Daisies (1966)

Written and Directed by Věra Chytilová

This is a wild romp of a movie. Not much plot, but bubbling over with the silly joyous adolescent anti-authoritarian playful naughtiness.

The movie opens with shots taken from an aircraft during a military attack or a few different attacks, this is just the title sequence.

Then we go to a couple of young women (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová) in two-piece bathing suits sitting side by side. These two are the main characters in the movie. We follow them on their adventures and hang out with them in their apartment as they talk.

They go to fancy restaurants, to dinners with old men. Or one is on a date with an old man and the other comes in and crashes the date. They order and consume lots of food, presumably at the old man’s expense. The old men appear well healed so there is not a feeling that they are cheating others in need. The implication is that they are rich horny old men taking a hot too-young date out in hopes of action later. And who has sympathy for men like that? At any rate the girls say, “We are late for the train.” and run off with him to the station. Then one gets on with him and jumps off before the train is out of the station with the old man, dumped and riding away, while the girls giggle. This sort of thing is repeated a couple more times with other distinguished looking older men. 

The movie is non-linear and avant-garde. The visual style goes from B&W to color, to filtered colors, and into moments that can only be called psychedelic.
This is not at all surprising because Czechoslovakia was a major center of manufacture and research on the clinical use of LSD during which many in the artistic community were given LSD. Further reading on that is here:
https://przekroj.pl/en/society/a-communist-lsd-trip-aleksander-kaczorowski?fbclid=IwAR0IA5io0YuC0-9BbyIuniAzn4ou71yR_7WE4zMkHBlzuFANY8EAL14XpiA
The young women end up in a large elegant banquet room which is all set up with a food table as if a large wedding party is about to enter at any moment. They have their destructively naughty glutinous fun in this setting.

This is a really interesting and fun short feature. A high point in 1960 film culture easily rivaling anything produced during the same period in the USA avant-garde in that era.

Yet this was so long ago. Something so lovely and immediate is now the work of the dead. Věra Chytilová died in 2014, and what has become of these girls 55 years later? They are old women presumably transformed by life into whatever they became after this crazy movie on their youth.
Moving image is so strange. It has captured time and sent it back to us. It was one thing in the 1950s when the cinema of 30 years before was a different thing, sometimes crude and technologically rudimentary, at best a wondrous world of pantomime, yet remote and definitely “then”.  But now in the 21st Century we can see much of the previous century 50, 60, even 75 years ago, looking brand new, not all that distinguishable technologically from the moving images produced today.
The dead regularly perform for us. This is different from reading the words of the dead, these people are really alive talking and moving.
This has never occurred before, this is totally new to the human experience. What does it mean? How does it affect us?

The young women in the film are unquestionably alive, giggling and vital in every way. They are relics of 55 years ago, yet fresh as, well, fresh as Daisies.