“Best thing I’ve ever seen”: the surreal movie that blew Mitski’s mind
There’s nothing quite as transformative as those years when you’re on the cusp of adolescence, reckoning with a shift from childhood to something older, although you’re still a long way away from adulthood – the movies you watch during this period can have a particularly lasting impact, as can the albums you listen to and the books you read.
It’s a time of real discovery, of opening up your mind to slightly more complex ideas, and for Mitski, that time of her life was spent watching movies that altered something inside of her creative mind, and she was never the same again.
The singer, who made her first album, Lush, as a college project, has since gone on to find significant acclaim with her vulnerable lyricism, often performing with a deep sense of visceral and raw openness. There’s a freedom to be found in Mitski’s readiness to let messiness and pain into her music, like when she screams in ‘Drunk Walk Home’ from Bury Me At Makeout Creek.
Appearing in the Criterion Closet, she revealed her love for a film that seemed to teach her the potential for finding ultimate freedom within art, and it has stuck with her ever since. Daisies, directed by Věra Chytilová and released in 1966, took a playful and satirical look at consumerism, patriarchal control, and social norms, and with its hallucinatory style, bold and psychedelic, viewers were inducted into a world quite unlike anything else.
The film is now a classic, but at the time, it was criticised by many for its shocking use of imagery, from excessive food fighting to phallic sausages being chopped with scissors – Chytilová was a revolutionary filmmaker, going against expected notions of filmmaking as an act of rebellion, but not long after the release of Daisies, and several other bizarre films, she was actually banned by the Czechoslovakian government from making movies for seven years.
The political climate that surrounded Chytilová’s work made her controversial – she was unabashed in her anti-authoritarian views and championing of bold female characters who went against convention –but when a young Mitski saw Daisies, she knew she’d stumbled upon something special.
Explaining, “So my family moved around a lot, but in seventh grade, for one year, we lived in a place where I could walk to a video-rental store – they had Daisies, and I knew nothing about this movie, I just watched it as a seventh-grade girl, and it blew my mind… I was like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever seen,’ I felt so much freedom.”
She continued, “It felt so absurd in the best way, I watched it over and over and over, so Daisies was my very first experience of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and after that, I had to watch everything I could get my hands on – ot was the best experience, I feel like I watched most of the weird movies in my life from that video-rental store.”
Clearly, seeing something that was so against the rules, so free in its disregard for proper form or sympathetic characters, sparked something inside of Mitski, who would then go on to become one of modern music’s most impressive songwriters.
Her music is fuelled by the desire to be emancipated from the strict norms that govern us – instead, she screams, and she bares her soul, showing us that to truly feel free, we have to lean into everything that fully makes us human, just like in Daisies.
