Daisies
- Tuesday, Jan 28, 2025, 7:00pm
- Tuesday, Jan 28, 2025, 8:45pm
We asked YOU to pick a film for us to show this month and this is what won!
Maybe the New Wave’s most anarchic entry, Vera Chytilová’s absurdist farce follows the misadventures of two hedonistic young women, both name Marie (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová). Believing the world to be “spoiled,” they embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Chytilová and cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera unleash an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes. DAISIES is the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.
In Czech with English subtitles.
Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.
“A feminist triumph, Chytilová’s film satirizes the bourgeoisie, authoritarianism, and the patriarchy, all while being unabashedly girly.” Marya E. Gates, Cool People Have Feelings, Too
“One of the great outpourings of cinematic invention in an age of over-all artistic liberation.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“As subversive as it is hilarious.” Kate Muir, The Times (UK)