DAISIES (1966)

This week we’re spending a lot of time talking about drug-based movies.

But what about movies you should watch while on drugs? Well, 1966s Daisies oftentimes feels like it is the drug.

Daisies recently ranked no. 28 on the Sight and Sound top 100 films of all time. It’s a truly deranged film about two young women in the Czech Republic who decide that since the world is spoiled, they will be spoiled too, and insanity ensues.

Daisies came out of a movement in the 60s called the Czech New Wave.

This is essentially a period of time when many graduates of the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) were given state funding to create state-sanctioned films.

The movement includes films by many artists such as Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, Jiří Menzel, and the director of today’s film, Věra Chytilová.

The irony of this film and others of the Czech New Wave is that, despite these films being funded by the government, the government was a communist regime that many of these films commented on.

Thus, films were often banned, including All My Countrymen, The Firemen’s Ball, and Larks on a String.

This film TOTALLY falls into that category!

It has strong feminist themes and toxicity towards the world and, more importantly, the communist government. What got it banned, though, was not its themes, but a blatant statement made towards the end of the film.

Our leads have a twenty-minute food fight that is a reference to a famine that was plaguing the country at the time that many believe was a direct result of its government.

The movie is directly calling out the excess of its leadership at the time and mocking them.

Let me put it like this: Imagine if you turned on PBS and in the middle of an episode of Call the Midwife Vanessa Redgrave started gargling gasoline and throwing eggs on the ground screaming “This doesn’t matter! This doesn’t matter!”.

You would 100% see a boycott PBS hashtag started by Tucker Carlson within minutes, guaranteed!

We cannot stress enough how strange this film is, but it also has a lot to say about culture, femininity, and the destruction of social norms.

The worldview the film is depicting is one of nihilism and absurdity.

To quote the film's director: “The form of the film was really derived from the conceptual basis of the film. Because the concept of the film was destruction, the form became destructive as well.”

No scene encapsulates this idea better than today’s clip.

A scene featuring two characters laughing at the idea of their own sensuality, breaking free of the sexualization of the female body.

It’s a scene that is mean and spiteful towards its audience.

A scene that is so destructive it turns from harming each other to destroying the movie itself.

It is only fitting that we discuss Daisies this week because director Ari Aster has pointed to the work of Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, Věra Chytilová, and other Czech New Wave filmmakers as inspiration for his upcoming movie.

He even programmed screenings of their work at the Lincoln Center in anticipation of Beau is Afraid.

Guess Tomorrow’s Film