Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1966 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Ivana Karbanová, Jitka Cerhová, Marie Češková
If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also cowrote the script. The result is DAISIES, 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.
Up Next in Ester Krumbachová: Phantom of the Czechoslovak New Wave
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All My Good Countrymen
Directed by Vojtěch Jasný • 1969 • Czechoslovakia
Vojtěch Jasný won the best director award at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival for this sweeping portrait of a small Czech village between the years of 1945 and 1958, during which the residents go from hopeful in the aftermath of the defeat of the Na...
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Fruit of Paradise
Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1970 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Jitka Nováková, Karel Novak, Jan SchmidOpening with a senses-ravishing, psychedelic vision of Eden, this tantalizing political allegory sets the story of Adam and Eve in a European health spa where a vacationing couple (Jitka Nováková ...
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Witchhammer
Directed by Otakar Vávra • 1970 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Vladimír Šmeral, Elo Romančík, Josef KemrCowritten by Ester Krumbachová and director Otakar Vávra, this unsettling parable uses seventeenth-century religious hysteria as a potent allegory for the repressive political climate of Soviet-oc...
