Although there were important women directors in the silent era, notably in the United States and in France, opportunities became scarce as cinema became industrialized. In this programme, we highlight two exceptional artists, pioneers in feminist filmmaking.
Born in what is now Ukraine, in 1917, but brought up in the USA, Maya Deren is best known for her surrealist 14 minute short Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), an extraordinary piece of avant garde filmmaking which prefigures the work of Kenneth Anger, David Lynch and many others. Meshes of the Afternoon was voted the 16th greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound’s poll of film critics and scholars in 2022.
Věra Chytilová (born 1929) was the first woman to study directing at the famous Czech film school FAMU. She made her first feature in 1963, Something Different, and then the radically confrontational Daisies, which was promptly banned in her home country. In the Sight & Sound poll, Daisies was voted =28th.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will be preceded by a 15 minute introductory lecture and feature a book club-style discussion afterwards.
May 19: Introduced by Alla Gadassik, Associate Professor, Media History & Theory, Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Surely one of the most exhilarating stylistic and psychedelic cinematic explosions of the 1960s, Daisies is a madcap and aggressive feminist farce that explodes in any number of directions. Although many American and Western European filmmakers during this period prided themselves on their subversiveness, it is possible that the most radical film of the decade, ideologically as well as formally, came from the East— from the liberating ferment building toward the short-lived political reforms of 1968s’s Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
Featuring two uninhibited 17-year-olds name Marie (Jitka Cerhova and Ivana Karbanova) — whose various escapades, which add up less to a plot than to a string of outrageous set pieces, include several antiphallic gags, a penchant for exploiting dirty old men, and a free-for-all with fancy food that got Chytilova in trouble with the authorities. This disturbing yet liberating tour-de-force shows what this talented director can do with freedom. A major influence on Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, Daisies is chock-full of female giggling, which might be interpreted in context as what Ruby Rich has called “the laughter of the Medusa”: Subversive, bracing, energizing, and rather off-putting (if challenging) to most male spectators.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
Daisies is as subversive as it is hilarious.
Kate Muir, The Times
Brace yourself for some of the most exuberant and disjunctive Pop Art imagery ever put onscreen.
David Edelstein, New York Magazine
Vera Chytilova
Jitka Cerhova, Ivana Karbonava
Czechoslovakia
1966
In Czech with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits
Screenwriter
Ester Krumbachová, Věra Chytilová
Editor
Miroslav Hájek
Cinematography
Jaroslav Kučera
Original Music
Jiří Šust, Jiří Šlitr
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
