Daisies (4k Restoration) - Enzian Theater

4K Restoration!

Dive into the magic of cinema with the Enzian Film Club! Join us for an enriching experience where film enthusiasts and novices alike can explore classic films in a new light. Each session features a short presentation by esteemed professors from local colleges, followed by collaborative discussions that bring fresh insights and foster a deeper appreciation for the art of filmmaking. Part of our Saturday Matinee Classics series, the Enzian Film Club is your gateway to understanding and enjoying timeless cinematic masterpieces in a vibrant, community-focused setting.

Featuring an Enzian Film Club discussion on “Experimental Cinema” with Nicole Richter, PhD from Rollins College!

If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over?

Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stopmotion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also cowrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion and widely considered one of the great works of feminist cinema.

1966, 76 minutes, Czechoslovakia, In Czech with English Subtitles, directed by Věra Chytilová, Unrated (treat as “R”)

“The playful, anything-goes experimentation of Daisies, with its psychedelic onslaught of coloured filters and fragmented editing, made it the most formally vibrant and daring film of the Czech New Wave.”
– Carmen Grey, BFI
“The Czech director Vera Chytilová's second feature, "Daisies," from 1966... is one of the great outpourings of cinematic invention in an age of over-all artistic liberation—and the revolutionary value of imagination is the film's very subject.”
– Richard Brody, THE NEW YORKER
“Modern audiences who come to see this late-'60s gem will be rewarded with a wicked sex farce and daring surrealist cinematography.”
– Ela Bittencourt, SLANT MAGAZINE
“Madcap, Dadaist explosion of a movie that represents the Czech New Wave at its most formally radical and kookily captivating... Chytilová ensures that something unexpected occurs in virtually every shot.”
– Michael Koresky, THE CRITERION COLLECTION