Daisies

Snapshot

Sedmikrásky (Daisies) is the best-known film of the Czechoslovak New Wave and one of the most radical feminist and formalist works of 1960s European cinema. Two young women, both named Marie, decide that because the world has "gone bad," they too will be bad — embarking on an episodic spree of gluttony, deception, and destruction that culminates in a demolished banquet hall. Věra Chytilová, working with cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera and co-writer/designer Ester Krumbachová, transforms this thin anecdote into a barrage of visual experiment: tinted monochrome, collage editing, jump cuts, and a soundtrack severed from naturalism. The film was completed in 1966, banned by the Czechoslovak authorities not long after for its "depiction of the wanton" and its wasting of food, and Chytilová was effectively prevented from working for several years. Today it is canonical — a touchstone for feminist film theory, avant-garde practice, and the study of state-socialist art cinema. Its reputation rests less on story than on the sustained audacity of its form and its refusal to resolve into a stable moral or political message.

Industry & production

Daisies was produced within the state-run Czechoslovak film industry, centered on the Barrandov Studios in Prague, and financed through the nationalized production system that also sustained the New Wave films of Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, and others. The mid-1960s liberalization that preceded the 1968 Prague Spring created an unusual pocket of tolerance: films could be experimental and obliquely critical so long as they passed through the studio's dramaturgical groups and censorship review. Daisies emerged from this window. Chytilová had trained at FAMU (the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) and had already drawn attention with the feature Something Different (O něčem jiném, 1963).

The production was small in scale but technically ambitious, relying on optical effects, color processing, and elaborate art direction rather than expensive sets or stars. The two leads, Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, were largely non-professional performers, consistent with the New Wave's preference for fresh, untrained faces. The film's afterlife with the authorities is the most-cited fact of its production history: it was banned domestically, and Chytilová faced a period of enforced inactivity, unable to direct again in Czechoslovakia until the mid-1970s. Accounts commonly attribute official objection to the film's imagery of squandered food; the precise administrative record is less widely documented in English-language sources, and specific internal deliberations should be treated with appropriate caution.

Technology

The film was shot on 35mm and exploits the full apparatus of mid-1960s laboratory technique as expressive material rather than transparent support. Its most conspicuous technological gesture is color manipulation: sequences shift between black-and-white, monochrome tints (rose, amber, green, blue), and full color, achieved through filtration and laboratory processing. These are not incidental flourishes but a structural principle — color is applied and withdrawn to keep the viewer aware of the image as a manufactured surface.

Optical printing and in-camera effects extend this. The film uses superimposition, cut-out collage, kaleidoscopic fragmentation of the frame, and rapid montage of disparate materials. The technology of the editing bench — the splice itself — is foregrounded rather than hidden. In this sense Daisies belongs to a lineage of films that treat the physical and chemical properties of the medium as content. The resources available within the Barrandov system, including its optical and processing departments, made this laboratory-intensive approach feasible on a modest budget.

Technique

Cinematography

Jaroslav Kučera's photography is inseparable from the film's meaning. Rather than serving legibility, the camera participates in the two Maries' anarchy. Kučera moves fluidly between registers: crisp, high-contrast compositions; deliberately artificial tinted frames; and passages of collage in which the image dissolves into abstraction. Framing is frequently frontal and flattened, emphasizing the picture plane over illusionistic depth. Handheld mobility and abrupt scale shifts refuse the settled, invisible camera of classical style. Kučera — a major figure of Czech cinematography and Chytilová's husband at the time — treats the lens as a co-conspirator in the girls' assault on order, and the film's celebrated set pieces (the fruit-and-flower collages, the multiplied and re-colored bodies) are as much photographic events as narrative ones.

Editing

Editing is arguably the film's dominant expressive system. Daisies is built on discontinuity: jump cuts, non-matching action, sudden interpolations of unrelated footage (industrial imagery, flowers, cut paper), and rhythmic bursts that fragment a single gesture into a stutter. The banquet-destruction climax is a crescendo of accelerating cutting. This montage aesthetic aligns the film with the Soviet avant-garde tradition of Eisenstein and Vertov — cutting as argument and shock rather than as smooth transport between story beats. The effect is anti-illusionist: the viewer is never allowed to forget that the film is assembled. Continuity is sacrificed deliberately, and the "meaning" of a sequence often lies in the collision of images rather than in any depicted event.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Ester Krumbachová's contribution to design and conception is central here. The film's world is deliberately artificial: rooms cluttered with props, tables laden with food, costumes and settings arranged as compositions to be dismantled. Staging is theatrical and often absurdist — the Maries pose, recline, and perform for the camera as much as they act within a scene. Food is the recurring material of the mise-en-scène, presented as spectacle and then as debris. The famous banquet is staged as a lavish tableau explicitly built to be desecrated. Objects, textures, and surfaces carry as much weight as human figures; the frame is treated as a canvas for arrangement and destruction.

Sound

The soundtrack is detached from realist synchronization. Diegetic sound, music, and effects are used elliptically and often ironically — a brass motif, mechanical noises, snatches of dialogue that repeat or dislocate. Voices are sometimes stylized or fragmented rather than delivered as naturalistic conversation. The sound design reinforces the film's collage logic: it comments on, contradicts, or punctuates the image rather than anchoring it. Silence and abrupt aural cuts contribute to the sense of a world that has come unhinged from ordinary cause and effect.

Performance

Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová play the two Maries as a near-interchangeable pair — giggling, provocative, alternately childlike and predatory. Their performance style is anti-psychological: they are figures or types rather than rounded characters, and the film offers little interior motivation. They mug, pose, and perform archness directly at the camera. This deliberate flatness is essential to the film's design; the Maries are less individuals than a principle of disruption, and the actresses' willingness to be stylized, unglamorous, and grotesque is a key part of the effect.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Daisies is essentially plotless by the standards of conventional drama. It proceeds as a series of loosely connected episodes bound by a single premise the girls state aloud: since everything is spoiled, they will be spoiled too. There is no arc of development, no causal chain leading to consequence in the classical sense, and no psychological resolution. The mode is closer to satire, farce, and avant-garde provocation than to narrative drama. Dada and Surrealism are the relevant reference points — the film shares their taste for non-sequitur, absurdist juxtaposition, and gleeful negation.

The one gesture toward structure is the ending, in which the Maries, having wrecked a banquet hall, attempt to "repair" the damage and declare themselves good again, only to be crushed — a mordant, ambiguous coda over which the film appends a dedication concerning those who get upset over trampled lettuce. This closing irony has been read both as an ostensible moral concession to censors and as a further layer of mockery. The refusal of conventional narrative is not a failure of construction but the film's central formal argument.

Genre & cycle

Nominally a comedy-drama, Daisies resists genre placement. It functions as absurdist satire, feminist provocation, and formal experiment simultaneously. Within the Czechoslovak New Wave it belongs to the movement's more radical, non-realist wing — closer to Jan Němec's dreamlike A Report on the Party and the Guests (1966) than to the observational comedies of Forman or Menzel. It can be situated in a broader 1960s European cycle of anti-narrative, politically restless art cinema alongside Godard's contemporaneous experiments and the international current of Pop and collage aesthetics. If it belongs to a "cycle," it is the short-lived flourishing of formally daring films that the pre-1968 thaw made briefly possible.

Authorship & method

Daisies is the signature achievement of Věra Chytilová (1929–2014), the leading woman director of the Czechoslovak New Wave and one of the era's most uncompromising filmmakers. Trained at FAMU, Chytilová combined a background that included work outside cinema with a rigorous formalist sensibility and a lifelong resistance to being labeled — she often rejected the "feminist" tag even as her films became foundational to feminist criticism. Her method here is confrontational and constructivist: build a world of order, comfort, and social ritual, then subject it to systematic derangement.

Crucial to the film's identity is collaboration. Ester Krumbachová, co-writer and designer, was a defining creative force of the Czech New Wave, and her sensibility — visual invention, dark irony, an interest in artifice and the grotesque — is woven through the film's conception and look. Jaroslav Kučera, the cinematographer, supplied the technical daring that realized the imagery. This triangulation of a woman director, a woman writer-designer, and a virtuoso cinematographer is central to any account of the film's authorship; Daisies is genuinely a shared creation, even as Chytilová's directorial vision governs it. Chytilová's later work (Fruit of Paradise, 1970, again with Kučera and Krumbachová; and films made after her return to directing in the 1970s) confirms the concerns visible here: form as argument, and a satirical eye trained on hypocrisy and appetite.

Movement / national cinema

The film is a cornerstone of the Czechoslovak New Wave (Nová vlna), the remarkable burst of filmmaking that emerged from FAMU-trained directors in the early-to-mid 1960s and that produced two foreign-language Academy Award winners in the period (Kadár and Klos's The Shop on Main Street and Menzel's Closely Watched Trains). Within that movement, Daisies occupies the experimental extreme. Where much of the New Wave favored humane realism, wry observation, and everyday texture, Chytilová pursued outright avant-garde abstraction. The movement's political and creative space was foreclosed after the Soviet-led invasion of August 1968 ended the Prague Spring; the subsequent "normalization" curtailed or exiled many of its figures. Daisies thus stands as an emblem of what the national cinema achieved in its brief opening and of the reprisals that followed.

Era / period

Daisies is a document of the mid-1960s socialist thaw — the loosening of cultural controls in Czechoslovakia that preceded the reforms of 1968. That context is essential. The film's imagery of consumption and waste, its mockery of social ritual and propriety, and its refusal of edifying "positive" content read against the backdrop of both state-socialist orthodoxy and the surrounding European ferment of 1966–68. It shares the decade's global spirit of youthful revolt, Pop-art surface, and anti-authoritarian energy, but filters it through the specific pressures of life under a communist regime. The ban that followed makes the film inseparable from its moment: it marks the outer limit of what the thaw would tolerate.

Themes

The film's governing theme is destructive negation as a response to a corrupted world — the Maries' logic that if everything is spoiled, spoilage is the only honest way to live. Consumption is central: eating, wasting, and destroying food operate as a critique of appetite, consumer excess, and, by extension, the hollow abundance offered by both consumerist and official-socialist promises. Gender runs throughout: the two women weaponize the roles of the flirtatious, decorative young female, luring and dismissing older men, parodying feminine performance even as they enact it. This has made the film a durable feminist text, though Chytilová resisted didactic readings.

Other threads include artifice and the constructed nature of images (the film constantly reminds us it is made), the tension between order and chaos, and moral ambiguity — the film withholds any clear judgment on its heroines' anarchy, and its ironic ending refuses to convert the spectacle into a lesson. Destruction is presented as both liberating and self-consuming, and the film declines to resolve which.

Reception, canon & influence

On release the film was censored in Czechoslovakia and its director penalized, which shaped its early reputation as much as any review. Internationally it circulated in festival and art-house contexts and accrued critical prestige over subsequent decades, particularly as feminist film scholarship and avant-garde studies took it up. It is now widely regarded as a landmark — routinely cited among the essential works of both the Czechoslovak New Wave and 1960s experimental cinema, and preserved and reissued in restored form for later generations.

Influences on the film (backward): Daisies draws on the historical avant-gardes — Dada's provocation and anti-art stance, Surrealism's absurdist juxtaposition (with a specifically Czech surrealist lineage in the background), and the Soviet montage tradition of Eisenstein and Vertov in its collision-based editing. Contemporary Pop art's flat, collaged surfaces and the broader 1960s international climate of formal rule-breaking, exemplified by Godard, are also legible antecedents.

Legacy (forward): The film became foundational to feminist film theory and to the study of women's authorship in cinema, and a reference point for experimental and collage filmmaking. It anchors Chytilová's own reputation as the New Wave's leading woman director and stands with Krumbachová's and Kučera's contributions as a model of collaborative avant-garde practice. Its imagery and spirit have been repeatedly invoked by later filmmakers, artists, and critics interested in feminist provocation and formal excess, and it remains a fixture of film-school curricula and repertory programming. Specific lines of direct homage are best asserted case by case; the more secure claim is that Daisies helped legitimate a mode of playful, destructive, image-driven cinema that continues to be rediscovered.