“Youth, my youth. Where have you gone? Why do tears come to my eyes at the very thought of you?”
Daisies was
directed by Vera Chytilova in 1966. After winning the Grand Prix at the Bergamo
Film Festival in Italy in 1967, it was immediately banned. The story follows
two girls who are trying to figure out love and the world around them. Daisies is one the most known surrealist
films that has come out of Czechoslovakia.
Vera
Chytilova was born on February 2, 1929 in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia. Ironically,
she just died on March 12th of this year. An avant-garde filmmaker,
she was considered the “first lady of Czech cinema”. Her films were acclaimed for visual experimentation and
for bold unmasking of the
moral problems of contemporary society. Her art belongs to what Sergei M.
Eisenstein described as "intellectual cinema", that
embraces the mix of "avant-garde", "cinema verite", "formalism", "feminism and,
with a good deal of humor.
The film starts out with the main
two characters talking to each other about how “the world is just spoiled”, and
since the world is spoiled, they should be spoiled too. After this decision has
been made, the two young girls run around Prague living frivolously and
destructively towards themselves and the world around them. I decided to do
research on the difference between feminism in the US and in Czech. I came to
find that our views are basically opposite. For us, being a strong woman means
a career, able to stand with guys, and going away from the traditional
housewife. However, in Czechoslovakia, women view working nonstop as an old way
of life seeing as how they were forced to work during the communist era. That
being said, this film embraces women being carefree and asking questions about
life, love, and existence.
As the young girls trash the city,
get drunk, seduce older men, and eat everything in sight, they begin to ask
questions that I feel like all women should ask. In one scene, Julie asks why
do we have to say, “I love you” why can’t you say something as simple as “egg”
and have it mean the same thing? She wants to understand why and how those
words mean so much when it’s obviously not about the words at all. Another
theme is the questioning of existence. They start to ask each other if they’re
real at all and if so, how do they know? One actually states that they might
not exist because they don’t really have any strings attached to them. They
don’t have families, jobs, or anything holding them back. So what makes them
exist? I love this concept. It makes complete sense to me. If you’re not
changing or affecting the world around you, do you exist? Does it matter if you
do or not?
This film is all about indulging and
feeding into your urges. Not all of your desires or urges will be necessarily
bettering for you or the world, but there’s something just beautifully sublime
in just giving in to everything you want, to forget the social pressures and
obligations that weigh down on you and to run free exploring your surroundings
and your own self. I would love to not exist for a day.
A link to "10 things to learn from Czech women"
A link to "10 things to learn from Czech women"
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