Věra Chytilová’s 1966 Daisies (Sedmikrásky) is today undoubtedly one of the best-known and best-loved Czech films across the Anglophone world. It is admired and enjoyed for the boldness of its visual experiments, the subversive charge of its heroines’ outrageous gastronomic gags and pranks, the exhilarating force of its slapstick exuberance and sensory overload. It might therefore be surprising to learn that upon its original appearance in both the US and the UK Chytilová’s film encountered a good deal of critical hostility. As the teasing words of the film’s own closing dedication would have it, prominent reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic effectively declared themselves upset by a trampled-on salad.
The film has thus seen a striking change in its critical fortunes, a change partly connected to no less dramatic shifts in the meanings and concerns ascribed to the film. What was at the time frequently considered a satire (successful or otherwise) about consumerism or a scolding study of irresponsibility and greed has more recently tended to be read as an exercise in deconstructed gender norms and anti-patriarchal rebellion. More than most films Daisies has benefitted from the shifting language of cultural analysis, from the emergence and diffusion of new socio-political concerns and critical concepts in the years and decades since its release. As the survey of contemporaneous American and British reviews that follows may attest, Chytilová’s film was perhaps too hip even for the late 1960s.
Original US Reception
Daisies appeared earlier in the US than in the UK, and with a rather bigger fanfare. It had its American premiere at the Festival of New Czechoslovak Cinema that played at New York’s Museum of Modern Art between June 29 and July 11, 1967, ‘as part of the Lincoln Center Festival’.[1] Created as a response to several recent Czechoslovak successes in America, the film season was programmed by Willard Van Dyke, Director of MOMA’s Film Department, and the highly influential film curator Amos Vogel, who at the time referred to Chytilová’s film as a ‘splendiferous masterpiece’ and who would later devote a passage to it in his classic 1974 study Film as a Subversive Art (where he calls it ‘[v]isually and structurally perhaps the most sensational film of the Czech film renaissance’).[2] Such, apparently, was the importance of Daisies that the film festival would not even have gone ahead had the Czechoslovak government ‘stuck by its refusal’ to release this controversial title for export.[3]
Not all viewers shared Van Dyke or Vogel’s enthusiasm for the film, and critics’ responses to this initial festival screening would prove typical of a wider split in American reactions. The negative voices included those of Bosley Crowther, resident reviewer for The New York Times and at this point perhaps the most important film critic in America, who dismissed Daisies as ‘a pretentiously kookie and laboriously overblown mod farce’, with its ‘thoroughly emptyheaded’ heroines and failed ‘stabs at humor and satire’.[4] Several days later Time magazine’s unnamed reviewer conceded that the film was ‘brilliantly audacious’ pictorially, but attacked it for its ‘leaden symbolism’ and a script ‘that has all the consistency of an amateur happening’.[5] But perhaps the most damning take, and certainly the most unpleasant, came, characteristically, from the notorious John Simon in The New Leader. Simon calls Daisies ‘the bottom of the barrel’ of the MOMA festival, and condescendingly and insultingly dubs Chytilová ‘a one-time fashion model and never director’.[6] He damns the film’s escapades as ‘disconnected’, ‘silly’, ‘uneventful’, ‘uproariously unfunny’, ‘unconscionably dragged out’, and a derivation of the ‘dregs’ of silent comedy, Godard, Warhol, Richter and underground cinema. The film is doubly slammed for emulating ‘what is worst in the West’ – with ‘its idiot yearning for Western beatnikdom’ – and conforming to ‘what is worst in the East’ – with its ultimate punishment of its amoral protagonists. If there is any value to Simon’s piece, it is the way it makes plain the distaste for the two protagonists that seems to colour or underpin the most negative reactions to the film: here they are branded ‘teeniest-brained teenyboppers’, ‘cretinous beatniks’ and ‘ghastly’, and the actresses themselves deemed ‘supremely untalented and reasonably unattractive’ (Stanley Eichelbaum, in The San Francisco Examiner, would later give Simon’s chauvinistic disgust a run for its money by noting that the film ‘gave me a pain in the stomach’ and describing the heroines as ‘unattractive to the point of distress’).[7]
At the opposite extreme from Simon’s excoriations was the noted critic Penelope Gilliatt, who covered the MOMA film festival for The New Yorker. Gilliatt takes issue with Chytilová’s own interpretation of the film as a ‘necrologue about a negative way of life’, considering it instead ‘a delicately balmy and freewheeling piece of slapstick, dedicated to recording the passing impulses of two ravishing teenagers with the pre-moral interests of infants.’[8] In an interpretation that anticipates more recent assessments of the film as an affirmation of overturned conventions and unleashed appetites, and of its heroines’ anarchy as positive, Gilliatt concludes that this is no ‘fable about depravity’, as Chytilová and other critics have implied, but a ‘dainty hymn to gorging, photographed with energy and taste…and played by dolly girls with the voice boxes of goats and the bodies of succubi.’[9] Unlike many later commentators, though, Gilliatt declares the film essentially an ‘apolitical’ work whose evocation of the absurd is motivated chiefly by the absurd’s ‘funniness’.
Daisies was clearly considered appealing enough to be selected for an American release, being one of a number of Czechoslovak films acquired in 1967 – via the mediations of famed Italian producer Carlo Ponti – by the small New York-based distributor Sigma III, a subsidiary of Filmways. When the film opened theatrically at New York’s 34th Street East Theatre on October 25, 1967, Crowther devoted a longer review to it in the New York Times, though his opinions had not changed. Crowther here returns to Chytilová’s interpretations of the film (offered in person when attending the festival) as a ‘philosophical document’ and a study of ‘the dangerous hunger for prestige’ that results in ‘a total inability to be alone and therefore happy’.[10] In place of such respectably weighty meanings, however, all Crowther sees is ‘a conglomeration of random shots’ that offers only fleeting amusement.
In a sympathetic review for The Christian Science Monitor from March 1968, Louise Sweeney – who had earlier interviewed Chytilová for the same journal during the director’s New York visit – calls the film ‘brilliant’ but notes that it is ‘bound to alienate those who like the moral and the plot clear as Waterford crystal.’[11] This is a ‘chaotic and ambiguous’ work, ‘short on entertainment’, and ‘so plotless it makes Godard look like Cecil B. De Mille.’ While not much different in substance from Crowther comments about the story’s ‘randomness’, Sweeney’s piece lacks his disapproval. She also finds the film’s essential justification in its visual realization, noting that Chytilová and her cinematographer husband Jaroslav Kučera ‘do things with film that have just never been done before’: ‘their kaleidoscopic cuts, supermontages, acrobatic marvels of film technique dazzle even a professional filmgoer.’ From this relatively obscure quarter, Sweeney displays a tolerance for the film’s narrative unconventionality and an appreciation for the uniqueness of its visual experimentation that was sometimes lacking in the more prominent publications.
Claire Clouzot’s review in Film Quarterly is rooted in a more informed awareness about Chytilová’s work and the film’s context, appropriately for the more scholarly nature of this publication. Describing the film as ‘the most uncompromising and mature work ever to come out of the Barrandov studios’ and a ‘shattering’ chronicle of ‘devastation and nihilism’, Clouzot is the rare critic who both assents to Chytilová’s own description of the film as a ‘philosophical documentary’ and a work of social commentary, and sees these elements as successfully realized or achieved in the film itself.[12] For her this a brutal and shattering indictment of ‘[o]ur entire civilization’, in which the two ‘greedy little creatures’ who dominate the story, far from simply inconsequential irritants, are ‘specimens of the capitalistic (or…socialist) drive for acquisition’, representatives of ‘social or economic parasitism’ and the ties between ‘consumption and destruction’.[13] Like Sweeney, Clouzot is highly enamoured of the film’s aesthetic and technical ‘inventiveness’, its ‘indivisible’ fusion of ‘rhythm, decor, color, and soundtrack’, with the latter element given especial praise for its ‘incredible’ collage of songs, snatches of music and ‘animation noises’. For Clouzot all this stylisation serves the film’s grave theme, turning ‘a materialistic social criticism’ into ‘a poetic parable’. She notes, however, that the ‘complex richness’ of the film’s style may prove the victim of its own innovation, being ‘naturally offensive’ to the contemporary viewer still unschooled in the ‘optical gymnastics’ on display here.[14]
Clouzot’s latter point about the film’s style anticipates a view of the film that has since been widely established: that it was ahead of its time. In contrast, however, most of the original American reviewers tended to treat it simply as modish, ‘with it’, a work typically of its time. References thus abound in these reviews to the hippie movement, the counterculture and the underground. Time calls the film ‘a hippie pipe dream that looks and sounds like something concocted by a den member of America’s own underground cinema clique’, Norman K. Dorn of The San Francisco Examiner piece calls it a ‘flower-child-movie’ with ‘a swinging manifesto’ and one that ‘sets about to prove that hippydom is not an exclusive stake-out of Haight Street’, while Will Jones in the The Minneapolis Tribune suggests that it could have been promoted ‘as a psychedelic film’.[15] Sigma III did in fact promote it as something along these lines, with the original US posters prominently displaying Time’s ‘hippie pipe dream’ quote cited above and featuring the strained, Learyesque tagline ‘upsa-daisy, downs-a-daisy, turned-ons-a-daisy’ – advantageously trendy touches for a film perhaps otherwise difficult to categorise and even harder to sell.
In at least one case, though, the film’s links with the counterculture were not simply a matter of idle or commercially impelled labelling but of embrace by the counterculture itself. In a brief but intense notice from the underground newspaper East Village Other, written after the original festival screening, Lil Picard acclaims the film as ‘[o]ne of the most enlightening events of this month’, ‘a “message film” without boredom’ and ‘a masterpiece’.[16] It is ‘the best’ of ‘all the destruction-happenings I have seen’ and – prophetic words – ‘will become a Chaplin-quality classic of the sixties.’ A counterculture cabaret performer and collagist linked first with German Dada and later with New York’s avant-garde art scene, Picard was obviously disposed to love and appreciate the film in ways that many American reviewers at the time could not.
Original UK Reception
Daisies first reached the UK in November 1967, when it played as the closing film at the London Film Festival. It did not receive a theatrical release until summer 1968, when it opened on the 11th July at the Paris-Pullman cinema in South Kensington (a cinema then recently acquired by the film’s distributor Contemporary Films). It was paired with Lindsay Anderson’s The White Bus (1967), a medium-length film originally intended for a portmanteau project to have involved three of Britain’s former ‘Free Cinema’ directors. The pairing was apt – The White Bus too has a semi-surreal style that is itself Czech-influenced, being the first of Anderson’s three collaborations with cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček – but neither film prospered. As Anderson himself later noted, ‘the London critics slaughtered Daisies, and The White Bus didn’t do much better.’[17] Indeed the British reception of Daisies was perhaps even more negative than the American one.
A review by David Wilson for the Monthly Film Bulletin from January 1968 effectively sets the tone for what was to follow. Once again taking up Chytilová’s own statements on the film (‘a philosophical documentary in the form of a farce’), Wilson writes that ‘the images of cosmic destruction with which the film begins and ends leave no doubt about what she means to say.’[18] If, on the one hand, Wilson criticises the film for ‘the crashing obviousness of its basic premise’ – i.e. that ‘life in a materialist, consumer-based society is a vicious circle of destruction’ – he also attacks Chytilová for ‘opting out’ of a clear enough delineation of the protagonists’ ultimate fate and the implications of the ending: ‘are the two Maries destined for eternal damnation, or is a new world to rise from the splinters of the chandelier?’ The film is further criticised for recycling ‘images and moods which crop up again and again in Czech cinema’ (the connections drawn with Jan Němec’s Martyrs of Love (Mučedníci lásky, 1966) are especially unfair given that this film was made after Daisies), for failing to rise above the formulaic, ‘ready-made’ surrealism of its imagery, and for offering only ‘gimmickry’ instead of ‘genuine invention’.
Later British reviewers reasserted what they too saw as the obviousness or crudity of the film’s ‘message’, which was commonly agreed to be a satirical and moral one – or even, for The Daily Telegraph’s Eric Shorter, a ‘plainly puritanical’ one.[19] Shorter somewhat patronisingly argued that the film’s ‘satire’ – directed against characters leading ‘a life without commitment’ and ‘an acquisitive world governed…by laziness and greed’ – is ‘so limited and monotonous’ that ‘it hardly seems worth aiming at a Western audience where such scorn seems almost naïve’. Tom Milne in The Observer called the film ‘a Czech comedy-with-a-message’, ‘all very symbolic if you get the very obvious point’, and Punch’s Richard Mallett saw it as ‘a laborious way of putting over a very simple idea’ – ‘the emptiness of a life lived only for kicks’.[20] Remarks like these are of course strikingly at odds with those commentators for whom the film’s meanings remain ambiguous, contradictory or even opaque.
Some of the negative reviews offer grudging or offhand praise for the film’s style or technical effects. Shorter calls its ‘experiments in colour’ ‘sometimes fairly pleasing or surprising’, Milne compliments its ‘exquisite colour’, and Gordon Gow, in Films and Filming, concedes that ‘inventiveness is applied’ to the film’s ‘appalling’ ends, and that the ‘self-congratulatory pyrotechnics’ of Jaroslav Kučera’s camerawork ‘beguil[es] the eye’ even as ‘we are submitted’ to undue ‘sermonising at the hands of his wife’.[21] Elsewhere the style itself came in for criticism. Mallett decried the lack of motivation behind the film’s changes of colour, the distinguished Michael Billington, in The Illustrated London News, called the whole thing ‘relentless, tricksy, headache-inducing’, and a blunt and exasperated Dick Richards, in The Daily Mirror, chastised protagonists and director alike: ‘There seems to be nothing wrong with the young anti-heroines of “Daisies”…that a short, sharp spanking would not put right. Their behaviour is giggly, stupid and tedious, and Vera Chytilova [sic] has directed it with the exuberant self-indulgence of someone who has just bought a home-movie camera.’[22]
Among the rare positive assessments was Ian Wright’s review in The Guardian, which is rarer still for adopting a gender-oriented (if not necessarily feminist) perspective, praising the film’s ‘enlighteningly female view’ and noting its ‘moral’ commentary on ‘women as objects’ and ‘the inherent frivolity of much female existence.’[23] Such commentary, Wright suggests, is what Chytilová means by referring to the film as a ‘philosophical documentary’. The film’s style is described as ‘sharp and invigorating’ and the two lead actresses as ‘thoroughly watchable’. An unsigned capsule review of both Daisies and The White Bus, again from The Observer, praises the two films as ‘amusing’ examples of, respectively, ‘bouncing Czech and British understatement.’[24] Beyond the national outlets, a brief review published in the London press (Westminster & Pimlico News, Chelsea News and General Advertiser) described Daisies positively as ‘a lyrical film, written with the camera.’[25]
Overall, however, the dominant tone of the film’s British reception would appear to be summed up by an end-of-year overview of the year’s film releases in The Sunday Telegraph: ‘the ridiculous Daisies showed that the Czechs could be just as awful as anybody else.’[26]
Later Reassessment: How the Daisies Became Good
In the years since the original release of Daisies, protagonists Marie I and Marie II have been subject to a remarkable vindication or ‘redemption’ of the kind they were denied by the film’s own apocalyptic ending. From being irresponsible youths living for kicks, from being feckless flower children, disgusting vandals or simply an ‘awful pair’, the heroines have since been critically recuperated as anarchic rebels, semiotic activists and subverters of male power.[27] They have been seen as forerunners of Thelma and Louise, as ‘nihilists, anarchists, feminists’ who fuse Lena Dunham’s Girls with Pussy Riot, and their actions as a mocking attack on ‘a power structure…rotten at its core.’[28] Having thus transformed these protagonists from the objects to the agents of the film’s satire, critics are now more likely to cheer-lead than to chastise the upset table manners.
No less than the protagonists’ culinary outrages, the film’s stylistic outrages have also subsequently been celebrated for their transgressiveness and radicalism, and have gone from provoking distaste to inspiring an equally visceral delight – from Eichelbaum’s stomach pains and Billington’s headaches to Steven Shaviro ‘literally trembling with joy and exhilaration’.[29] The film now enjoys the enviable status of the subversive classic, the avant-garde delight, the well-respected work that is also wicked fun.[30]
Several factors have been at work in the film’s ultimate transformation in status, the most important of which are probably the spread of feminist consciousness and the consolidation of academic film studies. It is the feminist critique and interrogation of established gender roles that has helped reframe the protagonists’ antics as subversive and positive acts, and Chytilová’s own tactics in terms of a specifically female discourse (a concrete analogue to this at the level of exhibition is the way the film began to be shown at festivals of women filmmakers during the 1970s and ‘80s). The critical instruments of academic film scholarship have perhaps proven generally influential too in this shift towards gender-based readings and, when brought specifically to bear on Daisies itself, have proven equal to grappling with the film’s obscurities for the elucidation of future viewers. Such erudite, sensitive and persuasive scholarly readings of the film as Herbert Eagle’s ‘Dada and Structuralism in Chytilová’s Daisies’, Bliss Cua Lim’s ‘Dolls in Fragments: Daises as Feminist Allegory’ and the highly contextually informed writing of Peter Hames may thus have had some role in shaping later receptions.[31] It must be noted though that the film’s ‘rehabilitation’ and the shift in its interpretation have not been entirely straightforward or absolute. Even in 1990 Time Out magazine’s Adrian Turner could pen a review as vitriolic as any from the 1960s, brutally concluding that the film ‘stinks’, and in 2012 the Boston Globe described it as ‘unrelenting’ and ‘a mess’.[32]
Daisies’ changing reception bears an interesting relationship to Chytilová’s own statements about her film. As the film has grown in stature and popularity it has also grown distant from its director’s stated view that it is a ‘parable’ about materialism and ‘parasitism’ ‘with strands of satire and sarcasm’ aimed at its two protagonists.[33] It is ironic, perhaps, that a number of the original, negative reviews essentially adhered to the director’s own comments on the film (especially in Britain) whereas the later, positive responses tend to discuss the film in ways markedly at odds with those comments and in terms alien to those used by Chytilová (though Bliss Cua Lim, while developing a reading of the film as a feminist allegory, does acknowledge Chytilová’s stated intentions and argues that the film ‘can be read multivalently’ as both a critique and a celebration of its ‘recalcitrant’ heroines).[34]
We may on the one hand regard this shift of interpretation in terms of an ultimate, belated revelation of the film’s ‘real’ meaning, a meaning that the original reviewers were perhaps too blinkered by the director’s statements or by their own conservatism to perceive.[35] We may on the other see this shift as testament to the film’s slippery complexity, its interpretative malleability, and an illustration of the way a film’s meaning changes over time together with the needs, values and critical frameworks of new generations of viewers. Whichever is the case, it is undoubtedly a good thing that this acidic confection of a film tends nowadays to be critically savoured rather than stomped on.
Jonathan Owen
Notes:
[1] ‘Festival of New Czechoslovak Cinema’, The Museum of Modern Art, No. 65, June 28, 1967 (https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/3914/releases/MOMA_1967_Jan-June_0088_65.pdf) (accessed October 1, 2021)
[2] John Simon, ‘Festival of Czechoslovak Film: Part 1’, in Movies into Film: Film Criticism 1967-1970 (The Dial Press: New York, 1971) (originally published in The New Leader, Vol. 50, No. 14), p.282; Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974), p.141.
[3] Simon, op. cit.
[4] Bosley Crowther, ‘The Screen: Czechoslovak Showcase: Center, Museum Join in Festival Project’, The New York Times, June 19 1967 (https://www.nytimes.com/1967/06/19/archives/the-screen-czechoslovak-showcasecenter-museum-join-in-festival.html) (accessed October 1, 2021)
[5] ‘Cinema: Czech New Wave’, Time, June 23, 1967 (http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,839566,00.html) (accessed October 2, 2021)
[6] Simon, op. cit.
[7] Stanley Eichelbaum, ‘Over-Fed Czech Allegory’, The San Francisco Examiner, November 9, 1968, p.9.
[8] Penelope Gilliatt, ‘The Current Cinema: Czech Wave in New York’, The New Yorker, July 1, 1967, p.56.
[9] Ibid., pp.56-57.
[10] Bosley Crowther, “‘Daisies’ at East 34th’, The New York Times, October 26, 1967 (https://www.nytimes.com/1967/10/26/archives/screen-camelot-arrives-at-warnerfilm-hasnt-overcome-stage-plays.html) (accessed October 2, 2021)
[11] Louise Sweeney, ‘“The Daisies”’, The Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1968, p.6.
[12] Claire Clouzot, ‘Daisies’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3, Spring 1968, p.35.
[13] Ibid., pp.35-36.
[14] Ibid., p.37.
[15] Norman K. Dorn, ‘A Fresh New Wave from the Czech Film Makers’, The San Francisco Examiner, July 23, 1967, p.7; Norman K. Dorn, ‘“Does it Matter?” Usually it Didn’t’, The San Francisco Examiner, November 10, 1968, p.10; Don Morrison, ‘“Daisies” Tells a Madcap Czech Tale of 2 Girls’, The Minneapolis Star, April 12 1968, p.15.
[16] Lil Picard, ‘She Has Her Feet in Her Face’, East Village Other, Vol. 2, No. 16, July 15-30, 1967, p.16.
[17] Lindsay Anderson, ‘The White Bus’, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise: The Collected Writings of Lindsay Anderson (London: Plexus), p.107.
[18] David Wilson, ‘Sedmikrásky (Daisies)’, Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 408, January 1, 1968, p.195.
[19] Eric Shorter, ‘Mindless Misses’, Daily Telegraph, July 12, 1968, p.19.
[20] Tom Milne, ‘Bergman’s Vengeful Demons’, The Observer, July 14, 1968, p.24; Richard Mallett, ‘Cinema’, Punch, Vol. 255, No. 6671, July 17, 1968, pp.30-31.
[21] Gordon Gow, ‘Daisies’, Films and Filming, Vol. 14, No. 12, September 1968, pp.36-37.
[22] Michael Billington, ‘Bergman the Mesmerist’, The Illustrated London News, Vol. 253, No. 6729, July 20, 1968, p.32; Dick Richards, ‘The Old Firm Step on the Gas’, Daily Mirror, July 12, 1968, p.23.
[23] Ian Wright, ‘Prospero’s Knell’, The Guardian, July 12, 1968, p.8.
[24] ‘Daisies (A) and The White Bus (A)’, The Observer, July 21, 1968, p.18.
[25] Steve Hunt, ‘Tennyson and Tolstoy’, Westminster and Pimlico News, July 12, 1968, p.2.
[26] Margaret Hinxman, ‘Good Views of the Year’, The Sunday Telegraph, December 29, 1968, p.10.
[27] Gow, p.37.
[28] Kate Muir, ‘Classic Film of the Week: Daisies’, The Times, March 6, 2015 (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/classic-film-of-the-week-daisies-1966-mg69bk7v5cj) (accessed October 3, 2021); Carmen Gray, ‘Daisies’, Sight & Sound, Vol. 24, No. 5, May 2014, p.112.
[29] Steven Shaviro, ‘Daisies’, The Pinocchio Theory, January 26, 2007 (http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=547) (October 3, 2021)
[30] Michael Wilmington in Chicago Tribune, 2003: ‘“Daisies” is that relative rarity, a landmark movie classic that’s still lots of fun.’ (‘“Daisies” a swinging ‘60s dandy’, Chicago Tribune, April 25, 2003, p.8.)
[31] Herbert Eagle, ‘Dada and Structuralism in Chytilová’s Daisies’, in Ladislav Matejka (ed.), Crosscurrents 10: A Yearbook of Central European Culture (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1991), pp.223-234; Bliss Cua Lim, ‘Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory’, Camera Obscura 47, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2001, pp.1-77; Peter Hames, ‘The Return of Věra Chytilová’, Sight & Sound, Vol. 48, No. 3, Summer 1979, pp.168-173; Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave (London: Wallflower Press, 2005).
[32] Adrian Turner, ‘Daisies’, in John Pym (ed.), The Time Out Film Guide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p.243; Mark Feeney, ‘A Prague Spring Wildflower (Very Wild) Blooms at the Brattle’, The Boston Globe, August 24, 2012, p.10.
[33] Chytilová, quoted in Lim, p.41.
[34] Ibid., p.38.
[35] J. Hoberman, for one, argues that, the director’s own ‘cagey’ assertions about the film notwithstanding, ‘there is just too much jouissance in the protagonists’ spiritedly anti-social behavior (as well as in the filmmaking) for Daisies to be understood as anything other than a celebration. (‘Perfect Chaos: Vera Chytilová’s Sedmikrásky (Daisies)’, Artforum, April 2019 (https://www.artforum.com/print/201904/j-hoberman-on-vera-chytilova-s-sedmikrasky-daisies-78969) (accessed October 3, 2021)
