Review: ‘Gluttony, Decadence, and Resistance, Embodied’, Cinema Rediscovered, Watershed, Bristol, 25–28 July 2019

Abstract

In the final scene in Vera Chytilová’s Daisies (1966), its two plucky protagonists, Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanová), enter a banquet room where excess – of nourishment and provision – leads to an elaborate and entertaining act of destruction. The scene is spectacular and vulgar; its grand depictions of food waste were responsible for the former Czechoslovakia’s ban on both the film and its maker. Chytilová was held accountable for her supposed lack of a positive attitude towards socialism. Apparently irony is not welcome when its execution involves waste. The paradox inherent in both Chytilová’s film and the very concept of social decline is that it must be enacted in order to be made visible: the food we watch Marie I and Marie II eat, throw, dance on, and destroy is food that will never make it into the mouths of the hungry.