style="font-size:15px;"> “Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of our industry says otherwise. As women, we all face our own unique challenges, but we stand together on these stairs today as a symbol of our determination and commitment to progress…The stairs of our industry MUST be accessible to all. Let’s climb.”
Just like her character Cléo, Agnès Varda has been on quite a journey.
The ending of Cleo from 5 to 7 has been the cause of some debate. Some see it as a cop-out, a woman being saved by a man. Others say it’s a beautiful commentary on finding love in the face of possible death by cancer and war. Regardless, the film has been celebrated as a feminist work both for the way that it features a complex and sometimes unlikable female character (instead of an idealized stereotype) and for its commentaries on how women see themselves and are seen by others.
★Agnès Varda was the only woman working in the French New Wave, and made her first film, La Pointe Courte, at just twenty-seven years old.
★She was dubbed “the grandmother of the French New Wave” when she was just thirty years old.
★The budget of Cleo from 5 to 7 was $64,000, and it took five weeks to film.
★Her film Vagabond, released in 1985, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
★Throughout her career, Varda has more than fifty credits as a director to her name as well as more than forty as a writer.
★In 2009, Varda was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour—an award of merit in France—for her achievements in cinema.
★When the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences conferred the Honorary Award on Varda in 2017, she became the first female director to ever receive that honor.
Daisies
(Sedmikrásky)
Filmové Studio Barrandov, 1966, Czechoslovakia | Black & White and Color, 72 minutes, Comedy/Drama
This experimental film follows two young women causing chaos.
Director: Věra Chytilová
Producers: Ladislav Fikar,
Bohumil Smída
Cinematography: Jaroslav Kučera
Screenplay: Věra Chytilová, Ester Krumbachova, Pavel Juracek
Starring: Jitka Cerhová (“Marie I”)
and Ivana Karbanová (“Marie II”)
“The form of the film was really derived from the conceptual basis of the film. Because the concept of the film was destruction, the form became destructive as well.”
—Věra Chytilová
Sometimes there are movies which defy easy categorization.
They are experimental, they feel risqué; are about nothing, but
also everything.
This is how I would describe Daisies by Věra Chytilová. It is a film with a deceptively simple plot, but its experimentation with content and form caused huge waves in Czechoslovakia at the time—and eventually, around the world.
First, some background: in 1945, the film industry in Czechoslovakia was nationalized, taking it from privately owned to being under the control of the state. By 1948, a communist government was in place, so the films being made in the 1950s were largely propaganda. Shot in the style of Soviet socialist realism, communist values were strongly depicted, the characters’ struggles were rewarded with happy endings, and narratives proceeded in a very straightforward manner.
Meanwhile, FAMU, the national film school, had been established in Prague, and the teachers there showed their students films from around the world. These were arthouse films not distributed within the country, including works from the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist movements by Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Louis Malle, Robert Bresson, and more.
By the time these students graduated in the mid-1960s, reform was underway and the restrictions on expression were slowly being loosened. The graduates turned their lenses on everyday life, infusing the experimentation of other cinematic movements with their own unique experiences. These films were often critical of the government, using metaphor and humor to speak out about the oppressive regime. They pushed the boundaries of filmmaking, and their free-spirited artistic tone was often seen as being dangerous to the ideals of communist Czechoslovakia. The films were smuggled out of the country to play at festivals around the world, and so the short but sharp “Czechoslovak New Wave” was born.
This movement lasted only a few years, starting around 1963 and ending in 1968 when the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and toppled the President. After that, many filmmakers fled the country or struggled to find work. But within those five years there was a burst of intense creativity from filmmakers such as Miloš Forman, František Vláčil, and Věra Chytilová.
Chytilová was the only woman in the movement, often referred to as the “First Lady of Czech Cinema.” Born in 1929 to a strict Catholic family, she studied architecture and philosophy at college before becoming a model, a draftsman, and a clapper girl at a film studio in Prague. That was where she developed an interest in making movies, and at twenty-eight years old she applied to study at FAMU. As the only female student in her class, she refused to let her gender be a barrier and often shocked her male peers with her confidence and ferocity. At FAMU, Chytilová experimented with improvisation and the use of non-professional actors and found she preferred work that was less structured.
She continued to play with form in her first feature film, which was released in 1963 and appropriately called Something Different. Here, Chytilová melded documentary and narrative to tell two parallel stories about two very different women. She also contributed to the omnibus film Pearls of the Deep made with several other Czech filmmakers in 1965, but it was her second feature Daisies that truly put her on the map.
To describe the plot of the film is to do it a disservice, because Daisies is more of an existential fever dream than a linear, narrative movie. In short, the story concerns two bored women, Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanová), causing havoc as they run amok through their city. They revolt against an oppressive society by treating symbols of wealth, such as money and food, with little care. Throughout the film they go out with wealthy older men, eating at expensive restaurants and leaving their unlucky dates to foot the bills.
Chytilová called the film “a philosophical documentary in the form of a farce,” with the two Maries rebelling against a male-dominated society that views them only as objects. They believe that the world is meaningless and so do what they want. Daisies is also something of a rebellion against filmmaking itself—here Věra Chytilová rejects the standard
