Background:

- Reception & censorship

- The film was produced in a state-sponsored studio but outraged the Czech authorities,
who severely criticized its “wanton” excesses, including its merry destruction of food
(reason they gave for banning: wastage of food)
- What they really objected to was the avant-garde form of the film and the fact
that the girls didn’t provide a moral example
- Made it very difficult for Chytilová to have any more films made for the next 7 years or so
- International acclaim, screened at multiple film festivals
- Director: Vera Chytilová
- Considered a key part of the Czech new wave (which I’ll get to in a moment)
- Was raised a Catholic in communist Czechoslovakia (“which gave her an exhaustive
education in the layers of power and patriarchy”)
- Prague Film School, only female student there
- Certainly understandable how Daisies, an early film of hers, would capture the
frustrations of being in a male-dominated industry & society, and how the idea of
becoming as bad and debauched as the world would be cathartic and appealing
- Said in an interview (about the banning of her films) that what communist officials
feared most was hysterical women, and so I could be that, I could be a hysterical
woman
- Historical context
- Censorship & artistic expression: 1966 - two years before Prague Spring; so it did not
enjoy the relaxation of censors and greater freedom of expression and criticism in early
1968; but there was a general liberalization in the 1960s that made it possible to reject
the 50s social realist style
- Ideal socialist woman: in a period where the Stalinist ideal model of women as workers,
or labor heroines, had given way to a more traditional emphasis on motherhood and
femininity (dual role of worker and mother contributing to greater good of society)
- Czech new wave, film movement
- New wave usually referring to a type of avant-garde, experimental and anti-Hollywood
films emerging in the 1950s and 60s, usually associated with “free” artists in the west
- Czech new wave films (1960s) rejected socialist realism, used dark and absurd humor,
experimented with style and often contained satires of communism and Czech society
- Quote James Tweedie (film critic, Global New Waves) that I think is really relevant to the
Czech New Wave & Daisies: “The films suggest that personal gratification is itself a
socially powerful act, and auto-annihilation offers a radical alternative to efficient
participation in or continued obedience to a social order ruled by old men.”
- Genre itself is subversive and in fact a lot of western critics did see it as a sort of “bastion
of freedom” under communist oppression
Scenes:
1. (32:45)
- A scene of destruction
- Fire burning, ashes falling
- Eating and/or cutting up phallic shaped foods (sausages, eggs, pickles and bananas)
- Mocking male genitalia and rejecting the power of men
- Green apples strewn everywhere
- Recurring symbol throughout the film: could be a biblical reference to the story of
Adam and Eve
 - The fact that the girls had eaten the apples and had carelessly thrown it
everywhere is an indication that they have “fallen”, but “fallen” out of their own
free will
- Male voice on the phone that is droning loving platitudes is being ignored,
highlighting its absurdity
- Not revolting against the patriarchy or their pursuers, not a consciously
feminist act; their indifference towards men is in and of itself an act of
radical revolt, in that the girls are feminine or even hyper-feminine but at
the same time they have detached their femininity from men, delightedly
indulging in destruction and expressing their personal inner impulses
- All of this (casual and cheerful destruction) is a release of energy and destructive impulse
under an oppressive patriarchy that puts them in stereotypes, and under a communist
regime that isn’t actually providing the excesses of food that they’re eating and abusing.
You can see the girls indulging in chaos, decadence and destruction, subversive and
cathartic act that undermines everything that
- Use of hyper-femininity (overacting stereotypes - giggling, girly and infantile voice, playfulness;
overt girlishness would have been seen as indecent, strange and slatternly in 1960s
Czechoslovakia) to ridicule and manipulate, even, the men who pursue them
- Ideal socialist female figure: neither mothers nor workers
2. (1:13:35)
- Probably the only scene with overt political criticism in the entire film
- “If we’re good and hardworking, we’ll be happy…” - repeated over and over again while the girls
are cleaning the room - clearly socialist message given to men as well as women to be good
workers, and work hard to collectively build a better world for everyone. But you can see this has
not actually come true, from:
- Bleak colors in an otherwise very colorful and even visually jarring film; girls are lying among
plates and bottles that are still broken despite the attempt to place them back together; wearing
what looked like newspapers tied together rather than actual clothes
- Self-delusion: “we’ve put everything to rights”, “we’re both so happy”
- One of the girls asked the other to “say we’re happy”, the other girl hesitated as if unsure
- Communist rule could not mend what was destroyed (by WWII? Or, if you take the
decadence of the two girls as a critique on bourgeois /bour-jwa/ greed, excess and
gluttony, then this scene is trying to say that communism is unable to repair a world
corrupted by capitalism) it could only create the illusion that the world was repaired
- Chandelier crashing down; black and white scenes of devastation & bombing: new threats to
peace and to the survival of humanity (nuclear weapons), or the ever-looming prospect of war -
this is not a new, healed world that’s progressing into greater happiness for everyone
- Nihilistic message that “nothing matters”, as the girls are always saying, that thing’s aren’t going
to get better, and maybe the only happiness people can have is in the very process of chaos and
decadence shown earlier in the film
Questions
- Is Daisies better understood as a historical source, or a work of art in and of itself, and how far
can we take it as a depiction of reality? (highly surreal and absurdist nature, so rich in symbolism
and so layered that there are many ways that we can interpret it - you might even say that it
resists easy interpretation; different from realistic films and documentaries we have seen before) -
this might lead us to question how we use films like this one for historical analysis
- How politicized were gender and femininity? As in, how did socialism and the state affect how
women saw themselves? Because this isn’t really apparent in this film - the connection between
ideology and gender aren’t really discussed