Vera Cytilova's Daisies

GR Film Buff Perrin Randlett:
We at GrassRoutes love films by Women! So I had to do a spotlight on my cinematic hero, and founding member of Czech New Wave, Vera Chytilova.

In Daisies, Vera created two interesting, unconventional female characters, both of whom I fell in love with. I have studied up about Vera's life and works and found her to be an inspiration to female directors across the globe.

Before gaining a place at the Prague Film School (FAMU) in 1958, Vera Chytilova studied philosophy and architecture, working as a draughtswoman and a model. At FAMU she studied with Otakar Vavra, a founding father of Czech New Wave. The Czech New Wave was marked by renewed attention to image and form. Directors in the late fifties and early sixties combined socially relevant themes with traditional Czech lyricism. Chytilovas filmic experiments incorporated the progressive formal and structural innovations of her predecessors, and she was also influenced by avant-garde techniques that broke narrative convention.
Vera Chytilovas early filmic works were impacted by the decree of nationalism of Czechoslovak cinema. The political atmosphere was one of censorship: On August 11, 1945, the President of the Republic signed a decree that took film production out of private hands and entrusted it to the care of the state. As a result of this decree Filmmakers were forced to be much more conscious about what their messages were, As Jan Zalman said about the 1947 decree: “That date marked the beginning of the purposeful growth and advance of Czechoslovak film art.”
Because she was forced to find metaphors for the social issues she wished to comment on, Chytilova has developed a way of communicating through textured and layered images. This level of aesthetic complexity runs through all of her films but is particularity developed in Daisies, her best-known work.


Film Focus: Daisies
The opening credits of Daisies are juxtaposed with black and white film images of war, and once the political context has been alluded to, the film cuts to the two heroines. The girls are sitting very rigid-like dolls. They turn to each other and decide in a short dialogue that the world has gone bad, so they might as well go bad too. This exciting conclusion leads one girl to slap the other, and she falls down into a grassy meadow. Thus begins the first of many poetic cuts and juxtapositions in space and time. Clarie Clouzot says of Daisies, “There is no involvement, no conventional chronology, no psychological development…no narration.” But Chytilova did not merely destroy narrative form; she created a poetic format in its place. (Hames)
The repetitive structure of Daises alternates major scenes set in the girl’s apartments with other central scenes that take place in the ladies room, the restaurant, and the railway station.
In the apartment the girls are shown performing daily rituals, eating snacks, cutting with scissors to make paper montages, messing with clothes. The room scenes are most revealing about their inner thoughts, since it is here that they talk to each other, their discussions reflecting on their successes, failures and future plans. After they get bored inside, they go explore the outside world. The ladies room is usually the first place they visit, it’s a grounding place for them. In the ladies room they steal from the nice old attendant who brings them coffee, they observe slender fashionable women with eager eyes, and they fight about smoking and their schemes, “Where are you?! I cant get rid of him myself!!”
When Daisies is screened in a contemporary Western setting the film is often accompanied by joyful, exclusively feminine laughter, in part because the characters fail to conform to the stereotypes expected by a male audience. Chytilova demands freedom for herself as creator and freedom for the audience as spectators, intending that the interplay between the two should be active. In this way she evokes a dialogue between the film and its audience, making her work an open-ended conversation between her and the filmbuffs who adore her work.