Daisies

Věra Chytilová's Daisies (Sedmikrásky) opened in 1966 at the Bergamo Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix, and was promptly banned by the Czechoslovak Communist authorities for the depiction of food waste — a charge that masked the regime's broader objection to the film's anti-authoritarian sensibility. Daisies remained suppressed in its country of origin until the end of the Communist period in 1989; it has since become one of the canonical works of the Czechoslovak New Wave and one of the foundational pieces of formally radical feminist cinema.

Two young women, both named Marie (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová), decide that since the world has gone to ruin, they too will be ruined. The film is structured as a series of joyfully nihilistic stunts — exploiting older men in expensive restaurants for free meals, destroying flats with shears and scissors, walking through documentary footage of bombed cities, eventually staging a banquet-disruption that is the film's most-cited set piece. There is no narrative arc; the film operates as a sequence of structurally and chromatically experimental vignettes.

Jaroslav Kučera's photography (Chytilová's then-husband, also a foundational Czechoslovak New Wave cinematographer), the experimental colour-and-texture treatments, and the rapid editing make the film one of the most formally radical works of 1960s European cinema — directly influential on later work by Vera Drakeová, the Riot Grrrl scene, and a long subsequent feminist-avant-garde tradition. Chytilová's own commitment to the project — she defended it against state censors for over twenty years — is part of the work's continuing reception.