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Daisies
(Sedmikrasky)
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Vera
Chytilova , Czechoslovakia, 1966, 74 min.
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In Daisies the two protagonists, Marie (Ivana Karbarnova)
and Marie (Jitka Cerhova), profess to "having gone bad."
The problem is, though, because Daisies is a leading example
of the Czech New Wave (a 1960s movement in Czechoslovakia paralleling
the French New Wave) and as part of such is in defiance of both
Social Realist and Hollywood conventions of simplistic meaning-
and message creation, the Maries are not clear cut criminals. Their
"destructive" actions can even be interpreted as critical
social and political interventions. Or, they could just be "evil"
as, curiously, a 1975 letter by Chytilova to the Czech President
suggests. Completed in 1966, the dazzlingly experimental Daisies
was immediately the target of political attack and experienced only
a brief public exhibition in 1967. A speech delivered in the Czech
National Assembly on May 17, 1967 (on behalf of twenty-one deputies)
vilifies the film: "I would like to demonstrate how money is
wasted which the state budget needs. The National Assembly has the
duty to express its opinion concerning basic economic, political,
and cultural matters of our Republic…[Daisies shows]
a road of our cultural life on which no honest worker, farmer, or
intellectual would like to embark." |
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| Influenced
by both the subjectivity of the French New Wave and the documentary
objectivity of cinema verite and Italian Neo-Realism, the Czech
directors worked within the bounds of these two influences. The
Czech New Wave exhibited a subtle mix of documentary techniques
with fiction. Nonprofessional actors, improvised dialogue, gritty
camera work, and keen observations of everyday life were combined
with allegory and surreal content to produce highly personal filmmaking
styles. Themes involving inhumanity, limitations placed on everyday
people, and the moral issues of modern life dominated these films.
- Facets DVD |
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| Everyone
does what they can to avoid thinking. Laziness is the most basic
human trait. People don't want to think—they can't make the
connection between entertainment and thought. They want immediate
kicks. People will not be human until they get pleasure from thought—only
a thinking person can be a full person. - Vera Chytilova |
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| Part
of the Czech New Wave of the early 1960s, Vera Chytilova made films
that were acclaimed for their visual experimentation and formal
innovation. While this reputation gained her international respect,
it also resulted in criticism by officials in her own country, which
disapproved of avant-garde styles and themes. The story of her career
then is one of irony and contradiction—the very reason her
films were acclaimed worldwide made it difficult for her to work
in her own country. - Facets DVD |
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I regret that I have to tell you that I am still the victim of unfair
discrimination, even though there is not the slightest justification
for this because it is clear that all the opposition to me is based
on a mixture of false assumption, personal hostility, and male chauvinism.
I hope you will not permit it to become a shameful fact that in
a country which boasts of its socialist ideals a woman film director
whose films have brought international recognition to its socialist
cinema and who is the mother of two children is unjustly persecuted
and deprived of work and of the opportunity to meet her colleagues
at the very time when we are celebrating International Women's Year.
- VC
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When
I tried to reply to the questions put to me by members of the commission,
when I asked one of its woman members who had condemned my films
to tell me of at least one anti-socialist idea from any of my pictures
and she was unable to do so—she had obviously not seen them—the
chairman of the Party organisation, comrade Leiter, admonished me,
saying that they alone would talk and I was just to sit and listen.
I did not know the Party code, he told me, and was unable to think
in Marxist and Leninist terms. - Vera Chytilova, "Letter to
President Gustav Husak," Autumn 1975
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Though
completed in 1966, Daisies was not released until the following
year...Officially, one deputy from the National Assembly complained
that the imagery of the film revealed a wastage of food, referring
to the scenes in which the main characters destroy a banquet setting.
The film was officially condemned and banned until 1967. As soon
as it was released, it won the Grand Prix at the film festival in
Bergamo, Italy. - Facets DVD
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