Daisies

Věra Chytilová's "Daisies" arrives to us as a genuinely anarchic film, though one must be cautious about retrofitting modern cultural categories onto work created in 1966 Czechoslovakia. The two female protagonists operate as agents of chaos and destruction in a patriarchal society, which has led some contemporary critics to read the film as proto-feminist or even proto-woke in its rejection of social order. Yet the film's radical posture flows from Soviet-era avant-garde sensibilities and existential rebellion rather than from the specific constellation of progressive identity politics that characterize contemporary social consciousness.

The film's visual style, its formal experimentation, and its deliberate rejection of narrative convention all serve an anarchic rather than a progressive political project. The girls consume and destroy indiscriminately, their rampage devoid of the consciousness-raising or awareness-building that modern progressive cinema insists upon. There is no lesson learned, no system critiqued for its injustices, no marginalized voice uplifted. The destruction is ornamental, aesthetic, almost playful in its refusal of meaning. The government's decision to ban the film for twenty years speaks to its perceived danger as an anarchic work, not as a work of social justice advocacy.

We might say that "Daisies" occupies an interesting historical position: it was revolutionary in its time, and its female protagonists do subvert authority, but the subversion operates on a register entirely separate from contemporary progressive sensibilities. The film is too anarchic, too committed to pure negation, too uninterested in building alternatives or centering marginalized perspectives. It remains a work of genuine artistic radicalism, but one that predates and operates outside the framework of modern woke cinema.