Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Daisies
1966 · Věra Chytilová · Daisies on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for the girls' joints creaking like rusty hinges. (sound)
Early on, small movements of the two Maries are dubbed with a creaking, mechanical sound, as if their bodies were dolls rather than people.
Payoff: The film tells you upfront that these are figures, not psychologically rounded characters.
Notice the image suddenly tinted rose, amber, or green. (light)
Kučera shifts the whole frame into a single flat color without warning, then lets it drop back to normal photography just as abruptly.
Payoff: Color stops describing a real room and starts announcing that you're watching something made, not filmed. In the reading: the readable image. Deleuze calls an image that stops looking natural and asks to be read a lectosign, which is what the tinting does here.
Watch a single gesture get chopped into several jump cuts. (cutting)
Chytilová fragments ordinary actions like a hand reaching or a head turning into repeated, mismatched cuts instead of one continuous movement.
Payoff: The cutting keeps reminding you the film is assembled, not a window onto anything continuous.
Watch how much food gets handled, eaten, and wasted. (setting)
Food recurs constantly as the two Maries eat, order, and discard meals through one loosely connected episode after another.
Payoff: Appetite and waste become the film's real material, more than any story it tells.
Notice how interchangeable the two Maries seem to be. (performance)
Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová play the pair as near-identical types, swapping registers between childlike and predatory scene to scene, with little inner life shown.
Payoff: You're watching a principle of disruption at work, not two individual people with a plan. In the reading: le faussaire / the forger. Deleuze calls an identity remade scene to scene like this a forger, someone who makes a self rather than simply having one.
Once you have seen it
Notice the banquet table built only to be wrecked. (staging)
The film's final set piece stages a lavish banquet as a tableau explicitly built for the Maries to demolish, cake underfoot, chandeliers ridden like swings.
Payoff: Destruction here isn't an accident interrupting order; it's the whole point the scene was built for. In the reading: attraction-image. Deleuze would call this staging an attraction image, built not to advance a story but to strike you directly, like a fairground act.
Notice the girls try to repair the mess and are crushed anyway. (structure)
After wrecking the hall, the Maries reassemble the broken plates and declare themselves good again, and the film crushes them under a falling chandelier regardless.
Payoff: The ending refuses to hand you a clear lesson about whether they're punished or just unlucky.
Notice the closing dedication about trampled lettuce. (structure)
The film appends a mock dedication to anyone upset by wasted food, a line that reads simultaneously as an apology to censors and a further joke.
Payoff: Even the film's final gesture keeps both a concession and a mockery open at once.
Carry this in: Watch the seams: the cuts, the color shifts, the assembly. The film never pretends to be a window.