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Czech New Wave

Daisies (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

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Věra Chytilová’s Daisies defies questions like “what the fuck is this?” It is simply unlike anything else in world cinema. I’ve watched films from every continent on the planet and cannot think of a single movie that compares to Daisies. It’s anarchic, ebullient and ruthlessly itself. In an era of petulantly formalist films, its blend of medium-breaking collages, jump-cuts and percussionist staccato soundtrack stands alone as a crowning achievement of drastic bizarreness. 

Yet this hour-and-16-minute chronicle of two women wreaking havoc in Prague is, in its own way, profoundly accessible and grounded. Yes, this is a film that starts with a montage of naval warfare, followed by two girls, Marie I and Marie II, declaring that “if the world is bad, then we are going bad as well.” It’s a cry against the ugliness of war. Yet it’s ultimately about the tumultuous journey of two girls failing to understand adulthood in a world that expects them to achieve it off the bat, a fact bolstered by its lack of professional actors in its lead roles. And like The Firemen’s Ball, it broadly relies on non-professional actors (its leads are played by a schoolgirl and a shop clerk).

More than many Czech New Wave films, Daisies benefits from the viewer knowing a spot of Czech. My Czech is far from proficient, but its simple dialogue, which replicates the speech patterns and worldview of children, was often clear to me even before I read the subtitles. But more importantly, there’s wordplay in the film that’s easily missed in English. In Czech, Ivana Karbanová’s line “I am a virgin” is “já jsem panna”, ending with a noun that can mean “virgin” or “doll.” The duo’s catchphrase, where one says “vadí?”, to which the other replies “nevadí”, meaning “do you care?” And “I don’t care” refers to a Czech children’s game. “Daisies is fundamentally childlike: a film that plays with adult ideas in adolescent terms.

“We are going bad as well” is an adolescent declaration of war against a disorienting world. The world is burning, so let’s burn it more. And the film follows suit: aesthetically, Daisies operates like the play-acting young girls it follows. It plays with the medium of film, mixing analogue effects, strange montages and color grading. When the Maries are home in their apartment, the film adopts color, portraying the girls’ world as vibrant and lively. When the Maries take on false identities to troll lonely older men over dinner, Daisies often switches to sepia or black-and-white, turning into a Buster Keatonesque comedy of manners. Just take the scene where the Maries run with an old man towards a train, hopping on board it, and then trade places with the old man. It feels like something out of The General or Modern Times. And that’s before we get to the Maries deploying a Burroughsian cut-up technique to each other, where they use scissors to cut each other apart, while their animated body parts occupy a different part of the frame, before the film devolves into a flashy montage of percussionist snipping set to bits of the frame clashing against each other.…

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The Firemen’s Ball (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

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Miloš Forman is best known in the Anglophone world for his crowd-pleasing (if delightfully truculent) blockbusters One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. Both relate the life stories of iconoclastic eccentrics who burn like a barn fire, disrupting the higher powers, and then die in obscurity.  Neither film exactly suggests that Forman was a politically dissident Czech Jewish child of Holocaust victims and whose initial films were banned by the Soviet authorities in Czechoslovakia before he resettled in the United States to become a filmmaker.

Yet this is the key to Forman’s anarchic spirit. His American studio films reflect his impish proclivities and emigration from an authoritarian government. Nobody sells outsider artists quite like Forman does. Yet his most countercultural and rebellious work hails from the first part of his career, when he was a pioneer of the Czechoslovak New Wave of filmmaking, a movement where Czechs and Slovaks used the medium of film to flip the bird at the Kremlin.

In the days before the Prague Spring, when the Czechoslovakians faced the possibility of democratic reforms, and the days following the Warsaw Pact invasion of the country, which quelled those hopes, some filmmakers pioneered a mode of filmmaking that viciously but furtively blasted the structure of Soviet authority. When the Czechs and Slovaks fell behind the Iron Curtain, those modes became stronger than ever.

So Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball is different from Cuckoo’s Nest or Amadeus. It lacks a countercultural protagonist with reckless countercultural tendencies hat results in his early death. Indeed, The Firemen’s Ball doesn’t have a protagonist, instead depicting a cast of Bohemian firemen driving to host a ball which their bureaucratic whims repeatedly thwart. They’re not exactly the kind of frigid authoritarians who’d be villains in Forman’s later work. The firemen — many of whom are played by real Czech firemen with no acting experience — are incompetent rather than malicious, attempting to honor their chairman who, unknown to him because of Soviet medical policy, has cancer. Yet instead of centering the ball around him, they try to protect a series of prizes which are stolen from them. At the start of the film, two firemen argue over whether to hold a latter in place while a man at the top of the ladder accidentally sets a banner on fire. This is revisited later in the film when the firemen are too late to save an old man’s house from burning down because they’re trying to save his prizes. These aren’t cartoon villains — they’re a much worse threat: bureaucratic oafs whose fixation on micromanaging non-issues in an extremely small space fucks everything up.

It’s hard to fathom why the Soviet Union had a problem with a film about incompetent bureaucrats failing to feed civilians. Yet after the Warsaw Powers invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet authorities banned the film forever, which is difficult to fathom when a crucial moment features a panicked old man throwing a stolen ham onto a table and then fainting in front of a crowd.…

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