Daisies

Vera Chytilova’s 1966 film Daisies is an incredibly peculiar modernist film out of the Czech new wave. She distinctively explores film as a medium. It might be best to look at Daisies as a film collage. Chytilova uses experimental editing techniques, which include numerous montage sequences, nonlinear editing, and several discontinuities. The film also goes through a series of color and tint changes. One might question the arbitrariness of her meddle with colors; however, it appears to represent, for the viewer, the artificiality of film.

Several times throughout the film she makes us conscious of the fact that the film is precisely that, just a film. An instance of this comes when the two main characters, Marie I and Marie II, use their scissors to not only cut themselves apart but also the film itself apart. Scissors are a reoccurring symbol; the main characters use them to cut food, sheets, paper, themselves, etc. The scissors are able to edit, erase, cut and create anew. The objects and images, which are cut out or cut up, are then brought into a new context. For example, one Marie cuts a picture of a steak out of an advertisement and eats it; she takes a picture and turns it into food. Whether or not it has nutritional value is irrelevant. What is important is that Chytilova questions the use and practicality of everyday things such as food, magazines, or even gaudy dinnerware.

Her excessive use of absurd and or arbitrary objects can be read as Dada inspired; however, this can also be read as an experimental exhibition of the symbolic. The film opens with a machine that’s running interspersed with war footage. We closely examine the cogs of the machine, and its rhythm. What is this machine, and furthermore, why is this combined with war footage? It seems to me that Chytilova is hinting at the communist ideology; she shows how individual cogs work together, much like people of the “group” should in communist ideology, to achieve a common output. This machine is purposeless, and arbitrary; however, when this juxtaposed with the communist system it reflects how many of the people worked together in the system, the "cogs", did so for no purpose at all but to work for the sake of working. It is through these vague metaphors and symbols that Chytilova inspires the viewer to look for deeper meaning in the film. This isn’t the only method to which she approaches the film; she also includes multiple sequences that have the main characters out with men of the bourgeois. Through these sequences she exploits the bourgeois, and has the main characters trick and use them emotionally, economically, and presumably sexually for their own good.