Fragmentation, Performance, and Feminist Revolt: Patriarchy in Daisies (1966) and The Girls (1968)

Introduction

Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) and Mai Zetterling’s The Girls (Flickorna, 1968) are among the most formally adventurous feminist films to emerge from European cinema in the late 1960s. Though produced in different national contexts, both films challenge cinematic and social patriarchy through bold aesthetic strategies that disrupt narrative coherence, spectatorship, and gendered representation. Daisies, made within the Czech New Wave and shaped by the constraints of socialist censorship, deploys fragmented editing, non-linear structure, and abrupt shifts in colour and tone to parody systems of order and moral discipline. Scholars note that Chytilová uses absurdity to expose the gap between image and meaning (Lim, 2009), while Hames argues that her playful excess constitutes a rejection of both official socialist realism and patriarchal norms embedded in cinematic form (Hames, 2005).

By contrast, The Girls, produced at the height of European Second-Wave feminism, constructs its critique through reflexive performance, oscillating between theatre rehearsal, domestic life, and fantasy. Zetterling reworks Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to confront postwar Swedish gender norms, revealing the emotional labour, contradictions, and psychic violence structuring women’s everyday roles. Critics have argued that the film “creates a new mythology” for women by rejecting dominant cinematic stereotypes (Thornburg, 1974), while Larsson highlights its modernist interrogation of alienation, spectatorship, and the social scripts that bind women to patriarchy.

While more radically anti-narrative feminist filmmakers of the period, such as Joyce Wieland, Laura Mulvey, or Vivienne Dick, pursued extreme abstraction and the near-total rejection of narrative cinema, Chytilová and Zetterling worked within recognisable cinematic frameworks and addressed significantly wider audiences. Their feminist radicalism lies not in the abandonment of narrative form, but in its strategic subversion from within. This essay argues that both films mobilise form as feminist revolt: Daisies weaponises absurdity and destruction to dismantle patriarchal order, while The Girls channels performance and reflexive consciousness to expose how patriarchy operates across both private and public life.

Context: Feminism, Politics, and Film Form

Together, Daisies and The Girls challenge patriarchal power not only thematically but structurally. Daisies disrupts narrative coherence through chaos and destruction, while The Girls employs performance, repetition, and interior monologue to reveal how the political operates within the intimate. Both films emerged during a decade of global social change, as political, cultural, and sexual norms were contested across Europe. In the mid-1960s, Second-Wave Feminism, student uprisings, artistic experimentation, and events such as the Prague Spring created conditions in which women artists sought new cinematic languages to confront patriarchal norms (Emancipation despite circumstances, 2022, pp. 1–12).

Within this context, Věra Chytilová and Mai Zetterling emerged as two of the era’s most innovative women filmmakers, working in distinct national settings yet producing similarly radical critiques of gender roles (Yao, 2023, pp. 106–111). Chytilová was the first prominent woman director of the Czech New Wave, a movement defined by its rejection of socialist realism and its commitment to visual experimentation (Leskosky, 2018). Operating under a state-controlled film system, she developed an aesthetic radicalism that allowed political critique to be articulated through form rather than explicit commentary.

As Hames argues, Chytilová’s rejection of “official realism” and her use of anti-illusionist strategies enabled a feminist critique to emerge through the fracturing of cinematic language itself (Hames, 2005). Lim similarly notes that Daisies destabilises coherent subjectivity, exposing the instability of representation under late socialism (Lim, 2009). In this context, absurdity, fragmentation, and excess function as covert strategies for challenging gendered expectations of discipline, morality, and productivity.

Zetterling worked under different conditions but encountered comparable resistance. As one of the few women directing large-scale feature films in 1960s Europe, she faced a gendered critical climate in which The Girls was dismissed as “hysterical” or “obscene.” Thornburg argues that such responses reflect patriarchal policing of female creativity, particularly when it engages sexuality, anger, or ambivalence (Thornburg, 1974). Sloan further observes that Zetterling’s modernist oscillation between performance, memory, and fantasy was framed not as innovation but as emotional excess, revealing how women’s experimental filmmaking was pathologised (Sloan, 2008).

Ultimately, both directors confront patriarchy not merely as interpersonal dominance but as ideology: a system structuring representation, domestic life, labour, spectatorship, and cinematic form. As De Lauretis argues, gender operates through both social technologies and representational practices (De Lauretis, 1987); Daisies and The Girls expose these mechanisms by making form itself a site of feminist struggle.

Form as Feminist Revolt

a. Daisies: Destruction and Excess

In Daisies (1966), Věra Chytilová mobilises formal anarchy as a distinctly feminist mode of revolt, craListen to this tabfting a cinematic language in which the only coherent principle is refusal. The film’s two protagonists, both named Marie, embody a radical rejection of identity, morality, and productivity, three pillars sustaining patriarchal social order. Their declaration, “If everything’s spoiled, then we’ll spoil ourselves,” serves as the film’s guiding ethos: a manifesto of excess directed against the disciplining logic of late socialism. Lim argues that Chytilová’s strategy hinges on disrupting the “relation between image, surface, and meaning,” denying the viewer the stable subjectivity typically assigned to female characters (Lim, 2009).

The film’s use of collage editing, discontinuous jump cuts, and absurdist repetition functions as an explicit assault on cinematic order itself. Hames notes that within the Czech New Wave, Chytilová was “the most formally oppositional” filmmaker, rejecting the psychological realism expected by both socialist ideology and mainstream cinema (Hames, 2005) Daisies pushes this refusal to an extreme: bodies appear in fragments, scenes collapse into visual noise, and colours shift abruptly from monochrome to hyper-saturated palettes. As Clouzot observes, this fragmentation creates an “aesthetic of unruliness” that undermines the viewer’s desire for coherence and exposes the artificiality of cinematic norms (Clouzot, 1968)

A big part of this style is the strange way the film portrays being female. Close shots of mouths eating, messy lipstick, and big movements make fun of how movies normally show women as just something to look at. Lim says that by turning eating into a wild pleasure, the film “reverses the direction of objectification,” making the Maries the creators of chaos rather than just objects (Lim, 2009). This reversal culminates in the famous banquet sequence. The protagonists tear through a lavish feast prepared for state officials, cramming food into their mouths, swinging from chandeliers, and dancing on the tables.

Through their actions, bourgeois femininity and socialist discipline are exposed as contradictions waiting to be overturned. The political response to this scene confirms the film’s feminist stakes. Authorities banned Daisies for “wasting food.” Hames identifies this rationale as a thinly masked expression of patriarchal anxiety over unruly female bodies and appetites (Hames, 2005). The state’s outrage shows how women’s behaviour, pleasure, and desire were controlled as a form of discipline. Through its bold style, Daisies critiques patriarchy at the level of form, breaking down the values of order, beauty, and logic that support its visual and social power. Chytilová doesn’t show feminist resistance, she performs it, making destruction a cinematic language of freedom.

b. The Girls: Performance and Consciousness

While Daisies uses visual anarchy, Mai Zetterling’s The Girls (1968) enacts feminist revolt through reflexive performance and psychological fragmentation. The film centres on three actresses touring with a production of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, a classical text about women withholding sex to stop war. By adopting this play as a frame, Zetterling constructs a critical parallel between ancient political rebellion and contemporary gender oppression. Thornburg argues that Zetterling uses Lysistrata not as an adaptation but as “a mirror revealing the structures of modern patriarchy,” allowing the actresses to confront their own constraints through performance (Thornburg, 1974)

Zetterling weaves theatre, reality, and dream into a multilayered “film-within-film” structure, exposing how women internalise patriarchal scripts. Sloan notes that this interplay of levels produces an “unsettling oscillation” between the actresses’ public empowerment on stage and the private anxieties that undermine them offstage (Sloan, 2008). For instance, Liz’s direct monologue to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, transforms performance into a political act. Her speech articulates the emotional labour and psychic fragmentation caused by marriage, motherhood, and social expectation. The moment illustrates what Winkler calls the film’s “feminist interiority,” where women’s subjective tensions are made structurally visible (Winkler, 1981)

The film's look supports this mix: neat stage shots clash with messy home scenes to show the gap between how women act in public and in private. Through editing, Zetterling puts together images of child care, marriages, forced sex, and play rehearsals, connecting personal life to politics in a way that matches Second-Wave feminism. Larsson says The Girls turns daily life into a “place of feminist awakening,” showing how patriarchy repeats itself through marriage, motherhood, and creative work (Larsson, 2016).

Where Daisies dismantles order through visual excess, The Girls critiques the structures, family, theatre, and social expectation that stage womanhood as performance. Zetterling deploys Brechtian alienation to prevent identification and instead encourage critical spectatorship. By making the mechanics of representation visible, she invites the viewer to participate in feminist reflection, transforming cinematic spectatorship into a political encounter.

Critique of Patriarchy: Aesthetic and Political Strategies

Although Daisies and The Girls emerge from different national, political, and aesthetic traditions, both films articulate a critique of patriarchy through radical formal strategies that expose gendered oppression as structural rather than merely interpersonal. Each director mobilises cinematic disruption, through anarchic montage or reflexive performance, to dismantle the visual and narrative systems that stabilise patriarchal authority. Their political force lies not simply in content, but in form: patriarchy is not described but actively undone through cinematic practice.

Chytilová’s Daisies deploys collage editing, frenetic jump cuts, abrupt colour shifts, and surreal excess to fracture the cinematic space that traditionally contains and disciplines women. As Lim argues, the film’s formal chaos “ruptures the surface of patriarchal spectacle” by refusing continuity and coherence (Lim, 2009). The Maries do not merely misbehave; the film itself behaves badly, transforming aesthetic transgression into feminist method. If patriarchy depends on order, productivity, and narrative meaning, then dismantling cinematic logic becomes a political act.

By contrast, The Girls uses reflexive meta-theatre, shifting between realism, rehearsal, dream, and direct address to reveal how patriarchy is internalised as performance. Thornburg observes that Zetterling “uses theatre to expose the theatricality of women’s oppression” (Thornburg, 1974). The film blurs boundaries between the actresses’ roles in Lysistrata and their lives offstage, showing how patriarchal ideology scripts women’s emotional, domestic, and professional identities. If Daisies shatters the frame, The Girls reveals how the frame is constructed and sustained.

Humour further differentiates the films’ feminist strategies. In Daisies, absurd, childlike rebellion, pranks, giggling, and destructive play, undermines patriarchal seriousness and authority. Clouzot describes this “infantile laughter” as a destabilising tactic that turns joy into political weaponry (Clouzot, 1968). Zetterling’s humour, by contrast, is sharper and satirical. The Girls exposes male authority figures and reveals women’s complicity in reproducing patriarchal norms, a dynamic that Sloan identifies as central to the film’s feminist critique (Sloan, 2008).

Spatial organisation reinforces these differences. Daisies unfolds primarily in public spaces, restaurants, nightclubs, city streets, and the banquet hall, exposing patriarchy as a social order rooted in public decorum and labour expectations. By invading and disrupting these spaces, the Maries reveal their fragility. Hames notes that Chytilová uses public spectacle to “unmask the gendered morality embedded in socialist public life” (Hames, 2005). The Girls, however, situates its critique within private and semi-private spaces such as kitchens, bedrooms, and rehearsal rooms, mapping what Winkler describes as “female fragmentation onto domestic and performative spaces” (Winkler, 1981). Here, patriarchy appears not only as external authority but as internalised architecture.

The female body becomes a central site of struggle in both films. In Daisies, eating, dancing, tearing, and excess transform the body into a tool of unruly disruption, destabilising the male gaze through grotesque exaggeration. Lim argues that the film “de-eroticises the spectacle of femininity” by pushing it beyond containment (Lim, 2009). In The Girls, the body is shaped by discipline, motherhood, sexual obligation, professional performance, yet moments such as Liz’s direct address to the audience convert embodied constraint into feminist consciousness. As Larsson notes, Zetterling articulates an “embodied feminist awareness” in which political insight emerges through performance (Larsson, 2016).

Spectatorship ultimately marks the films’ most significant divergence. Daisies disorients the viewer, disrupting voyeuristic pleasure and refusing stable identification. The Girls confront the spectator directly through reflexivity and theatrical address, insisting on critical awareness rather than absorption. As Sloan argues, Zetterling enforces a “feminist mode of looking” that implicates the viewer in the structures under critique (Sloan, 2008).

Together, these films offer complementary feminist strategies. Daisies imagines liberation through anarchic refusal and aesthetic sabotage, while The Girls links feminist consciousness to collective reflection and political solidarity. Both remain foundational to feminist film history, demonstrating how patriarchy can be challenged not only through representation, but through the radical reworking of cinematic form itself.

Contemporary Resonance

Daisies and The Girls demonstrate 1960s feminist cinema operates not merely at the level of theme, but through the very structures of filmmaking itself. Both films expose patriarchy as a system embedded in narrative coherence, visual stability, and behavioural discipline, and each dismantles these structures through distinct but equally radical aesthetic strategies. Chytilová weaponises fragmentation, excess, and absurd humour to sabotage the cinematic and social logics that confine women, while Zetterling uses reflexivity, theatricality, and emotional dissonance to reveal the processes through which patriarchal norms are internalised and performed.

Their contemporary value lies in this formal radicalism. By refusing the conventions of representation, both films offer enduring models for feminist filmmakers seeking not only to portray resistance but to enact it through cinematic form. They propose that feminist cinema must challenge its own conditions of production, spectatorship, and authorship, insisting on new ways of seeing and being seen. If Daisies burns down the house with anarchic joy, The Girls rebuild it as a theatre of consciousness, where performance becomes political awakening. Together, they articulate a feminist cinema that remains provocatively alive, continually inviting reinvention and critical engagement across generations.

Conclusion

Taken together, Daisies and The Girls demonstrate that the critique of patriarchy in 1960s feminist cinema operates not merely at the level of theme, but through the very structures of filmmaking itself. Both films expose patriarchy as a system embedded in narrative coherence, visual stability, and behavioural discipline, yet they do so through markedly different formal strategies. Chytilová’s Daisies mobilises fragmentation, excess, and anarchic humour to sabotage the cinematic and social logics that confine women, transforming refusal and destruction into feminist method. Zetterling’s The Girls, by contrast, employs reflexive performance, theatricality, and direct address to reveal how patriarchal norms are internalised, rehearsed, and sustained through everyday roles.

Where Daisies disorients spectators and denies stable identification, The Girls confronts them directly, insisting on critical awareness and feminist spectatorship. The former imagines liberation through anarchic freedom and the rejection of productivity, while the latter links feminist consciousness to collective reflection and solidarity, echoing the political structure of Lysistrata. Together, the films articulate complementary models of feminist resistance: one grounded in aesthetic sabotage, the other in reflexive performance.

Their contemporary relevance lies in this formal radicalism. Rather than simply representing feminist resistance, both films enact it, offering enduring tools for filmmakers seeking to challenge not only patriarchal images, but the conditions of cinematic production and spectatorship themselves. If Daisies burns down the house with anarchic joy, The Girls rebuilds it as a theatre of consciousness. Together, they articulate a feminist cinema that remains provocatively alive, adaptable, and critically generative across generations.

Bibliography

Chytilová, V. (1966) Sedmikrásky / Daisies. Prague: Filmové Studio Barrandov.

Clouzot, H. (1968) ‘Chytilová and the Aesthetics of Unruliness’, Czech Cinema Review, 4(2), pp. 12–18.

De Lauretis, T. (1987) Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hames, P. (2005) Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition. London: I.B. Tauris.

Larsson, M. (2016) ‘Mai Zetterling and the Modernist Politics of Female Consciousness’, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 6(1), pp. 23–39.

Lim, B.C. (2009) ‘Delirious Surfaces: Excess and Feminine Unruliness in Daisies’, Camera Obscura, 23(3), pp. 37–71.

Sloan, J. (2008) ‘Making the Scene Together: Mai Zetterling’s Flickorna and Feminist Performance’, Film History, 20(4), pp. 453–469.

Thornburg, L. (1974) ‘Mai Zetterling: The Creation of a New Mythology’, Women and Film, 2(4), pp. 28–33.

Winkler, E. (1981) ‘Theatricality, Feminism and The Girls’, Cinema Journal, 21(1), pp. 42–56.

Zetterling, M. (1968) Flickorna / The Girls. Stockholm: Sandrews Films.

Zetterling, M. (1970) ‘Some Notes on The Girls’, in Scandinavian Film and Politics. Stockholm: Norstedts.

Filmography

Chytilová, V. (1966) Sedmikrásky / Daisies. Film. Czechoslovakia: Filmové Studio Barrandov.

Zetterling, M. (1968) Flickorna / The Girls. Film. Sweden: Sandrews.