Opening Statement

Věra Chytilová’s Daisies is undoubtedly one of the most unique films we’ve covered on The Cinessential. A series of comic vignettes connected by smash cuts and cinematic tricks—as when a character falls out of frame and lands in another space—it actively defies rationality — by Patrick Brown, October 3, 2017

The Art of Watching Weird Movies

As I tossed these ideas around I couldn’t help but feel that I was missing a single thread that would string the anarchic energy of the film into a coherent whole. That string remained elusive. I grew frustrated. That’s when it hit me. I was so wrapped up in figuring out what the movie meant, that I didn’t give myself any space to enjoy it — by Alex Moore, October 4, 2017

Devouring Feminism

An inescapable element of the film is food. Food is everywhere in this movie. The women are absolutely gluttonous, and their eating is filmed sensuously. I have thought a lot about it, and while there’s a lot I don’t understand, I think that the food symbolism is much more complex and layered than anything else in the movie — by Felicia Elliott, October 5, 2017

Photomontage and Feminism

Like the collages that line the walls of their apartment, they, and then the film, become randomly assembled images whose shapes are shifting and mobile. Such, Daisies implies, is female subjectivity in a world gone bad, torn apart by the demands, expectations, and projections of a patriarchal world — by Patrick Brown, October 6, 2017

Related Review: Pearls of the Deep

Pearls of the Deep, a film by Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, Jaromil Jireš, and Daisies’ Vera Chytilová provides an introduction to the early stages of the Czech New Wave. As its five shorts are each based on short stories by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, the stories have a similarity in tone and topic that allows us to see all the more clearly the filmmakers’ stylistic differences — by Patrick Brown, October 6, 2017