Daisies

One of the most celebrated books in film history is Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art.  Vogel was a poor writer, a fan-boy for underground movies who was likely to praise any picture that featured human genitalia -- he was also a vulgar Marxist of the most obvious sort with a soft-spoyd for pictures made by Leftist apologistd for totalitarian regimes.  But his study of naughty and transgressive films is encyclopedic and nothing if not enthusiastic and he had a great eye for stills.  Exhibit A in his index of subversive films was a picture called Daisies that had the dual appeal for him of featuring comely young girls, not exactly naked but nearly so, made in Czechoslovakia, during that country's short, and tragic, emergence from Stalin's deep-freeze.  Vogel wrote enthusiastically about the movie and showed a picture from the film -- two attractive women clad entirely in form-fitting newspapers wrapped around their bodies with what seem to be rubber bands.  The women have dirty faces and wild hair and they raise their arms from the prone position in which they are posed in mock alarm.  Of course, I pored over this book endlessly when I was a young man -- it came out in 1974 -- and I studied it so obsessively that the pages fell out; the book was poorly bound.  (I may still have it in my basement somewhere).  One of the appealing things about the book was that, almost by definition, none of the films praised by Vogel could be seen -- unheard melodies are the sweetest, of course, and difficult to objectively criticize.  Now, 48 years later, Daisies has been released by Criterion in a brilliantly restored version and can be studied at leisure.  The picture is pretty daunting and, indeed, uncomfortably transgressive.  When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, people responded not to his social-economic criticism but to accounts as to the filth and mire associated with the production of meat -- the dirt in the sausage is what made the book famous.  Daisies is similar -- what troubles the viewer is not the movie's nihilism but the way food is used in the film; it's nauseating and, therefore, disturbing.  

Daisies was made by Vera Chytilova during the brief Czech Spring, as it was called, in 1966.  Like several others truly transgressive films, principally Sweet Movie and WR The Mysteries of the Organism (Dusan Makayavev), the picture is the product of an entirely subsidized Communist film industry controlling production through the monolithic institution of its State film school.  Communism periodically produced transgressive, even politically dissenting, films simply to demonstrate that its regime was willing to "let a thousand flowers blossom" -- however, movies of this kind were imported into Western markets for propaganda purposes while the filmmakers were suppressed and, even, jailed for their efforts; needless to say, people in the Communist countries where these movie were made were generally not allowed to see these efforts -- this was true of Tarkovsky and, certainly, the case with Vera Chytilova, who lost the ability to direct films for about a decade or more, after Daisies and its companion piece Forbidden Fruit were released.  Of course, pictures of this sort couldn't be made  at all under  a commercial Hollywood regime and it is worth observing that, frame by frame, Daisies suggests the feverish mise-en-scene of some New York Underground movies, particularly pictures by Jack Smith such as Flaming Creatures.  

In its first minutes, Daisies attacks hard and never relents.  We see some kind of flywheel contraption shot in black and white -- an eccentric wheel runs some gears; the image, in context, seems to signify history, materialism, maybe, some kind of mechanized sexual activity.  Intercut with the flywheel, we see colorized shots of tracer bullets, kamikaze planes hurtling into battleships, huge explosions and flares of napalm.  The world is at war and the stakes seem to be apocalyptic -- however, the entire spectacle is aesthetized by being refracted through some kind of diffraction grating filter that creates tingly little rainbows around the edges of the things shown to us.  The effect is a combination of prettiness (all those little rainbows) and horror.  Two girls are seated against a wooden wall.  They are wearing bikinis and say that since the world is bad, very bad, they have resolved to be bad themselves.  One girl picks her nose; the other plays a brief blast on a trumpet -- they move jerkily and their gestures are accompanied by ratcheting and clicking noises.  Apparently, the girls are imagined as marionettes being moved by invisible strings and levers.  This impression is heightened by the girls announcing that they are "virgins" -- in Czech, the word also means "dolls."  At first, the film suggests a narrative -- one girl is dining with a man who seems to be trying to seduce her.  The other girl appears, rudely orders everything in the house, and, then, proceeds to gobble down trencherfuls of food.  The girls then hustle the disappointed beaux off to the train station.  When the trains leaves the station, the camera seems mounted on the front of the locomotive and the landscape hurls by, although exotically colored and blurred, a sort of psychedelic terrain before psychedelia.  At intervals, the girls trick two other men into paying for expensive meals before getting the bum's rush.  But this motif never settles into a narrative and soon enough we grasp that the two girls are monsters from the Id, two anarchic demons (or witches) who destroy everything they encounter.  (The girls don't even have names although sometimes men call them by different monikers -- in the script, they are simply "Marie 1" and "Marie 2".)  The young women are extravagantly beautiful with huge Carnaby Street waif eyes and willowy figures -- on occasion, they resemble Andy Warhol "stars" or silent screen vamps.  Their excessive, almost Gothic beauty, adds a sexual frisson to the picture, although the heroines (if they can be so called) are pretty much asexual -- their only real desire is gustatory:  the girls are constantly eating -- pickles, grapes, green apples, sausages (that they cut apart with emasculating scissors), bananas (likewise chopped with scissors), every kind of pastry, and, at last, a spectacular buffet of voluptuously prepared foods, things like salmon pate, roast duck, gelatinous aspic, fowl "with eyes" (as one girl says) and, all sorts of unidentifiable gourmet foods slathered in whipped cream.  There's no plot to speak of -- the girls lounge around half-naked in their white-walled apartment, a room that becomes increasingly adorned with all sorts of graffiti on the walls, collages of pictures, smears of pigment, and hanging streamers of crepe paper (an adornment that the girls set on fire to roast phallic strings of sausages).  In one scene, the bed that the girls seem to share is covered in greasy-looking huge gingko leaves.  The girls are blonde (she wears a wreath of daisies on her head) and brunette.  Periodically, the picture is punctuated by wild montages of flowers or iron padlocks or fields of abstract color -- in some scenes, the girls seem to cavort in front of huge paintings that look like Jackson Pollok or, even, Cy Twombly, spasms of scribbling on the walls.  The sensibility is like that in a Vogue magazine -- rake-thin models pouting in front of flat expanses of whitewashed iron wall, like the sides of a bleached battleship, or posing next to industrial ruins.  Sometimes, the girls lounge around near the river in what seems to be a disreputable sort of spa with wooden cabanas.  In one scene, the girls take a bath in milk, sensuously eating bread as they soak ---- they wash the bread down with little sips from their bathwater.  In about half of the sequences, one or the other of the girls is armed with sharp-looking scissors -- the better to castrate you with.  The closest thing to a sex scene is an amatory encounter with a young man who has a massive, scary-looking collection of butterflies in glass cases.  The blonde poses for him with the butterfly cases strategically held to preserve her modesty.  On the soundtrack, we hear bits and pieces of music -- the use of sound is similar to Godard's films of about this time:  there are allusive fragments of pop songs or classical music or military marches, but nothing is played for more than a few seconds.  Dialogue is limited to absurdist exchanges about the meaning of words or speculations as to whether the girls even really exist.  This question becomes more preeminent as the film continues.  The girls brandish scissors at one another and seem to cut each other up into fragments -- then, the whole screen slips into a cubist montage of body parts, a sort of flurry of polaroid snapshots of legs and thighs and heads.  A gardener with his dog doesn't seem to notice the girls when they walk on his farm.  Some bicyclisst pass the girls, who are holding bedraggled-looking cobs of corn, and don't seem to notice them.  Then, the two girls find themselves in a weird underground vault full of tangles of piping and HVAC ducts.  There are dumb-waiters arrayed in one of the white-washed walls.  The two Maries crush themselves together into one of the tiny, locker-like dumb waiters and engage the mechanism to lift them from the lime-white subterranean cellar in which they have been wandering.  After some surrealist inserts of building levels through which they pass (viewed through the tiny opening in the compartment), they reach a sumptuously appointed banquet hall.  Huge tables in a Baroque room are groaning with a feast set for invisible gourmands.  The food is all elaborately prepared, drenched in rich sauces, and, almost nauseatingly rich.  Bottles of Johnny Walker Red abound, as well as Cinzano and other kinds of booze off-limits to most Czechs -- this signifies that the girls have intruded on an orgy prepared for Party dignitaries.  Of course, the two Maries who have been noshing their way through the preceding hour in the film begin to sample the dishes on the table and, in fact, gorge themselves.  They throw clumps of cream and pastry at one another -- heavy barrages of food that hit with a sickening impact.  Drunk on the whiskey, the girls, then, climb onto the table and trample food underfoot.  One of them does a striptease; the other clothes herself in drapery and mimics a fashion show.  They climb onto a chandelier over the smeared and ruinous trays of food.  When the chandelier collapses under their weight, the girls find themselves in the river -- they surface and seize hold of long poles that rock up and down, knocking them again and again into the water.  (Critics claim that these poles are instruments of punishment for dunking witches; I don't think this is obvious at all -- to me, the rods oaring away at the water, shaped a bit like utility poles, just seem some kind of phallic inconvenience; the girls are really not dunked or submerged by them.)  Emerging from the water, the two Maries next appear mummified in newsprint -- it's tightly wrapped around their bodies.  The witch-torture theme seems to falsify what happens next -- the Super-Ego, as it were asserts itself and the girls seem to punish themselves.  They are now back in history, literally clad in it.  They reassemble the smashed crockery into patterns of shards and, then, pour a disgusting slurry of wrecked food onto the plates.  Lying on their backs, the virgins (dolls) now seem partly paralyzed and, again, the chandelier drops like the blade of a guillotine on them.  The film ends with massive explosions and plane tour of a bombed out city, possibly Dresden.  In typescript, titles tells us that "This is the only way it could have ended" and,  then, as if sensing the viewers discomfiture at the transformation of elegantly prepared food into a nauseating garbage-slurry, the title says:  This film is dedicated to those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-trifle."  In other words, the moviemakers acknowledge that the film aimed at the mind has hit the audience in the gut -- we're upset not about oppression but about the massacre of the dainty delicacies in the carefully prepared banquet.  (This visceral reaction was apparently shared by the Communist authorities who denounced the movie for "disrespecting," as it were, food in a time of scarcity.)

The movie suggests, I suppose, that the gluttonous, primitive desires with which are all equipped are ultimately apolitical and anarchic.  If you want to subvert the Communist party and dialectical materialism, eat its lunch and shit on what you can't devour.  Four year olds are necessarily rebels.  This message is delivered through a mad collage of different film stocks, fragments of music, editing that knocks characters out of black-and-white scenes into rich technicolor.  The film has been characterized as profoundly "feminist", but this seems not exactly right either -- one of the filmmakers, the co-writer said that the movie could just as well have been about "two generals."  The style reminds me most of some of Jan Svankmeyer's stop-motion films, pictures in which monstrous and grotesque characters interact in menacing ways against a bizarre wallpaper of montage -- the Svankmeyer film that seems most similar to Daisies is Little Otik in which a childless couple adopts a vaguely human-shaped tree stump that then eats up everyone.  The other unmistakable influence on this film is Richard Lester's work with the Beatles on A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help (1965) -- Lester's exuberant jump-cuts and stylized narration created a whole new film grammar and it seems ludicrous to believe that Vera Chytilova wasn't aware of this kind of moviemaking.  In an early scene in the movie, a man and woman perform the Charleston in some kind of night club -- the two Marie's watch, get drunk, and begin hamming it up as well, competing, as it were. with the dancers for the attention of the other nonplussed patrons.  This sequence could have been lifted whole from one of Lester's Beatles' movies. 

The two young virgins who are so indelible in this movie weren't professional actors.  They appeared in only one other film produced at the same time by affiliated movie makers.  They are fresh, beautiful, and the brunette can cross her eyes to create a sort of Jimmy Finlayson effect -- I wonder what happened to them.