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City Gallery is currently screening Daisies, an experimental, feminist feature film by Czech new-wave director Věra Chytilová, made in 1966. See it, if you can. It runs until 13 April 2020.

This female buddy movie follows the exploits of two young women, both called Marie, as they prank silly old men, conspicuously consume, and speculate on their existence. Their hedonism and irresponsibility was a rebuff to the bleakness of life in communist Czechoslovakia, and the film was initially banned for the wanton waste of its food fights and milk baths. Here, feminism holds hands with consumerism.

It’s hard to get a fix on the protagonists. They act like dolls or robots—but malfunctioning ones, off mission. They are adorable yet obnoxious, pretty but unladylike, mischievous yet vacuous, trapped but free. They scramble anarchic feminist agency with coquettish sex-object appeal. In Artforum, critic J. Hoberman described them as ‘all impulse and appetite, with food substituting for sex’.

Daisies exemplifies its mid-1960s counterculture moment: a time of underground movies, happenings, street theatre, nudism, bagism, body art, psychedelia, free sex, and feminism. It’s experimental and rebellious in its content, but also in its form, with disorienting, gimmicky special effects—often seemingly pursued for their sheer novelty. The anarchic filmmaker was out to break as many rules as her heroines. Daisies is, in many ways, confounding and unreadable. Hoberman writes, ‘the film does not lend itself to decoding. On a primary level, it simply is.’

Why screen Daisies now? Aside from it being an amazing romp of a film, it’s also an interesting space-time capsule from which to consider our current moment, as feminism, sexism, and capitalism cleave unto one another.
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