Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (38 page)

5.12a Everyday surrealism. Ty i Ja (You and I) luxury magazine, designed by Roman Cieslewicz.

In Věra Chytilová’s
Daisies
(1966) two young women do
nothing
for the entire film, apart from: eating; lying on their bed in flamboyant costumes; rolling in a meadow; chatting up men and making them pay for them in exclusive restaurants; catching flies; sitting/lying down,
neglige
, in stupefaction, like mechanical dolls; awkwardly trying to attract men to then run away from; and throwing and wasting enormous amounts of hard won and fought for socialist food, in an obvious act of disdain for Czechoslovakian men and women workers’ toil and socialist values. If anything,
Daisies
is driven by a sense of play, so rare in cinema, with an open-ended structure, which at best works as a series of episodes. If the stabilized socialist society (as we can call the 1960s) could be characterized by the rigidity of norms, conformity, lack of spontaneity, oppression, stiff rules directing every moment of life, then everything the two Marias do is aimed exactly as disclosing the organism’s diseased bones, as if even the slightest blow of unruliness could easily overthrow this carefully constructed mediocrity. In fact, the state’s power wasn’t exactly that frail at all, as the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion and the end of the Prague Spring made most clear. But to maintain the ideology – similarly in Poland or USSR – the conformity of others was essential.

Made two years before the Prague Spring,
Daisies
was the product of a deep socialism, with all its sleepiness, sheepishness, closure of perspectives and with a return to private, family life.
Daisies
goes precisely against all this. Shot in radical, strong, ‘hippie’ tie-dyed colors, it also went against the greyness of socialism, creating an anarchic alternative.
Daisies
remains one of the rarest and strongest satires and subversive fantasies of a life under socialism, which never really took place. Maria and Maria from Chytilová’s film remind me of the ‘theory of form’ developed by the Polish modernist writer Witold Gombrowicz. In his view, form is something negative: a pervading power of conformity,
turning us into pitiful members of mass society, an opposition to which would be a romantic aristocrat of the old type. Yet Gombrowicz was rather up for the un-made man, a man without qualities, without feelings, without dependencies. No wonder he never came back to communist Poland, but before he became canonized as a writer in France, he preferred the life of an sexual outcast in Buenos Aires, much in the Jean Genet lowlife/whore-affirmative way.

The two Maries are on a mission to unmake the socialist stereotypes of womanhood: mother, wife, worker, nice girl from youth organisation, homemaker. They want to live on the margins of this society, still manipulatively using their girlishness to obtain their goals: a free dinner, adoration and lots of fun at men’s expense. At the same time Maria and Maria’s excesses visibly bring them little jouissance. Whenever they’re up to something fiendish, they have their little dialogue:
Does it matter? It doesn’t matter!
Precisely: whatever they do, it doesn’t matter. The fun derived from breaking the rules, from constant line-crossing lasts perhaps two minutes, only to make room for the usual dullness and boredom (even hopelessness) once again. The more they try, the more they go to an excess, the more pointless it is. They’re on a quest for form. They are women – which means within the society they don’t have an inherent form just by themselves. What for Gombrowicz was a blessing and a liberation – escaping the overpowering form, becoming a dandy of the spirit, a ready product to be admired - for them becomes the reason they fall. “We will be hard working and everything will be clean” they promise. “And then we’ll be happy”.

People who have fallen out of form is a frequent topic in socialist era Czech film, because not working was the highest form of subversion in countries where it would straight away qualify you as a ‘loafer’. In
Of the Party and the Guests
, Jan Němec’s 1967 film, a group of upper echelon system beneficiaries lose their form. In turn, they are left adrift – without the system that made them feel important, they’re nothing. Planning a nice picnic with their
wives, they suddenly are taken over by a mysterious group of people – apparatchiks? Government officials? Best not to ask too many questions. Again, there’s an obsession with food which can never be consumed, just like in Buñuel’s
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Are the
Daisies’
Marias bored, or empty or simply stupid? Their waste of time, labor, food, and the pointlessness of their own ways suggest they are outcasts of society – and they suffer because of that. Is this film really a praise of anarchy? The girls are rather dejected and depressed by all of the increasingly scandalous pranks they perform, so joyless. They exist between automated dolls from horror movies and eccentrics from a Beckett play. Self-reflection makes them unhappy. The two Marias are also women reclaiming their time, which normally is supposed to be spent on work, nursing men and children. They try (and fail) to realize their dreams: of a pure virgin, parading on a meadow with a wreath on her head. They plant flowers and vegetables on their bed, their room is a laboratory of fantasy. They seem constantly hungry. The motif of food and femininity in
Daisies
is strictly surrealist and had great traditions in Czech art, which produced some of the most interesting art in that spirit. Food as fetish, as sexual object was often a factor in Czech surrealist art and film, from the 1930s paintings of Toyen to the animations of Jan Švankmajer.

In Švankmajer’s work food becomes basically “existential” and stands for the general hopelessness of human existence; the hopeless mundanity, the routine and repeatability of everyday activities, such as eating three meals a day. This is also deeply felt in the short film ‘Meat Love’, and is a motif that he repeats in his late film
Lunacy
, which was partly inspired by Marquis de Sade, a huge influence present also, in a sardonic way, in his
Conspirators of Pleasure.
The world of Švankmajer is always impossibly twisted and distorted to the degree that we barely recognize the familiar elements, stripped down to the libidinal rudiments of id, all-consuming, violent and unpredictable.

5.13 Not for human consumption. Food anarchy in Daisies.

The screenplay for
Daisies
was developed together with Pavel Juráček and Ester Krumbachová, two artists in their own right - especially Krumbachová, a strikingly original costume designer, writer and director, and a somehow tragic, unfulfilled figure, who collaborated with Chytilová also on the oneiric
Fruits of Paradise
, and co-wrote several exuberant surrealist Czech classics, like
On the Party And The Guests
by Jan Němec, Karel Kachyňa’s
The Ear
, and
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
by Jaromir Jires, but then, as a self-reliant director she didn’t have similar success. Watching her only film,
The Murder of Mister Devil
(1970) we see that despite being possessed by an extraordinary visual imagination, on her own Krumbachová couldn’t go beyond a combination of visual gags, without a principle organizing it. In
Mister Devil
, the visual means overshadow the actual content. We see a perfect bourgeois woman in a perfect flat preparing a real feast for her rather unimpressive functionary partner/husband. The feast is completely disproportionate to the small scale of the evening, yet the dishes just keep coming and coming, more and more breathtaking, and the whole film reminds me rather of Marco Ferreri’s
La
Grande Bouffe
or a similar transgressive anti-capitalist 70s fantasy. Yet given the title, and the superb poster, in which the screaming man is drowned and eaten in a ice-cream sundae by a smiling Medusa-woman - designed by Eva Galová-Vodrázková, in the best traditions of the Czech and Polish school of poster, with excessive irony and surreal/dada spirit, from where Linder Sterling must’ve learned some of her technique too - it was a strongly feminist statement playing with anti-feminist sentiments, about a woman who’s using one of her only ‘weapons’ - food, as a way to make everything in the world implode.

5.14 SCUM manifesto in Czechoslovakia. The poster for Krumbachova’s Murder of Mister Devil.

Food and wasting food is a great taboo, not only in socialism but also in capitalism. The two Marias walk on food, crush it with their high heels - an analogue scene is repeated by Ulrike Ottinger in her
Trinkerin
, with the character walking on broken glass. Yet their consumption seems faraway from a joyful carnivorous feast. Was excessive eating truly subversive within the socialist state? It definitely was, especially in the light of woman’s role within society, of her body being ogled and consumed, combined with her role of a family food provider. This is related to the sexualization of women eating, which today instantly brings to mind images from the hardcore pornography, with the scene of a zoom on woman’s face, as she licks sperm from her face, the so-called money-shot. The sexual attraction of a ‘money shot’ is a pure male fantasy – but the thing is, as Mark Fisher points out, that the pleasure lies not in the fact the girl really ‘enjoys it’, but precisely that she willingly pretends to do so. As a good worker, it’s not enough she just sucks somebody’s dick, she must do it with a smile. In The
FACE
magazine in 1988 there was a photo session called ‘ALEX EATS’, with the relatively unknown skinny model, shot repeatedly as she eats in various settings, with the stress on the food that’s being wasted rather than consumed. Overeating excessively, yet retaining her skinny flesh, Alex was openly mocking really existing eating disorders. It was the beginning of the 90s waif-like model, when magazines openly promoted an anorexic and unhealthy look. In the cardinal scene of
Daisies
involving food, the two come upon an abandoned banquet, with a table groaning under the weight of most gluttonously arranged piles of food, a real Balthazzar’s feast, completely uncannily displayed in the midst of socialist scarcity. What ensues is the girls breaking into a final, elemental jouissance, where the food is consumed and destroyed, transforming into an ultimate orgy. Like children left home alone, they destroy as much as they can. They seem still addicted to the classic denominators of beauty – they must parody the fashion catwalk, dressed in mayonnaise, salad and curtains, to finally get rid of the nagging beauty ideal. They try to be flirtatious, yet they are ultimately afraid of sex: rather shy, they much prefer their own company to the boring/stupid/intimidating men.

It seems that the woman’s body just never can be right, no relationship she has with food can be liberatory. Too fat/thin, or not thrifty enough. In
Daisies
the meaning of food is contradictory: the two Marias neither really chew and swallow their food nor take pleasure from their anarchic waste of it. But this association of women and food runs incredibly deep. Women are supposed to take pleasure from eating and preparing food, which makes their bodies equally prone to consumption. Natalia LL, the pioneering Polish feminist conceptual artist, made a still shocking series of so called
Consumption Art
in 1970s. The films and film stills show LL, then an attractive bimbo-blonde, ‘consuming’ various phallic foods: she’s licking and slowly unfolding a banana (then also a symbol of luxury) and then sucking it intensely, she drinks cream and lets it dribble all over her mouth and face. She smiles seductively
as she does it, licking her lips with visible lust and voraciousness. She nailed perfectly (and prophetically) the conflation of capitalism and pornography and the role the exploited woman’s flesh plays in it. Not only was consumption as such a highly ironic notion in PRL – LL, like many women artists from the socialist republics, felt the burden of being thrown into a role of a ‘harmless chick’, whose only role is to look good and conform well within the image of healthy socialism.