Dont miss this stunning hallucinatory feast. 
Sedmikrasky (1966) AKA Daisies
Directed by Vera Chytilová
Genre: Surreal Comedy, Avant-garde / Experimental, Satire, Abstract Film, Black Comedy
Runtime: 74 min
Country: Czechoslovakia
Language: Czech
Color: Color (Eastmancolor)
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060959/
An exercise in avant-garde cinema that is freshly humorous and accessible, Daisies is a dark comedy that eschews a traditional narrative for a Dadaist construction of events. Perpetually dressed in vibrantly corresponding costumes and dark black eyeliner, Marie and Marie work together to create mischief. Seeing the world ruined and values worthless, they decide to "go bad." They stage various dinner dates with stale old men, eat and drink merrily while telling lies, and, in a fast-motion Chaplinesque bit of slapstick, they hop trains and lose the men. Always looking for new adventures, the girls get drunk at a nightclub and get kicked out in a grand physical comedy style. They sit around their apartment and destroy things with a deadpan whimsy, apathetic to the men professing their love. Pursuing adventure about town, the two Maries take a dumbwaiter up to a banquet hall and proceed to delightfully demolish it. Using both black-and-white and color film stock, the girls' antics are enhanced by innovative special effects and camera tricks by cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera. Historically a key film in the Czech New Wave movement, Daisies was banned and director
A surrealist comedy way ahead of its time, Daisies uses unconventional film techniques in its telling of two girls' wholeheartedly creative way of destroying what surrounds them. An exemplary film in the Czech New Wave movement, Daisies was banned and found director Daisies remains difficult for mainstream audiences, yet undoubtedly appears to be a visionary exploration of youth gone wild. — Andrea LeVasseur
A rare female voice from the Czech New Wave.
The opening of 'Daisies' features a montage of two subjects very familiar to 1966 Eastern Bloc film audiences: work and war, as shots of an industrial machine alternate with views of rubbling city from an airplane bomber's point of view. These are masculine subjects in a very masculine culture. Or they seem to be. The machine features a circular mechanism, and represents repetition, but also productivity, and might be said to represent female principles, whereas the war footage is of pure destruction. The heroines of 'Daisies' embody both these gender-specific realms, and manage to create something new. They are idle, but, like George Costanza, their indolence depends on relentless invention. They are destructive, but out of the destruction they produce something new.
'Daisies' was a product of the Czech New Wave, but seems a million miles away from its most famous contemporaries, the films of Menzel and Forman. These latter, though liberal and anti-totalitarian, were artistically conservative - deliberately humanist works, where 'real', psychologically plausible characters exist in 'real' places, and every narrative progression makes logical sense. If they seem 'timeless' to us now, it is because they didn't truly engage with their own times.
And, of course, they were male. Where they seem closer to the 19th century novel, or classic Hollywood cinema, Chytilova's peers are the great European modernists, Godard, Paradjanov, Makajev, Rivette, or the plays of Ionesco. Where Forman and Menzel framed their illusions of realism in formal coherence, Chytilova revels in formal instability. These aren't psychologically plausible characters in a cause-and-effect universe. We first meet the two Maries after the opening credits, and their automaton gestures, with accompanying sound effects, continue the movement of the machine.
The plot basically consists of the girls trying to chat up old men who'll feed them, but what they really do is make a nonsense of plot. The recurring motif is the posy of roses worn by Marie II, and thrown by her to further the story - we remember the nursery rhyme 'a ring a ring of rosies, a pocketful of posies, a tishoo, a tishoo, we all fall down'. And everything falls down here, in a game where the rules have splintered and fragmented.
The film mixes monochrome, colour, and unstably tinted scenes. Sequences that begin 'sensibly' are broken down, by slapstick, changes of register, 'impossible' changes of location or physics, or are turned from natural scenes into the robotic movements of a clockwork toy going out of control. This disruption has a theoretical point - in one scene, the girls find their bodies cut up as they find their identities dissolved by conflicting desires, social expectations and representations. In another, they wander around a dream space, wondering why people pay no attention to them, realising that 'logically', they mustn't exist, because Western culture has no place for them.
Just as they parody the notions of work and war (in the climactic food orgy, martial army music soundtracks a cake fight), so these sprites play with and destroy the assumptions of Western humanism, its claims to adequately represent 'reality', especially in a time of such bewildering, radical change, as in the 1960s. They do to cinema what Ionesco did to literature, cut it into shreds.
The whole thing plays like parody Godard, with Marie II as Anna Karina, with meaningful conversations about love accompanied by the girls cutting up sausages and bananas: the butterfly sequence is a wicked lampoon of 'Vivre sa Vie'. Where Godard's heroines remained fixed and stared at, the two Maries laugh, look, escape, see their frame and break it, insist on their body as something more than an object, something they can play with themselves.
Not even the heroines' liberating subversivess is fixed - their mindless appetite is punished as often as their formal iconoclasm is celebrated. But for all its theoretical rigour, 'Daisies' never sacrifices its sense of humour - I first saw it when I was ten, and loved it for its slapstick fun, its narrative unpredictability, its playful soundtrack, and its tireless visual invention. I still love it now.
Sedmikrasky.(Chytilova.1966).Tvrip.XviD-Tir.avi 
(1 full source, 9-10 leechers now.)
Otras copias
