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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the seams: the cuts, the color shifts, the assembly. The film never pretends to be a window.