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 depicting food waste, a charge that covered the regime's wider objection to its anti-authoritarian spirit. Daisies stayed suppressed in its own country until the end of the Communist period in 1989; it is now one of the canonical works of the Czechoslovak New Wave and one of the founding 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. What follows is a series of joyfully nihilistic stunts: exploiting older men in expensive restaurants for free meals, cutting up their flat with shears and scissors, walking through documentary footage of bombed cities, and a banquet that has become the film's most famous set piece. There is no narrative arc to speak of, only a run of vignettes that experiment freely with structure and colour.

Jaroslav Kučera's photography (he was Chytilová's husband at the time, and one of the founding cinematographers of the Czechoslovak New Wave), the experimental treatments of colour and texture, and the rapid editing make it one of the most formally radical works of 1960s European cinema. Its influence runs through later work by Vera Drakeová, the Riot Grrrl scene and a long feminist avant-garde tradition after them. Chytilová defended the film against the state censors for over twenty years, and that fight is now part of how it is received.