she says in the 2004 documentary.

Eventually she made a feature, “Something Different” (1963), a vérité-inspired tale also about two women (a gymnast and a housewife), followed a few years later by “Daisies.” And she later fought being banned from filmmaking. In 1975 she petitioned President Gustav Husak directly (stating, “I want to work!”) and was allowed to make “The Apple Game” (1976), a vindicating popular success.

Ms. Chytilova also had outstanding collaborators. “Daisies” would not be what it is without Ester Krumbachova, an artist and costume designer who wrote the screenplay with Ms. Chytilova and helped design the film, and the cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera, who died in 1991 and was Ms. Chytilova’s husband. The leads are played by winningly game nonprofessionals, Ivana Karbanova and Jitka Cerhova.

Together the team created a film filled with eye-catching imagery, like Ms. Karbanova wearing nothing but strategically placed butterfly pin-boards, or a scene in which the two women appear to slice and dice the screen, shattering the image. (“Daisies” screens at BAMcinématek in a new 35-millimeter print from Janus Films; Criterion Collection’s recent box set “Pearls of the Czech New Wave” pairs Ms. Chytilova and Mr. Nemec’s banned films.)

Ms. Chytilova continued to make films into the 2000s, but “Daisies” remains her best-known work.

“You don’t really begin working creatively until you are at a point where you don’t know,” she said a year after making “Daisies.” Today her film still has that fresh, try-anything outlook.

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References: 
1. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisies_(film))

2.  (https://www.criterion.com/films/27854-daisies)

3. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/movies/daisies-from-the-czech-director-vera-chytilova-at-bam.html?_r=0)