![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI just watched Vera Chytilova’s Daisies and you guys, what the fuck is this movie?
As the person writing the post, I am the one in a position to answer this: it’s a movie from the Czech New Wave, originally released in 1966 to the acclaim of Europeans, the bafflement of Americans, and the horror of the Communist Party. The movie was pulled from major Czech cinemas on the grounds that it depicted wanton food wastage, and Chytilova had trouble getting work as a filmmaker again for quite some time.
As you might guess from the fact that the censors eventually settled on “food wastage” as a reason to ratchet back the film’s release, there’s nothing specific in here that you can point at as anti-Communist. But the mood of the movie is one of nihilistic destruction, totally at odds with the spirit of “let’s build communism together!”
(I suspect that Americans and Eastern Bloc countries would have recoiled at being told that they had this in common with each other, but that squeaky clean well-adjusted constructive citizen contributing to society ideal are SO similar between Soviet propaganda and American advertisements. Apparently the zeitgeist is inescapable.)
But again: what the fuck is this movie? This description doesn’t capture the sheer weirdness of watching it. The story centers on two teenage girls, both named Marie, who decide that the world is spoiled and therefore they might as well spoil themselves too. I’m not sure if “spoiled” in Czech has the same dual meaning as in English, but both meanings apply here: the two Maries want to partake in the spoilage of the world by being spoiled with material things that they haven’t worked to earn.
Therefore, they spend much of the movie mooching massive dinners off older men, whom they then send packing on the train; lounging around in bed eating sausage and bananas that they cut with scissors, while listening to a young man profess his love over the telephone; and discovering a banquet laid in the top floor of a factory, which they proceed to destroy in a food fight.
But this description doesn’t do justice to the sheer trippiness of this film, which begins and ends with war footage, which might mean something (the war has rendered life meaningless?) or might just be a send-up of war films: the film is dedicated “to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce,” a pretty clear send-up of pompous dedications to the soldiers fallen in past wars. The film cycles seemingly at random between black-and-white, color, and shots taken through a color filter, so suddenly the two Maries are blue, or red, or green.
The storyline similarly wanders all over the place. There’s not a plot as such, really just a series of scenes illustrating the Maries’ various strategies to partake in the spoilage of the world; and also scenes that don’t seem to take place in time at all, digressions where the girls muse about their philosophy, or fantasy sequences where they use those scissors (scissors are leitmotif throughout the movie) not to get sausage or paper, but to cut up the whole mise en scene as if it were a magazine spread.
Possibly I’m too American to fully enjoy this sort of thing (the American critics at the time just didn’t get it), but it’s definitely… well, it’s very much its own thing, and even if I didn’t exactly enjoy it, there’s something impressive about Chytilova’s ability to capture so exactly her own madcap nihilistic vision.
As the person writing the post, I am the one in a position to answer this: it’s a movie from the Czech New Wave, originally released in 1966 to the acclaim of Europeans, the bafflement of Americans, and the horror of the Communist Party. The movie was pulled from major Czech cinemas on the grounds that it depicted wanton food wastage, and Chytilova had trouble getting work as a filmmaker again for quite some time.
As you might guess from the fact that the censors eventually settled on “food wastage” as a reason to ratchet back the film’s release, there’s nothing specific in here that you can point at as anti-Communist. But the mood of the movie is one of nihilistic destruction, totally at odds with the spirit of “let’s build communism together!”
(I suspect that Americans and Eastern Bloc countries would have recoiled at being told that they had this in common with each other, but that squeaky clean well-adjusted constructive citizen contributing to society ideal are SO similar between Soviet propaganda and American advertisements. Apparently the zeitgeist is inescapable.)
But again: what the fuck is this movie? This description doesn’t capture the sheer weirdness of watching it. The story centers on two teenage girls, both named Marie, who decide that the world is spoiled and therefore they might as well spoil themselves too. I’m not sure if “spoiled” in Czech has the same dual meaning as in English, but both meanings apply here: the two Maries want to partake in the spoilage of the world by being spoiled with material things that they haven’t worked to earn.
Therefore, they spend much of the movie mooching massive dinners off older men, whom they then send packing on the train; lounging around in bed eating sausage and bananas that they cut with scissors, while listening to a young man profess his love over the telephone; and discovering a banquet laid in the top floor of a factory, which they proceed to destroy in a food fight.
But this description doesn’t do justice to the sheer trippiness of this film, which begins and ends with war footage, which might mean something (the war has rendered life meaningless?) or might just be a send-up of war films: the film is dedicated “to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce,” a pretty clear send-up of pompous dedications to the soldiers fallen in past wars. The film cycles seemingly at random between black-and-white, color, and shots taken through a color filter, so suddenly the two Maries are blue, or red, or green.
The storyline similarly wanders all over the place. There’s not a plot as such, really just a series of scenes illustrating the Maries’ various strategies to partake in the spoilage of the world; and also scenes that don’t seem to take place in time at all, digressions where the girls muse about their philosophy, or fantasy sequences where they use those scissors (scissors are leitmotif throughout the movie) not to get sausage or paper, but to cut up the whole mise en scene as if it were a magazine spread.
Possibly I’m too American to fully enjoy this sort of thing (the American critics at the time just didn’t get it), but it’s definitely… well, it’s very much its own thing, and even if I didn’t exactly enjoy it, there’s something impressive about Chytilova’s ability to capture so exactly her own madcap nihilistic vision.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-15 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-15 08:42 pm (UTC)