AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Photomontager full9/7/2023 ![]() ![]() Daisies is saying something similar: the title, as well as much of the film’s content, point to the delicateness and virginal beauty the world expects of women. ![]() It also speaks of the commodification of women’s bodies-hence, the advertisements and BMW logos. The emphasis of this chaotic assemblage is on the artificiality and irrationality of the standards of beauty applied to the female form and the ludicrousness of maintaining romantic standards in a mechanical world. A hand pokes out of the oversized, permed head, holding a pocket watch, reflecting modernity’s emphasis on regimentation and timeliness. One is an oversized, permed head of hair whose face is an advert the other, the far background, is a woman’s face with what appears to be an owl’s eye. Flanking this figure are a gears, tires, a bevy of BMW logos, and two more feminine figures. Hannah Höch’s photomontage Das schöne Mädchen is a prime example of this aesthetic: assembled from advertisements and other images from magazines, its central figure is a woman in a bathing suit, holding an umbrella, whose head and neck have been replaced by a large reproduction of a strange, futuristic light bulb. Berlin is a quick three-hour train ride from Prague, whose cultural connections to Germany and the German-speaking world goes back centuries. Such, Daisies implies, is female subjectivity in a world gone bad, torn apart by the demands, expectations, and projections of a patriarchal world.Ī good point of reference for this scene are Dadaist photomontages, a type of visual composition particularly tied to the Berlin Dada group, whose rebellious anti-art courted controversy in the immediate wake of the First World War. Like the collages that line the walls of their apartment, they, and then the film, become randomly assembled images whose shapes are shifting and mobile. They appear to cut each other, and then the filmstock, into discrete little bits. In this scene, the women turn the same pair of scissors they used earlier to symbolically castrate phallic footstuffs against themselves. But the overt social commentary, dark humor, and cinematic quality of the scissors scene appeals to me more. The film is full of confrontation: it opens with its central characters looking directly at the camera, announcing that, in a world gone bad, they’ll go bad too. My favorite scene in Daisies is one of its most confrontational. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |