Sixty Years of Daisies [talk + screening + party]

The Czech Center New York celebrates Věra Chytilová’s Czech New Wave classic Daisies (1966) with an evening of conversation exploring the film’s aesthetic, political, and cultural resonances from its original socialist context to its enduring influence today.

Drawing on their contributions to a forthcoming dossier in JCMS: The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, scholars Barbora Bartunkova, Tanya Goldman, Maggie Hennefeld, Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen, Dijana Jelača, Meta Mazaj, Masha Shpolberg, and Aurore Spiers will approach Daisies from a range of perspectives. Together, they will trace the film’s connections backward to early cinema and forward to contemporary pop culture, while also considering its reception in Czechoslovakia and its later canonization through feminist film culture in the United States. The event will also include the premiere of a short Daisies-inspired film by experimental filmmaker Kelly Gallagher.

The forthcoming dossier revisits Daisies as both a landmark of the Czech New Wave and a living and breathing work that continues to inspire new interpretations across generations and political contexts. Speakers will explore the film’s anarchic humor, experimental collage aesthetics, feminist subversion, relationship to socialist modernity, and surprising echoes in contemporary culture — from avant-garde cinema to the aesthetics of Charli XCX’s “BRAT summer.” Together, these talks collectively examine why Chytilová’s radical and playful cinematic language continues to resonate sixty years after the film’s release.

The discussion will be followed by a cinema screening of Daisies and by a Daisies-themed rooftop gathering with refreshments and music. 1960s-inspired dress is warmly welcomed.

Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. She is co-editor, with Lukas Brasiskis, of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe: From Communism to Capitalism, and co-editor, with Anastasia Kostina, of The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism.

Barbora Bartunkova is the Provenance Specialist in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her academic research explores modern European art, photography, and film, with a particular focus on the relationship between aesthetics and politics from the interwar period through the Cold War era. Her recent publications include “Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes: The End of August at the Hotel Ozone and the Czechoslovak New Wave,” in Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe, edited by Masha Shpolberg and Lukas Brasiskis.

Kelly Gallagher is an experimental filmmaker, animator, and associate professor at Syracuse University. She makes colorful cut-out animations, experimental films, documentaries and found footage essays that explore political histories of resistance and personal stories of resilience. Her work has received support from Creative Capital, New York State Council on the Arts, the Wexner, Doc Society, LEF Moving Image Fund, Oscilloscope Films and Orphans Film Symposium’s Helen Hill Award. Her handcrafted films and commissioned animations have screened at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and Sundance Film Festival, and she has presented solo programs of her work at institutions including SFMOMA, Close-Up Cinema London, and Balkanima European Animation Film Festival.

Tanya Goldman is Assistant Professor of Film at Missouri State University. Her writing has appeared in Criterion Currents, Feminist Media Histories, Film History, and The Moving Image, among others. She is currently completing her first book, A Free and Better Screen, on the career of film distributor Thomas J. Brandon.

Maggie Hennefeld is Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes and Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema, co-editor of two academic volumes, Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence, and co-curator of Kino Lorber’s 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray collection "Cinema's First Nasty Women.”

Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen is Assistant Professor of Film History at Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled Rise of the Modern Mediatrix: The Feminization of Media and Mediating Labor, 1865–1945.

Dijana Jelača is Lecturer in Film Studies at Brooklyn College. She is the author of Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema and co-author of Film Feminisms: A Global Introduction.

Meta Mazaj is Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Once Upon a Time There Was a Country: National and Cynicism in the Post-1990s Balkan Cinema, and co-author of Critical Visions in Film Theory and World Cinema: A Critical Introduction.

Aurore Spiers is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the College of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978.

DISCLAIMER

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