Director: Vera Chytilova
Writers: Vera Chytilova, Pavel Juracek, Ester Krumbachova, Jaroslav Kucera, Zdenek Blaha, Vaclav Nyvit, Bohumil Smida, Ladislav Fikar
Photography: Jaroslav Kucera
Music: Jiri Slitr, Jiri Sust
Editor: Miroslav Hajek
Cast: Ivana Karbanova, Jitka Cerhova, Julius Albert, Ester Krumbachova, Marie Ceskova
Taking the US-centric view, it’s tempting to connect this tidy little experimental art film from the Soviet-era Czechoslovakia to the famous Daisy ad that Lyndon Johnson used against Barry Goldwater two years earlier in the 1964 presidential contest. That 60-second spot—aired only once—involved a 3-year-old girl, a daisy flower, and a mushroom cloud. Daisies similarly features images of warfare and bombing and one way or another seems to be about destruction. It's admittedly a tenuous connection—I’m not even sure Daisies includes a mushroom cloud.
Most of the screen time of Daisies is devoted to a Betty and Veronica pair of young women—ID’d as Marie I (Jitka Cerhova, the brunette) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanova, the blonde). Marie II wears a garland of daisies in most of her scenes. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that no one associated with this picture had any idea who Barry Goldwater was, let alone anything about whether or why the Daisy ad existed in the first place. In many ways the vibe in Daisies points in another direction altogether for me, reminiscent of the 1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating, which is much longer but similarly features two happy-go-lucky young women and their various randomized hallucinatory adventures.
It’s likely there are many more Czechoslovakian pictures I don’t know providing a context for Daisies, which hits me as pretty weird, challenging and seemingly out of nowhere. It is colorful and dazzling enough even to be considered psychedelic in places, but I’m not sure that’s what director and cowriter Vera Chytilova (with a team of seven more credited as writers) was going for. In fact, I’m not sure what she was going for.
Taking the US-centric view, it’s tempting to connect this tidy little experimental art film from the Soviet-era Czechoslovakia to the famous Daisy ad that Lyndon Johnson used against Barry Goldwater two years earlier in the 1964 presidential contest. That 60-second spot—aired only once—involved a 3-year-old girl, a daisy flower, and a mushroom cloud. Daisies similarly features images of warfare and bombing and one way or another seems to be about destruction. It's admittedly a tenuous connection—I’m not even sure Daisies includes a mushroom cloud.
Most of the screen time of Daisies is devoted to a Betty and Veronica pair of young women—ID’d as Marie I (Jitka Cerhova, the brunette) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanova, the blonde). Marie II wears a garland of daisies in most of her scenes. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that no one associated with this picture had any idea who Barry Goldwater was, let alone anything about whether or why the Daisy ad existed in the first place. In many ways the vibe in Daisies points in another direction altogether for me, reminiscent of the 1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating, which is much longer but similarly features two happy-go-lucky young women and their various randomized hallucinatory adventures.
It’s likely there are many more Czechoslovakian pictures I don’t know providing a context for Daisies, which hits me as pretty weird, challenging and seemingly out of nowhere. It is colorful and dazzling enough even to be considered psychedelic in places, but I’m not sure that’s what director and cowriter Vera Chytilova (with a team of seven more credited as writers) was going for. In fact, I’m not sure what she was going for.
Chytilova denied it was feminist, but I suspect that is more a matter of semantics and associations with the term that she rejected. Certainly Marie and Marie and the game they play are images of independent women, however absurd. They entice men to buy them food and then get rid of them by escorting them to a train.
Empty consumerism is another candidate, though I’m not sure how pressing that was in a Soviet-controlled society even in the ‘60s. In terms of consumerism, or let’s say consumptionism, eating food does stand as a major motif all the way through. They are often in restaurants. They gorge on cake with messy mouths, take lusty crackling bites out of apples. Apples are all over the place in many scenes. The way the Maries eat is strange too, wantonly, cutting food up with scissors and generally making a big mess.
Is it pop art? The era says Maybe. The visual attack of Daisies shifts from black & white to color to sepia- and cyan-saturated overlays and other filters, sometimes changing by the second or even fractions of seconds, changing palettes the way motel signs blink on and off. These filters and the picture’s gaze of the Maries also reminded me of Andy Warhol.
Chytilova, or one of the seven other writers, seemed to anticipate certain criticisms of the film as wasteful, with a dedication at the end. My Criterion channel version gave it as “This film is dedicated to all those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle” whereas the Wikipedia translation seems a little more on point: "to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce."
This seems to be a preemptive apologia for the closing scene of a big banquet, attended only by the Maries, although possibly they are there early and illicitly. They sample the food and make another big mess—“sloppy mess” is a prevailing note of the mise en scene here. When they have had their fill they get up on the table and dance, stepping on the food to make further messes. Then it’s on to climbing up into the chandelier to rock their cares away.
I am pretty sure now that countryman Milos Forman, transitioned to the US and Hollywood in the ‘70s, paid Chytilova and Daisies an homage in the scene in Hair where the dirty hippie Berger crashes an upscale formal wedding and gets up on the banquet table in his dirty tennis shoes and sings Nina Simone’s “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life” while making little messes.
Daisies is basically senseless, but Forman captures the spirit of it in that scene. It’s rebellious. It’s destructive by affect. It thumbs its nose at the upper class. It wants to charm you, seduce you—to what end? The visuals can be arresting abstractions, too-brief Fantasia / Yellow Submarine-like forays into the optic pleasures of patterns and animation effects. The wardrobe for the principals is ever-changing, ever-fashionable, ever-sexy from a remove. The film stock is all over the place.
It goes out on more scenes of war, like it opened with (which also includes a nice bow to Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times). What those bombs and explosions are doing to people and the landscape, Marie and Marie seem intent on doing to society at large. Not just to the Soviets, not just to Western civilization, but to you and me too, to anyone looking. It seems more quaint now than dangerous in any way—an artifact of the Cold War era—but the visuals can really light up the cortex in any number of pleasurable ways. That will probably never change.
Empty consumerism is another candidate, though I’m not sure how pressing that was in a Soviet-controlled society even in the ‘60s. In terms of consumerism, or let’s say consumptionism, eating food does stand as a major motif all the way through. They are often in restaurants. They gorge on cake with messy mouths, take lusty crackling bites out of apples. Apples are all over the place in many scenes. The way the Maries eat is strange too, wantonly, cutting food up with scissors and generally making a big mess.
Is it pop art? The era says Maybe. The visual attack of Daisies shifts from black & white to color to sepia- and cyan-saturated overlays and other filters, sometimes changing by the second or even fractions of seconds, changing palettes the way motel signs blink on and off. These filters and the picture’s gaze of the Maries also reminded me of Andy Warhol.
Chytilova, or one of the seven other writers, seemed to anticipate certain criticisms of the film as wasteful, with a dedication at the end. My Criterion channel version gave it as “This film is dedicated to all those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle” whereas the Wikipedia translation seems a little more on point: "to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce."
This seems to be a preemptive apologia for the closing scene of a big banquet, attended only by the Maries, although possibly they are there early and illicitly. They sample the food and make another big mess—“sloppy mess” is a prevailing note of the mise en scene here. When they have had their fill they get up on the table and dance, stepping on the food to make further messes. Then it’s on to climbing up into the chandelier to rock their cares away.
I am pretty sure now that countryman Milos Forman, transitioned to the US and Hollywood in the ‘70s, paid Chytilova and Daisies an homage in the scene in Hair where the dirty hippie Berger crashes an upscale formal wedding and gets up on the banquet table in his dirty tennis shoes and sings Nina Simone’s “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life” while making little messes.
Daisies is basically senseless, but Forman captures the spirit of it in that scene. It’s rebellious. It’s destructive by affect. It thumbs its nose at the upper class. It wants to charm you, seduce you—to what end? The visuals can be arresting abstractions, too-brief Fantasia / Yellow Submarine-like forays into the optic pleasures of patterns and animation effects. The wardrobe for the principals is ever-changing, ever-fashionable, ever-sexy from a remove. The film stock is all over the place.
It goes out on more scenes of war, like it opened with (which also includes a nice bow to Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times). What those bombs and explosions are doing to people and the landscape, Marie and Marie seem intent on doing to society at large. Not just to the Soviets, not just to Western civilization, but to you and me too, to anyone looking. It seems more quaint now than dangerous in any way—an artifact of the Cold War era—but the visuals can really light up the cortex in any number of pleasurable ways. That will probably never change.
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