Daisies: Czech New Wave Feminism & Discontinuity Editing

[00:00:00]hi folks and welcome to our last installment in  our series on editing we're going to talk about   daisies discontinuity editing and a little bit  about the ideology of the film in its historical   context i want to call what it's doing a kind  of feminist subversion but first a little bit   of historical context as i mentioned in the film  notes daisies is a an example of a film from the   czech new wave um new wave generally is a film  uh film history term that refers to a kind of uh   burgeoning of kind of creative and anti-hollywood  films coming out of the 1950s and 60s what we   get here in the czech new wave is a kind of  energy resisting a uh the soviet censorship   that was happening in the 1960s james tweedy is a  film scholar who writes a bit about this i'm going   to quote a bit from what he says about the czech  new wave he says the new waves emerging from the   soviet sphere of influence attracted inordinate  attention from critics and government officials   who are interested in highlighting the discrepancy  between free artists in the west allowed to pursue   personal artistic expression state artists in the  east forced to work through bureaucratically and   politically dictated channels and the new waves  of central and eastern europe a bastion of freedom   within an oppressive communist order it's that  latter category that daisies falls into a film   that expresses a desire to manifest a certain  freedom as a way of kind of sticking it to   the oppressive order associated with the  communist dictatorships that were ruling over   freedom of expression in these parts of the world  at the time he'll elaborate and say that the films   of the czech new wave suggest that personal  gratification is itself a socially powerful   act no matter how counterproductive it seems and  auto annihilation offers a radical alternative to   efficient participation in or continued obedience  to a social old order run by old men i hope   that resonates a bit with the film uh also he'll  continue to write in the west there was a tendency   to judge the artistry of cinematic works coming  out of the eastern bloc according to the level of   dissent displayed they also judged both artistic  merit and descent by the level of youthful   exuberance and absurdist comedy on parade and  the films become local manifestations of a more   extensive youth uprising against implacable and  dreary communist party authorities once again i   hope this is giving some contextual understanding  to the strangeness and wildness and absurdity   that is daisies right it is not merely an  antarctic film it has a kind of historical context   for that for that anarchy and also he'll say the  revolutionary politics of youth begins with the   refusal to play an assigned part in the chorus and  the cultivate cultivation of a demeanor a way of   posing the body that clashes with an ideology of  consensus and conformism i'm going to suggest that   this idea of uh playing against kind of dominant  modes of demeanor uh has a gendered component as   well in daisies which i hope is apparent and also  a kind of tricky thing to discuss and you can see   this gender component to conformism right off the  bat in the film remember this film is difficult to   kind of track what's going on because things are  so uh so wild and out of control it's barely a   kind of narrative stitched together that we don't  it's difficult to say what is exactly going on   in terms of content in any given scene however we  have to start kind of picking apart what we have   you'll notice at the beginning of the film does  give us some iconographic things to latch on to   i hope that you sensed a kind of biblical set of  references in the opening of the film where we   enter almost a garden of eden and i'll play the  opening just to remind you of what this was like so what we just saw was in a sense a reference  to the first book of the bible genesis the uh   the garden of eden right and that's fairly clear  i think when you see the space that we're in right   a kind of single field with a centered tree um and  we're and it also makes sense that we're not quite   in a real world right we've entered here uh we've  entered the space almost magically and then you   get these series of abrupt cuts where one of the  marie's takes a look at an apple reaches for it   and then kind of almost contemplates taking  a bite what is the significance of this well   i want to suggest that this invocation of even  the apple is a way of invoking the iconography   of female representation yes the idea that the  form of female representation has been imposed   with the structures of biblical representation  but also eve functions as a representation of   female rebelliousness right there's a way to kind  of turn the figure of eve into a figure of almost   feminist subversion which i also think goes along  with the cinematic rebelliousness the formal   rebelliousness that is uh on display in this  opening scene after all remember how we got to   this space we used classical hollywood techniques  against their their intended use right we used to   match on action to violate the continuity  of space this is a radically discontinuous   use of match on action to go from one space to  the next also just consider the way in which   this shot is composed it has a very flat quality  right it almost looks like a medieval painting   where we don't have a sense of renaissance  perspective this background really confuses   our sense of three-dimensional space and i think  that's deliberate you'll also get of course the   jump cuts and i hope you'll notice these jump cuts  that happen as they start dancing like right there and there but you'll also get these non-diegetic  inserts right there and i want to briefly show you   what is actually happening when you see these  non-diegetic inserts rapidly firing well what   you're getting is in a sense every frame is  a different image this kind of frame by frame   non-animation or anti-animation is um a kind of  trope of the avant-garde it's a way of exposing   the apparatus of cinema which is used to hide  the fact that it's giving us individual frames   played at 24 frames per second to hide the kind of  discreteness of each image here that discreetness   is on display you could think of that as a  kind of avant-garde exposure of the apparatus   so a lot of the things that are happening  here are both thematically rebellious and   formally rebellious right not playing into the  conventions of what movies generally generally do   um and i want to kind of take this to vera  hitalova the director of the film to think about   the characters and how they are rebellious and  in what way they're rebellious so vera will say   or hit the level will say we made the girls  look like dolls or puppets from the beginning   because it was our intention to make it  clear that this was not a psychological   portrayal this was not actually realistic so you  might say if they're dolls and that's clearly   a a kind of accurate way of understanding  what these characters are which is in a sense   that they're not characters they're  not fully fleshed human beings with   deeply complex interior lives they're superficial  almost cardboard cutout stereotypical young women   how could this be a kind of feminism as i'm  going to claim that it is well i'm going to use   one passage from an excellent essay on this film  by film scholar bliss kwa lim in which i think she   summarizes this strategy very well she says i read  daisies as a narrative of recalcitrant dolls who   realized the limits of their position and set out  to over perform their constructed characteristics   to the point of severe infractions against the  very masculine establishment that set the terms   of their subjectivity i can see that this is  kind of a jargon heavy way of saying something   but i might summarize this by saying we can  think of the marie's in this film as kind of   stereotypes that know their stereotypes and that  they overplay their stereotypical characteristics   in such a way as to ultimately piss off the men  that try to take advantage of their stereotyped   femininity which you see throughout the film  um take advantage of the man in the film and   also take advantage of the masculine establishment  patriarchy in general so you can see references to   support this kind of thing and notice this moment  in which they are walking down the street and   the farmers that they're passing with with the  corn don't notice them and then they have this   revelation they say nobody pays attention to us  i thought we'd suddenly disappeared into thin air   well you can think about the kind of feminist  uh idea here that's being manifested almost   literally right the idea that um uh to be looked  at uh as a condition of femininity is literally   giving these women life and giving them a kind  of uh self-awareness and when they don't have   that to be looked at miss and this is a term i'm  adopting from laura mulvey who we'll talk about in   the week on gender and spectatorship when we don't  have that they literally fear as if they will lose   existence that they'll disappear into thin air i  think these lines of dialogue are very suggestive   of the kind of feminist subversion going on  in this film and you can see that manifested   here as well that like dolls they are kind of  two-dimensional that they are more image than   than human subject and you can see that  emphasis on the two-dimensional imageness   uh of them in this sequence in which they  uh are are cutting um fabric around them   and then it quickly becomes literally uh  cutting each other right you can see that here right so i don't want to take this  moment in the film as merely one   of many absurdist um uh bits that lack meaning  right um i think you can say that certainly this   seems absurdist like that it wouldn't make sense  to read it um but i think given the concerns of   the film this idea of cutting the women right  into these pieces that that kind of reveal the   fact that they are just images especially here  that the two-dimensionality being uh pronounced   really does resonate i think with this idea of the  of the dolls being uh or or of the marie's being   like images um and you can see uh the kind of  almost more literally a subversive behavior of   the marie's in this sequence here not reflecting  on their own two-dimensionality but here uh using   their femininity uh their their hyper femininity  to um ridicule the men who are in pursuit of them system so just like the last sequence what we  have here is another seemingly absurd   meaningless sequence but we have to maybe actually  consider what we're actually seeing right what we   have here are the two maries eating for the most  part what you might say are phallically shaped   foods right i think in a film like this uh you  maybe can grant yourself the kind of freudian   interpretation of some of these objects which  bear a consistent resemblance to a kind of phallic   shape at the same time that a male suitor is on  the phone being completely ignored reduced to   uh to ridiculousness and his utterance of of  loving platitudes right um and what you have here   is it's not as if the maries are say angry with  this man they're completely oblivious to his uh   to his uh his his romantic lines which i think  is a perfect emblem of the kind of feminism   that's going on here right um that they are not  necessarily conscious radical feminists who are   going out into the world and trying to change  things they are they are actually characters   whose kind of emptiness ends up making patriarchy  reduce itself to a kind of ridiculous image right   um there's something pathetic about the man on the  phone here which i think is quite quite delightful   um and then you'll get a celebration not  just of the kind of anarchy that these   uh two characters are reveling in but um a  celebration of editing itself and discontinuity   right you'll get graphic associations not causal  logic that gets us from place to place right so   one way to think about this film is to simply  think well how do we get from one place to   another what are the cinematic means by which that  happens check it out in this little transition so i hope you'll consider this sequence  as being merely a kind of purely graphic   association leap from one thing to the next  there is no causal reason we got from this space   of the bedroom to this space of the restaurant  everything that got us from one thing to another   was purely a celebration of uh formal matching of  graphic matching in a way right what we get first   is the pendulum of the of the clock swinging or  what was a clock swinging which sets off a series   of non-diegetic inserts that move to the rhythm  of that clicking and then we get purely for for   no reason a shot of this kind of non-space of the  of the sun tanning uh uh uh area right um in which   the kind of oscillation of clicks happens with  this oscillation of color filters instead of these   images of flowers right and then when marie  decides to take the other marie's flower cap   and then as soon as she takes it we'll get a match on action that  takes us to a new location but   we don't know where we are now  we know it's at the same place and then we'll find the  flower cap to be in the water   for and where for some reason apples bubble up  for no reason but the apples will motivate they   switch to the apples of the restaurant right  it's it's not as if it lacks sense but the   sense has nothing to do with causation it's  like to do with plot it has no nothing to do   with an actual representation of two people who  have motivations to get things done it's simply   purely formal right and so i want to end by  just showing you how the flower cap in the film   is this kind of motif um not not as a  symbol i want to say i mean you can read it   read it that way if you wish but it functions as  a way to simply get us from one thing to another   purely by means of graphical matching matching on  action um just as a kind of a cinematic trick a a   revelry in discontinuity for discontinuity's sake  right here we get the moment where she dofs her   flower cap throws it in the air and it lands on  the water here we start a scene with a flower cap   on the grass and then we find out that we're not  in grass at all but rather we are in a room with   a strip of astroturf lying on a bed here as  we just saw one marie takes the flower crown   cut to a interior shot or to a close-up shot  and then you find it on a bit of water so   this is the way in which i think the film can  be understood as both thematically subversive   and also formally subversive and those two things  are implicated right seems like an absurdist film   indeed it is but its absurdism has a purpose  right that it kind of revels in revels in   both a kind of formal freedom and a kind  of freedom from the strictures of gender   expression and also gender roles okay that's it  for editing week we'll see you next time thanks