Thursday, February 18, 2010

can you feel how volatile life is?

Daisies {Sedmikrasky} is another movie that I have been waiting years and years to see. It is also another movie that sparked my interest based on a single still. It was the following picture:

This 1966 Czech film is directed by Vera Chytilová and the amazing, experimental camera work is by the talented Jaroslav Kucera. If I thought Polly Maggoo was a psychedelic kaleidoscoped collage than Daisies is that on ten! On overdrive! On acid! There are a lot of reviews of this film that like to get deep and speak of feminist undertones or anti-war messages. For me, this film was mostly a visual pleasure. There is a simple plot-two young ladies find themselves in a world that has gone bad and in turn decide to be bad themselves. This results in a colorful, fast paced piece of art house cinema where the two main characters (played by Jitka Cerhová & Ivana Karbanová) dance, flirt, and eat their way through their days & nights. I have never seen anything quite like this movie and was really impressed by the special effects and the mixed use of color & black and white film. Stunning & surreal.
One of my favorite clips--especially for the dialog:


































I also came across a montage of some of the best scenes that someone put together to a Sigur Ros track:

2 comments:

Daughters of Dawn said...

I Love this movie!! So glad to see the word spread of its brilliance
xo
E

John Peurach said...

Thank you so much for giving this absolutely amazing film a somewhere out there/in here shout-out. It totally works on so many levels that it's apparently taken this long so for most folks to finally catch up with it. And when they do, it's no more calls, we have an instant winner time in the Most Had To Be There Ultra-Subversive/Perpetual Visual Treat Oriented Film of the 1960's Sweepstakes. Or, something like that. Otherwise sitting pretty, and then some, now and forever like this.