Daisies

Thirty-five years, a thousand kilometres and one language apart, tonight's two films meet on a single word: rules.

M (1931) asks the later question — when the law cannot keep up with fear, who is entitled to judge? Its answer is an improvised tribunal. Daisies (1966) asks the earlier one: if the rules themselves are rotten, is destruction a legitimate answer? Two young women, both named Marie, decide the world is spoiled and declare themselves spoiled in turn.

The coincidence is also a practical one: one is Fritz Lang's first sound film, which established cinema's rules for sound; the other smashes the rules of the cut — jump cuts, colour gels, direct address, whole passages of collage.

It also closes three gaps in this archive at once: Czechoslovakia 0→1 (the 22nd country or region), experimental cinema 0→1, and the archive's first woman director.

两个少女坐在那里。其中一个说：世界已经败坏了。 另一个说：那我们也要败坏。

她们都叫玛丽。从这一刻起，影片就跟在她们身后，看两个女孩如何把「败坏」当作一项工程来推进：赴约、戏弄、吃饭、搭车、跳舞，把一切正经的东西变成游戏。

但要小心——这部电影的破坏从来不只是角色的。每隔几分钟，画面本身也会坏掉一次。

（这里不再往下说。）

A 74-minute film that takes cinema's grammar apart in front of you

Daisies (original Czech title Sedmikrásky) was made in Czechoslovakia in 1966 by Věra Chytilová, who co-wrote it with Ester Krumbachová (also the film's art director). 74 minutes, Czech, with two non-professional leads, Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová.

The story is one sentence: two young women, both named Marie, decide the world is spoiled and that they will be spoiled too. Everything else is in how it is told:

• jump cuts: a single conversation is sliced into discontinuous fragments, the two women teleporting between spaces — causality is deliberately severed;
• colour: whole passages switch between red, green and blue gels, and one face becomes three different people;
• collage and direct address: pinned butterflies, flowers, newspaper fragments are cut into the image, and the Maries repeatedly look straight into the camera and speak to us;
• sound: music is deliberately offset against image, environmental noise and score interrupting one another.

The sharpest laugh of the Czechoslovak New Wave

It is the furthest-reaching film of the 1960s Czechoslovak New Wave. Where contemporaries such as Miloš Forman and Jiří Menzel worked from observed everyday realism, Chytilová worked from form itself — for her, form was the argument.

The reason it was banned

Completed in 1966, it was immediately banned by the Czechoslovak authorities, officially for "wasting food" — a reference to the banquet sequence the two Maries destroy. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, Chytilová was barred from directing for years. The end title dedicates the film to those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle.

Belated recognition

In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll — 1,639 voters — it placed 28th. For a film once charged with wasting food, that is a very long echo.