Daisies (1966), Dir. Vera Chytilov
Sunnying up the winter, ACMI, in collaboration with the just-finished Sydney Film Festival, is hosting a program of films about women from the 60s and 70s. Focus on Girls 24/7 collects the desperate housewives, the lethargic pop stars, the passionate lovers and the anarchist teenagers across European cinema, spanning Russia, France, former Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Germany, the UK and the USA. These are stylistically brazen and philosophically challenging films, which ask difficult questions about personal freedom in an era in which ‘liberation’ was the main prize.
Focus on Girls 24/7 opens with Agnes Varda’s celebrated Cleo from 5 to 7. The only girl among the boys of the French nouvelle vague, Varda’s keen eye blends documentary-style shooting with the hip aesthetics of the era. Cleo, an airhead chanteuse, spends two hours waiting for the results of her cancer test walking around Paris, receiving admirers, whining about death, shopping and falling in love. It is a meticulously plotted film: the timing and the itinerary correspond precisely to the film time, which Varda divides into minuscule chapters, such as “Cleo from 5.04 to 5.08.” Reminiscent of Jacques Demy’s pop fantasies, it turns inside-out the frothy portrait of Cleo, ending in a strangely profound place.
Vera Chytilov·’s 1966 Daisies, banned in Czechoslovakia for its ‘depiction of food wastage’ (the legendary banquet food fight), and earning the director a six-year bar on film-making on the grounds that she ‘lacked a positive attitude to socialism’, is a wickedly inventive rampage against work, materialism and men. Sisters Jezinka and Jarmila hit the streets of Prague on an hilariously slapstick assault on all things good and proper. Ironizing both the patriarchal reality that surrounds them, and their facile construction of girly identity, Daisies is a much smarter film than its playful surface may suggest. Opening and closing with horrific footage of war destruction and nuclear explosions, Chytilova dedicates the film “to all those whose biggest source of outrage is a ruined trifle.”
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is the only film in the program (co-)directed by a man, Volker Schlˆndorff with Margarethe von Trotta. Based on a classic novel by the Nobel-Prize-winning author Heinrich Bˆll, and set in the explosive era when Baader-Meinhof Group was terrorising West Germany, it looks at how violence develops, and where it can lead. Katharina Blum’s one-night-stand turns out to be wanted by the police. Her refusal to give in to the police and the tabloid press proves to be her downfall. Reticent housewife Katharina becomes a figure of national scandal, an empty vessel on which general ideas and fantasies are projected.
Larisa Shepitko’s Wings is a brooding drama about a proud woman coping with ageing, loss and disappointment. Nadezhda, a World War II military pilot and a loyal Stalinist, is now a school principal. Detached from her daughter, the politics of the new era, and her own life, Nadezhda’s memories of a happier, more exciting past are depicted in powerful, lyrical sequences. In contrast, Barbara Loden’s Wanda is lost without context. Abandoning her mining town and latching onto a frankly brutal petty crook, Wanda makes a mockery out of the common myth of the road trip liberation. Like a pessimistic sequel to Ibsen’s Doll House, Loden shows how little freedom means without power. Both films by first-time directors, these are film-making gems.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, by Chantal Akerman, is not to be missed. At 201 minutes, this is a marathon of quotidian actions, yet every minute of it manages to be riveting. Chantal Akerman shows three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman (played by the arthouse goddess of the time and place, Delphine Seyrig, compared to Greta Garbo), housewife, mother and prostitute. It is a life packed with small-scale busyness, a precise clockwork of chores, cooking, knitting, cleaning, that starts to break after Jeanne sees her client on the second day. Mesmerising in its assuredness (it was made when Akerman was only 25), this is a masterpiece of structuralist cinema: showing the power of duration, the effect of repetition, the wonder of people simply existing.
The program is in turns entertaining, infuriating and eye-opening: from somnambular victims of society to pragmatic bread-winners and defiant rebels, girlhood is examined in all its aspects. Seen apart, each film is an enduring classic from one of the most vital cinematic eras. Seen together, they amount to a panoramic portrait of womanhood in barely post-feminist times.
Focus on Girls 24/7 is at ACMI, Federation Square, July 3-12.
