I watched Vera Chytilova's
DAISIES today.
These are my impressions, I don't really know if they have anything to do with how someone else would see this movie.
DAISIES was so free, so anarchic, it was nothing like any other movie I've seen. It makes fun of everything. I thought the Marx Brothers did that, but the themes here are a little different because of the woman's viewpoint which I don't think has been as fully realized anywhere else. If I were to compare, I can see it being sort of like
HELP in style, but that is so limiting, in a way I don't really wish to be. It does a disservice to the film. It goes into waaaay deeper territory and is far more subversive and is far more creative. Someone compared it to
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and I can agree with that, except that it gives those characters knives and scissors and an attitude that men are not really important. Spiritually the filmmaker closest to Chytilova might be Cocteau, at least that feels right to me.
It's hard to imagine someone making a movie so free while under repression, though maybe it's because of the repression that Vera Chytilova HAD to make this film. Her mind was free, and that's kind of the whole point here. Her mind was so free it hurts and dazzles and is ugly and is beautiful. It hurts even more when you know that she was banned from making any more movies after 1968, though that doesn't seem to have stopped her. I felt like she was giving the finger to the powers that be, while outwardly criticizing a materialistic society that makes of women a product. The film's scope is immense - it's like a bomb going off in a museum that holds the most beautiful creations and the most repressive stereotypes. The pieces of art scattering and falling around you all meant something deep at one time. It's just that putting them together as they fall in different ways has the effect of alienating you from their natural meaning. Juxtaposing them with the stereotypes and the ugly make them seem meaningful in a totally different way. The conventional roles of women are blown up and scattered among the art only backwards and upside down, and the pieces intermingle and fall together and become something else. And then the women eat them. But that's only scratching the surface...
To me, it was about seeing women, and them seeing someone seeing them, and then finally the women taking on the personas inflicted on them in a heightened way, and by doing so, rejecting them, blowing them to kingdom come. Using the personas to feed themselves in the most hedonistic way. Dining is all there is in a world that is empty. There are consumers, and consumees. It's a place where women aren't even allowed to eat at will, or feed themselves in any way except as a standardized model, one dress fits all, at the pleasure of men or the government. But the two girls here mock and use that, breaking the rules. And then there's also their own relationship and power plays with each other. And I'm not even getting to the real 'meat' of the movie. Ha ha ha ha ha ha
The creativity of
DAISIES is STAGGERING. Just the collage sections alone must have taken forever to film, and each of these only takes about 10 seconds of film time. There are fast edited spinning, moving, falling collages of butterflies, screws of paper, train wheels, what have you. The girls even cut off their own heads and stick them randomly into a different background. Collage plays an important part in the film, the girl's apartment is even a collage - first the walls have giant green leaves and framed flowers, then phone numbers and addresses of men they have taken for a ride written all the way up to the ceiling.
Chytilova uses colored filters randomly, camera techniques of all kinds, different types of film. Her use of sound is just as inventive and collaged. No wonder they felt they had to stop her. The film incites one to be spirited, liberated from rules and regulations. To tear things apart and put them back together. There are certain parts that are zany funny. The cake fight was wonderful, ending with the girls swinging from a grandiose chandelier in a banquet room. At the end, realizing they might be caught, they try to put together the pieces of the giant banquet which they have gobbled up and demolished, making small collages of of the broken plates and mashed food. They declare that they'll be good from now on.... and end up mummified, rolled up in tablecloths and what looks like barbed wire for wrapping. Did Chytilova know what was going to happen to her? That her flowering would be stifled just as it was blooming?