Daisies · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two girls lie on a bed in swimsuits, and when they move their limbs creak like rusted hinges — the sound of dolls, not bodies. They have decided the world has gone bad. So, deadpan, to no one, they announce they will go bad too. A hand snips at the air with scissors and the whole image comes apart: the room drops into rose, then amber, then a scatter of cut paper. This is barely ninety seconds in, and Věra Chytilová has already handed you the rules. Nothing will hold still. Nothing will add up. You are going to love it anyway.

The temptation is to call Daisies chaos and leave it there. Deleuze gives us a better word: it is a montage of attractions. Eisenstein coined that phrase for staging built not to advance a story but to strike the viewer — a sequence assembled to figure an idea rather than act one out. Watch the banquet. It is not a scene the Maries pass through on the way somewhere. It is a tableau erected precisely so it can be desecrated: cake ground underfoot, chandeliers ridden like swings, a whole laid table converted from spectacle into debris. Deleuze would call this the reflection-image tipping into pure Figure — action transposed into spectacle. The girls never do anything that changes their situation. They perform demolitions for the camera. That is why psychology never arrives, and why looking for it is the one mistake the film punishes.

Which is the second lens, and the sharper one. Daisies runs on the powers of the false. Deleuze's idea: some films drop the old contract that the image reports something true, and make truth and falsity undecidable on purpose, as their creative engine. Everything about the Maries refuses to settle. Two girls, both named Marie, near-interchangeable, swapping wigs and registers — childlike one cut, predatory the next. This is what Deleuze names the forger: not a liar but a maker, a serial identity that forges itself scene to scene. Their founding line — the world is spoiled, so we'll be spoiled — is offered as logic and as joke at once, and the film never tells you which. The ending seals it. They 'repair' the smashed banquet, mumbling we'll be good, we'll be happy, re-laying broken plates — and are crushed anyway, under a dedication to those upset by trampled lettuce. Concession to the censors, or the last and deepest mockery? The film keeps both true. That undecidability isn't evasion. It is the argument.

And it is built on the cut. Daisies belongs body and soul to dialectical, Soviet-style montage — Eisenstein and Vertov, the splice as collision, meaning struck from the clash of images rather than carried smoothly between them. But where Eisenstein cut to agitate a crowd toward action, Chytilová weaponizes the same grammar for satire that goes nowhere. A single gesture stutters across three jump cuts; a girl's flirtation is interrupted by industrial footage, by flowers, by scissored paper. The frame kaleidoscopes and multiplies the bodies into abstraction. This is the any-space-whatever in its most disconnected form: space fractured into affective shards that no longer host a setting — a room becomes color and texture and fragment. You cannot forget the film is assembled, and you aren't meant to. This is the lectosign, the image that has quit being self-evident and asks instead to be read. The tinted monochrome — rose, green, blue applied and yanked away — isn't mood lighting. It keeps flagging the picture as a manufactured surface, a thing made in a lab and spliced on a bench.

Place it in the lineage and the craft debts are exact. From Un Chien Andalou, the shock-cut that joins images for scandal, not continuity. From Entr'acte and Ballet Mécanique, the plotless Dada gag and the rhythmic cutting of fragmented objects into repetition-as-abstraction. From Man with a Movie Camera, the self-reflexive flaunting of the apparatus — trickery that shows its own hand. From Potemkin, collision montage itself, borrowed and turned from agitation to farce. And the jump cuts are Breathless only three years on, Godard's rupture pushed past cool into open assault. The whole episodic stroll — prank to prank, transforming nothing, refusing any arc — is the crisis of the action-image made joyful instead of despairing. Bazin's postwar dream of the image as a window onto real duration: Daisies takes that window and smashes it, cheerfully, on principle.

What did it do to film as an art? It proved that formal negation could be the content — that a movie with no plot, no psychology, and no stable moral could still be rigorous, and dangerous enough to get its director banned and silenced for years. Chytilová and Ester Krumbachová, who designed and co-conceived this world of props built to be wrecked, made destruction into a compositional method and handed the feminist and avant-garde cinema after them a working model: the woman's body not as object to be shot but as agent that dismantles the frame it's placed in. Watch it again for the creak of those opening hinges. The girls tell you they're mechanisms. The rest of the film is them tearing the mechanism apart.