Daisies
One of the highlights of Vera Chytilová’s filmography is the grotesque moral Daisies (1966). The surrealistic narrative about a pair of young women who decide to be as corrupt as the world around them does not arise from concrete socio-political realities. As a result, the biting account of conformity, petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness, and the limits of light-heartedness has timeless qualities. Daisies marked the beginning of Chytilová’s collaboration with Ester Krumbachová, who contributed to the eccentric costumes and script. The collage-like visual component then gave a lot of space for experimentation to the cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera. It is still an original gem of Czech cinema of the 1960s, which infuriated the communist officials of the time.
About the Director
Perhaps the most innovative director of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s, Věra Chytilová, was born on February 2, 1929 in Ostrava. While working as a clapper girl at Barrandov Studio, she was accepted to the Prague film school FAMU. During the years 1957–1962 she studied direction under the veteran Czech film director Otakar Vávra. In her schoolwork, she was visibly influenced by cinéma-vérité documentaries and formalist modern European movies. The same was true for her first feature film, Something Different (1963), which intercuts the life of a real gymnast with a fictional story of a housewife. Chytilová is probably best known for her second film, the Dadaist, surrealist and feminist hymn to creative imagination Daisies (1966). After the Soviet invasion in 1968, she wasn’t allowed to shoot feature films for a few years. Then she returned with the acerbic comedy of manners The Apple Game ( ). Her satire about social reality of socialist community called Panelstory (1979) was so provocative that it could be seen only on the outskirts of Prague. After the fall of Communist regime, Chytilová completed many penetrating documentaries and four more features satirising capitalism and revealing her still equally strong moral stance. Věra Chytilová died in Prague at the age of 85, on March 12, 2014.
Source: https://www.filmovyprehled.cz/en/person/1555/vera-chytilova