Daisies The Czech director Vera Chytilova's 1966 film Daisies invites an allegorical reading from the outset. It is clear that we are not in the realm of any sort of realism, but the question remains whether the symbolism here is in any way coherent. However, considering it is a film by a female director with dual female leading roles, it is worth examining the role of gender in the film.

Chytilova's credit sequence seems to be a wink in the direction of Soviet-style socialist realism: we are watching a world of heroic machinery, cogs and gears. When we first see the paired female leads -- one blonde, one brunette, both named Marie -- they seem to be part of the machinery as well. As the girls make their stylized movements, we hear a loud squeaking sound, as though they were dolls or automata whose joints were machinery that squeals with each movement. It might be worth recalling here that the English word "robot" is originally a Czech word, coined by the Czech avant-garde dramatist Karel Capek but derived from the Czech word for "serfdom" or "forced labor." This is a possible way of interpreting Chytilova's intended meaning for the two girls, but more importantly it points toward the social context of Chytilova's film. Czechoslovakia was a Communist country in 1966, and under Soviet domination, but uneasily so -- Daisies is produced in the waning years of the Novotny government, which was barely holding off popular demand for reforms, and it predates the Prague Spring of 1968, when a brief thaw and embrace of reformism under Alexander Dubcek (who replaced Novotny) prompted a Soviet invasion to stop the liberalization. These facts are important to bear in mind because any examination of the sexual politics of Chytilova's film should probably begin with an understanding of the larger overall Marxist politics of Czechoslovakia in 1966.

In some sense, though, one way in which the sexual politics and the Marxist politics of the film collide should be evident from the film's opening. Why are these two girls both named Marie? It cannot just be a whimsically perverse...

In reality, the meaning of the symbolism is established very quickly when one of the two identically-dressed girls places a floral crown on her head, and remarks that she looks like a virgin. Czechoslovakia was, of course, one of the largely Roman Catholic countries that nevertheless fell behind the Iron Curtain and embraced Soviet-style Marxist ideology -- Poland, which would ultimately produce an anti-Soviet Pope, is perhaps the better known example, but Czechoslovakia was also largely Catholic, and Very Chytilova herself had been raised Catholic. But official Communist ideology was, historically, atheist: it denounced religion as superstition, following Marx's notion that it was the opiate of the masses. What does this have to do with Daisies? Quite a bit, when we attempt to think of how a female film director -- raised within Catholicism but liberated from the religion by official state ideology -- might have been considering the question of gender. Roman Catholicism has notoriously been accused of promoting a "Madonna-whore complex," by fitting women into social roles where they are either virginal and pure, or sexualized and wicked. Of course, one can argue that this aspect of gender relations in Catholic countries merely derives from the New Testament itself, where Jesus has two crucial women in his life, one a virgin (and his mother) and the other a prostitute (and his follower), and both named Mary. In other words, Chytilova's contemporary audience in 1966 would have known exactly how to approach the symbolism of two contrasting girls named Marie, especially when one of them tries on a garland and asks if she looks like a virgin. The gender politics here seem to implicate the church's traditional role in suppressing female autonomy, which is a convenient way for Chytilova to sidestep any questions about how Communism did or did not benefit women. The simple fact is that the fairly reactionary gender roles the girls end up playing here -- in being coquettes for a series of (presumably lecherous) older men -- can easily be…