Paul and Corey Cross the Streams: S4E8 [New Wave: DAISIES (1966)]

No dip into film history would be complete without a swim through New Wave. A movement born in France in the 1950s within the pages of the magazine Cahiers du Cinema – New Wave began when a group of adventurous film critics tried their hands at tearing down old concepts of film grammar and subjects and replacing them with kinetic, symbolic, and abstract examinations of social alienation, psychopathology, and sex! The French New Wave quickly (and, at times, not so quickly in some countries) caught on in countries across the globe, and filmmakers in dozens of countries took on the same revolutionary charge that began in France. In this episode, Paul chose to head east from England to Czechoslovakia to discuss Věra Chytilová's Daisies (1966). An absurdist feminist classic whose plot(?) can only be described as "Two young women look at a world gone bad and decide to be bad, too." Banned by the Czech government at the time of its release and Chytilová herself was blacklisted for nearly a decade, Daisies was and remains radical in theme, form, and subject. From patriarchy, to the Prague Spring, to Tankies and the Brezhnev Doctrine, to Eve and cutting sausages with scissors, there's a lot to discuss. (Also...Corey hated it, and Paul loved it.) This Month's Theme: New Wave This Episode's Focus: Daisies (1966)