Daisies (Vera Chytilová, 1966)

Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová in Daisies

Cast: Jitka Cerhová, Ivana Karvanová, Julius Albert, Jan Klusák, Marie Cesková, Jirina Myskova, Marcela Brezinová, Oldrich Hora, Václav Chochola, Josef Konicek, Jaromir Vornácka. Screenplay: Vera Chytilová. Ester Krumbachová, Pavel Jurácek. Cinematography: Jaroslav Kucera. Production design: Karel Lier. Film editing: Miroslav Hájek. Music: Jirí Slitr, Jirí Sust.

Girls just wanna have fun. The adjective usually applied to Vera Chytilová's Daisies is "anarchic," but that doesn't quite apply to a film so cleverly staged, photographed, and edited. To be sure, the impish young women whose adventures the film chronicles are in some sense anarchists, in that they try to break all the rules they can find to break. And if you're looking for the conventional beginning-middle-end narrative structure you won't find one. But Daisies is not just Dadaist nose-thumbing. It's framed by images of the mass destruction of war, against which, the film seems to be saying, the sheer mad hedonism of its two uninhibited sprites should be viewed as trivial. Chytilová takes her cue not only from Dada but also from the Marx Brothers, whose antics would be appalling in real life but are liberating to the spirit when viewed in the context of a work of art. Daisies is akin in this sense to an apocalyptic comedy like Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, made only two years earlier, and its spirit and some of its techniques come from Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night, also from 1964. They reflect an era when youth thought it could change the world, only to be put down, as the Czech filmmakers like Chytilová would brutally be put down, by the establishment it so gleefully mocked. That Daisies can be grating as often as it is giddy suggests an awareness that the road of excess may lead to the palace of wisdom, but not without paying a price.

The Firemen's Ball (Milos Forman, 1967)

Cast: Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebánek, Josef Valnoha, Frantisek Debelka, Josef Kolb, Jan Stöckl. Screenplay: Milos Forman, Jaroslav Papousek, Ivan Passer, Václav Sasek. Cinematography: Miroslav Ondrícek. Production design: Karel Cerný. Film editing: Miroslav Hájek. Music: Karel Mares.

Milos Forman's raucous comedy about the screwups of a small town fire department as it attempts to celebrate its retired fire chief and raise money with a raffle got the director into deep trouble in Czechoslovakia when the regime realized that the film was actually a satire on communist bureaucracy. And the truth is, The Firemen's Ball teeters between slapstick comedy and mordant satire so much that it winds up a little too dark for laughter, a little too silly for pointed criticism. Which is not to say that it isn't sometimes very funny or that its criticism didn't have an effect: Forman went into exile and wound up a major Hollywood director. The mostly non-professional actors in its cast throw themselves into their roles and the pacing of the film is appropriately hectic. Somehow, despite the frowns of officialdom, The Firemen's Ball wound up as the Czech entry for the best foreign language film at the Oscars, which led to another irony: The winner in that category was the Soviet Union's entry, Sergey Bondarchuk's War and Peace. 

Marketa Lazarová (Frantisek Vlácil, 1967)

Magda Vásáryová in Marketa Lasarová 

Kozlik: Josef Kemr
Marketa Lazarová: Magda Vásáryová
Mikolás: Frantisek Velecký
Adam: Ivan Palúch
Alexandra: Pavla Polásková
Lazar: Michal Kozuch
Old Count Kristián: Harry Studt
Young Count Kristián: Vlastimil Harapes
Captain "Beer": Zdenek Kryzánek
Bernard: Vladimir Mensik
Sovicka: Zdenek Rehor

Director: Frantisek Vlácil
Screenplay: Frantisek Pavlícek, Frantisek Vlácil
Based on a novel by Vladislav Vancura
Cinematography: Bedrich Batka
Art direction: Oldrich Okác
Film editing: Miroslav Hájek
Music: Zdenek Liska

I am grateful to Tom Gunning's Criterion Collection essay on Marketa Lazarová not only for the many insights into the film, including a concise summary of the story it tells, but also for citing another film scholar's comparison of it to Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966). My viewing of Frantisek Vlácil's film was very much like my first viewing of Tarkovsky's: It left me with a feeling that I had seen something extraordinary that I didn't quite understand. I've seen Andre Rublev again, and while I can't say I understand it, I recognize it as the extraordinary cinema masterpiece that it is. It's entirely possible that another viewing of Marketa Lazarová might leave me with a similar impression. Both films are immersive experiences, throwing the viewers into an era strange to them and giving them only a few guideposts to help them sort out even such matters as who's doing what to whom and why. Marketa Lazarová has been voted the greatest Czech film by Czech critics and filmmakers, and I have no doubt that it deserves the accolade. But it will take me another viewing simply to get my bearings on it. It's beautifully filmed, and it does some daring things with sound -- the voices were dubbed later, sometimes with actors other than the ones we see on screen. Every film in a language foreign to me is a cultural challenge, though one I welcome, so much kudos to TCM for programming Marketa Lazarová.