Vera Chitylova, Daisies (Czechoslovakia, 1966)

Most, I am tempted to say all, Eastern European films from the Communist period are in some way political. Indeed, arguably the most instructive body of criticism of Stalinism to be found is in the cinema of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia most of the relevant films were made between 1963-70, the period of the Czech New Wave. .

Whether or not the 1966 “Daisies,” which draws on both comedic and modernist traditions, is the greatest Czech film, as I think it might be, it is undoubtedly the most fun; indeed, it can seem almost intolerably exuberant and delightful. One of the key European films of the ‘60’s, “Daisies” focuses on two young girls who share an apartment, both named Marie. The girls’ premise is that since the world has gone “bad” they too will be “bad.”  The term of course is polyvalent, and one thinks of the “hooligan” idea in the girls’ song in the previous year’s “Loves of a Blonde” by fellow Czech Milos Forman, a film and director similarly disposed to comic irony. The world’s badness could mean many things, including injustice misrecognized as disorder, while that of the girl’s evidently means disobedient and disrespectful. 

Like its successor film by the director, Fruits of Paradise (1970), Daisies combines a loose narrative that is little more than a set of scenes involving a set number of characters, with an extravagant series of highly abstract visuals that at times seems to take a page from the non-narrative American avant-garde. What most captivated me on my first screening in 1979 and subsequently is the two Maries’ use of magazine cutouts and arrangements of letters and numbers on their apartment wall and around them in bed and suspended from the ceiling. This is a modernist strategy of making use of images and elements of images and texts (and sounds, including a phone conversation with a male would-be suitor and the speech of the two girls throughout) give the sense of a world of representations reduced to their elements and placed in multiples montages. All of this conveys a project that is at once one of art and life (fortuitously, neither of the girls is employed, and what they get from the men they dally with for their amusement largely is that amusement), and that conveys an impression of a highly plastic world of images and signs that may be both constructed and deconstructed. The way in which art and life are equated is essentially joyful. The destructiveness of the women is a pure potlatch of joy and liberation; if there is anger, it has been so well digested that the resulting comic rage has nothing unpleasant about it, though it can be a weapon all the same in the hands of aggressors disposed of the (feminine?) ludic. It is a celebratory modernism, and viewers tend to right away find this the most striking quality of the film. If the film may be said to include the women themselves in what it judges, at least by virtue of the ending, it must also be said that the stylistic lightness and speed that was so much of the film aesthetic of the 1960s internationally may have few better exponents or advertisements than this film. There is more pure fun here even then in any of the early films of Godard.

Indeed, this is a film whose basic principle is the montage of shots, not of scenes, nor a plot, which is really a drift though non-sequential stages, or stagings, of possible strategies and tactics to realize the two Maries’ project of being “bad” in a wold that is bad. For example, the first of the several dinner scenes with older men seeking their own enjoyment involves rapidly changing color filters within the same shot, and in another dinner scene the girls both have polka dot dresses whose dots at one moment suddenly enlarge greatly, one of the many contributions of costumer designer and screenwriter Esther Krumbachová, who delighted in using costumes that might be incongruous to suggest possibilities of the characters. This in a film that starts with an image of a large industrial gear on a wall that appears to drive nothing so that it is like a perpetual motion machine serving as gratuitous object, its sole raison d’être being to represent the workings of machines and their cogs, and so serve as counterpoint to the film’s whole argument. At the deepest level, the film is an essay about an idea that is illustrated in a sequence of images. The world these women find themselves in is defined by conformism perhaps, and certainly vanity, especially the romantico-sexual vanities of the film’s hapless male suitors. The Maries’ project of being “bad” because the world is may be a way of showing that world, or us the audience, how that seriousness can usefully be “baddened” in the interest of a comic social criticism.

Every now and then some major filmmaker gives us a portrait of the politics of private vanities. In Czeschoslakia around this time, there were also films like Karel Kachyna’s “The Eat,” which portrays a deputy minister and his wife in their home reacting with understandable cowardice and pettiness to the discovery that they are objects of surveillance. Their domestic comedy is intercut with scenes from a Party party, in which no one says anything that is not vain or ridiculous, even when menacingly so. Or think of the first few minutes of Visconti’s “Sandra” (“Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa”), when Claudia Cardinale is itching to leave the home in Geneva she shares with her American husband, and we are shown a scene of rich people lounging and drinking and saying completely innocuous things; this becomes the background of Sandra’s search for some moral grounding as she returns to her childhood home for a ceremony honoring the betrayed war hero and Nazi victim father whose story, far from small talk, she has been researching. Or, finally, Godard’s party in “Pierrot le Fou,” where people spout advertising slogans as if they were their religious or political ideals, or identity. Vanity is an offense against morality because it avoids moral seriousness. It can well accompany more obviously political offenses like oppressions or treasons. “Daisies” is about the world it is dedicated to: people who care about things that do not matter, because they do not care about things that do.

In a series of vignettes (again, the film has no real plot), the Maries proceed to make fun of everyone and everything in their world. They arrange dinner dates with older men who take the train into the city in order to meet them. They then ridicule these invariably sentimental, well-heeled gentlemen (whose class status as Party members we can infer from the fact that they can afford to dine in expensive restaurants) while gorging themselves on food.  Food is everywhere in the film, up to the final vignette where the women ruin the prepared food in an empty banquet hall and then “make good” by piecing together broken plates and glasses in a mock clean-up. At this point, their party ends in a crashing chandelier that segues into nuclear explosions, followed by the filmmaker’s stirring dedication, “To all those whose sole source of indignation is a messed-up trifle.”

The watchwords of the film are play, consumption, and artifice.  The two women do nothing but play — with food, with magazine cutouts, with words and names.  They have covered the walls of their apartment with drawings, cutouts, and writing.  Food is central because they belong to the nascent world that French critics of the time called la société de consommation, meaning consumer society, but with certain sinister connotations. This being a film from Communist Czechoslovakia and not Gaullist France, however, this world is not so much critiqued as used, in a carnivalesque manner, as a subversive weapon.  At the risk of seeming pedestrian, it may be noted that a society of plentiful consumer goods and enough food to waste without flinching may or may not have an important part of what the people of Eastern Europe wanted, though it was much of what they would finally get twenty years later. In fact, the socialist economies of Europe combined bureaucracy and consumerism, along with notions of normality and discipline; French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre spoke of both East and West then as a “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.” It was one of scarcity, and there is no reason this should not have been targeted. (The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia did flinch, and precisely at the food wastage, when apparatchiks saw the film, unwittingly making themselves targets of the witticism of the film’s thusly prescient dedication). What the young women in the film, and the young woman who made it, were taking aim at was a society based on a philosophy that was by turns utopian and tragic and not particularly comic, a society that took itself incredibly seriously.  The music drives this home; much of it is bombastic or solemn, quasi-hymnal, and ironically counterpointed by the brilliant images and dialogue.  The work demonstrates how play, consumption, and artifice can be subversive strategies, more so in the Czech context than they would have been if this film had been made in the West, where much the same situations and behavior would have taken on a rather different meaning.

Indeed, Daisies was championed in the 1970s by Western feminist critics, who saw the women in the film as role models for a playfully ironic and subversive critique or “deconstruction” of patriarchy.  Chytilova herself took pains to disavow this interpretation, but it is easy to see both what fueled it and why it must have been in error.  Although the filmmaker said she originally considered using men, it is obvious that the film works much better with young women. In a patriarchal society — and despite its greater gender equality Communism was surely that — women, especially young women, have the privilege of being allowed a far greater measure of irresponsibility, because less is expected of them at least in the way of public life and meaning (and private/public is certainly one of the several dichotomies the Maries transgress)..  The problem is that this limits as much as it enables the political effectiveness of the appropriation of this irresponsibility through a strategy of playful irony. I’m not sure that the film escapes this limitation by virtue of a distance between the discourse of the characters and that of the film itself, because to speak of such a distance is to speak of irony, and the characters as well as the filmmaker are thoroughgoing ironists.  That is, what is it to speak of an ironic treatment of characters whose discourse itself is entirely ironical?   The film is very self-consciously a work of filmic artifice. But then the characters themselves seem to know that they are artificial, which is part of the meaning of their use of Cartesian doubt (wondering whether they exist, and at one point poignantly noting that not having a job and an identity card renders this problematic), and of their cutting off each other’s limbs and heads with scissors, along with mock screams, which is another manifestation of their refusal to take anything seriously, at least until the final chandelier crash. The problem with the feminist reading and the strategy it implies is the failure to recognize that this kind of playful irony can be very effective in a work of fiction but is less so in real life. The film’s relentless attack on the new party bourgeoisie and its spirit of seriousness is quite potent.  The feminists differed from the filmmaker in tacitly proposing that people, or women at any rate, live this way.  A less innocent strategy is to propose instead that people learn to view as farce the life of a society whose ideology is that of a straight man.  The Party didn’t laugh at the film or at the mess it had created in real life, but maybe it ought to have; it was Marx himself who said that tragic events return as farce.

I don’t wish to imply that the film ceases to delight when the Stalinist frame of reference is disregarded.  Part of the fate of the spirit of 1968, which this film so well embodies, is that the kind of attitude that is here celebrated easily morphs into a kind of cynicism, which is indeed what the societé de consommation has become in the West. But that the film delights on repeated viewings suggests that it manages to steer clear of that, and indeed perhaps articulates an oppositional mode that is still relevant.  

It is also in a major Czech tradition that goes back at least to Kafka, and includes much of Czech literature and the cinema of the Czech New Wave, a tradition that, finding it more interesting and thought-provoking than (as is a tendency in certain Polish directors, such as Wajda) the angry passions of political romanticism, nationalist and otherwise, counters oppression with laughter.